Café Society
Woody Allen (2016)
Let’s suppose there’s at least one person in the world who has heard about Woody Allen but never seen any of his films and who decides to break the habit of a lifetime with Café Society. This hypothetical viewer will probably reckon the picture is feeble and wonder what all the Woody Allen fuss was about. Inveterate followers of Allen’s work may find Café Society feeble but sadly touching too, because of who made it. This one did anyway. As the movie dribbled on, it occurred to me that, assuming I outlive Woody Allen, I’ll probably find it more touching still when he’s gone.
Café Society, set in the 1930s, divides its time between New York and Los Angeles. New York is where the protagonist, Bobby Dorfman (Jesse Eisenberg), was born and raised. Tired of working in his father Marty (Ken Stott)’s jeweller’s shop, Bobby goes west to Hollywood, where his uncle Phil (Steve Carell) is an agent. Bobby begins by running errands for Phil, whose secretary Veronica (Kristen Stewart) – known as Vonnie – introduces Bobby to LA. He falls in love with her. Vonnie is fond of Bobby too but she tells him she already has a boyfriend: what she doesn’t tell him is that the boyfriend is Phil. It’s an on-off affair because Phil dithers about whether to leave his wife of many years. When he discovers that Vonnie is seeing Bobby, Phil’s mind is made up; when Bobby discovers that she’s seeing Phil and is going to marry him, the younger man returns heartbroken to New York. He goes into business there, running a nightclub with his elder brother Ben (Corey Stoll), a gangster. The club becomes increasingly successful. Its clientele includes not only fashionable locals but swanky out-of-towners too: one evening, Phil and Vonnie, on a visit from Hollywood, call in. By now, Bobby is married and a father. His beautiful wife (Blake Lively) is also called Veronica but meeting her namesake again rekindles Bobby’s feelings for Vonnie. Bobby and Ben have a sister, Evelyn (Sari Lennick), a schoolteacher with a conscientious, super-mensch husband (Stephen Kunken). The polarised lives of Ben and Evelyn suddenly collide when she gets fed up with an anti-social neighbour, his associates take the neighbour out and Ben goes to the electric chair for the murder. This leaves Bobby in sole charge of the nightclub – its reputation given added notorious lustre by Ben’s execution. Bobby returns to Los Angeles with the idea of opening a club there too. He decides against doing so but not before he’s seen Vonnie one more time. The story ends at New Year parties, with Bobby back in New York and Vonnie in LA. As midnight strikes, both are quietly regretful – closer to each other in spirit than to the spouses they’re actually with.
Three years ago, Stephanie Zacharek began her Village Voice review of Blue Jasmine with this paragraph:
‘For anyone who’s been going to the movies at all regularly over the past 45 years, Woody Allen is practically family. His movies may draw fewer passionate responses than they did in the ’70s and ’80s, but we still feel compelled to reckon with him. Whenever Allen comes out with a new one—which he continues to do with alarming frequency—those of us who still care even moderately may ask, “How is he this time?” as if he were an infirm relation who’s reached the stage where he’s blessed with more bad days than good ones.’
Café Society is the first Allen movie to appear since his eightieth birthday. How is he this time? Slightly gaga, mostly bloody-minded. His indifference nowadays to what he creates amounts to something deeper than negligence. This film features Central Park and views of Manhattan, movie chat and references, jazzy arrangements of standards on the soundtrack, Jewish family combat – more than a few of Woody Allen’s favourite things. Café Society is beautiful to look at: the production designer is Santo Loquasto, who has worked on over twenty Allen films; the cinematographer, for the first time on an Allen picture, is the celebrated Vittorio Storaro. His lighting gives a paradisal glow to New York and Hollywood. This conveys the fond nostalgia felt for both places by Allen – who no longer seems interested in doing much more than expressing such feelings. He doesn’t even try to animate thirties Hollywood beyond tossing in the names of actors and directors. He goes through the motions of writing a love story without seeming to care if what results on the screen has any romantic, comic or dramatic life.
Allen has responded to questions about the mob violence and bloodshed in the film by saying that ‘murder and criminality’ have been a persistent feature of his work. True enough but these elements haven’t previously been weightless, as they are here – as nearly everything in Café Society is. It’s the weightlessness that makes the violence somewhat troubling. It isn’t comically stylised – it simply doesn’t matter. The links between organised crime and show business in inter-war America are familiar enough, from Chicago and Allen’s own Bullets over Broadway, but, in those cases, the links were a controlling theme. In Café Society, they’re perfunctory – they have the quality of something the writer-director vaguely remembers having seen in movies before.
Café Society is Woody Allen doing what he feels like doing and, in effect, talking to himself. Ben Dorfman undergoes a death-row conversion to Christianity. His mother Rose (Jeannie Berlin)’s horror at this development – a fate just about worse than death – is funny enough but the exchange between Rose and her husband about Jews not believing in an afterlife is curious. It’s true that Judaism has traditionally put a stronger emphasis on this world than on the next and there have been particular Jewish schools of thought that ruled out life after death. But the implication that Jewish eschatology generally rejects this is wide of the mark. The dialogue between the Dorfman parents seems rather to be confirming that Woody Allen is still niggled by the impossibility of surviving death – and, after all, who’s more Jewish than he is? The one feature of Café Society that isn’t weightless is Allen’s own (uncredited) voiceover narrative. As a piece of writing, this is dull and otiose: the narrator is often doing no more than describe what the image on the screen is already showing. But the voice itself is something else – an old man’s voice. It sounds thick and sluggish and speaks more loudly than necessary – as if it might not be able to hear itself otherwise. The New Year’s Eve finale has a rather similar quality – in the singing of Auld Lang Syne, in the chimes of midnight that bring to mind the preoccupation with manifestations of time passing of Woody Allen’s mentor, Ingmar Bergman. (The opening chorus of ticking and chiming clocks was the highlight of Bergman’s final film, Saraband.)
Woody Allen’s self-absorption makes it tough on his cast (which includes, as well as those already mentioned, Parker Posey and Paul Schneider). The actors feel privileged to be working with Allen and they really want to please – but the director doesn’t seem bothered with what they’re doing. As a result, they tend to do too much. In his early scenes as an innocent in Hollywood, Jesse Eisenberg is tensely focused – it’s more effortful characterisation than we’re used to seeing from him. Eisenberg improves once Bobby’s back in New York: with his hunched shoulders and affably suppressed world-weariness, he gets across the idea of Bobby as ever-unfulfilled in love. Kristen Stewart is a good actress but she seems too modern throughout. When Vonnie and Bobby first meet again, he’s appalled by her initial gush of celebrity name-dropping but this outburst doesn’t connect with anything else about the older Vonnie. She doesn’t appear to have changed into a Hollywood wife, let alone developed the personality of one. Steve Carell is uncomfortable in the insecurely written role of Phil. I saw a trailer for Café Society several times. Each time I did, there was an odd tension in the audience laughter that followed a clip where Jesse Eisenberg says, ‘Life is a comedy – written by a sadistic comedy writer …’ It was as if people were laughing on cue, thinking, ‘Oh yes, that’s a typical Woody Allen line!’ – and were then realising the line wasn’t really up to much. This goes for Café Society as a whole. Woody Allen evidently takes the view that he no longer has the time to come up with anything better.
12 September 2016