You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger
Woody Allen (2010)
‘When You Wish Upon a Star’, from Pinocchio, plays over the opening titles. It’s unusual (in my experience) for Woody Allen to use popular music from the 1940s sarcastically but the song introduces both the theme and the tone of You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger. The story is set in London. Recently divorced Helena, whose ex-husband Alfie has gone off with an ‘actress’ (call girl) called Charmaine, some forty years younger than him, is desperate to find a way of feeling less hopeless about the future. She visits a clairvoyant called Cristal. Is it because he feels he’s nearing the end of his life that Woody Allen is giving his films titles that start with letters working towards the end of the alphabet – Vicky Cristina Barcelona, Whatever Works, now this one? In fact the film’s title is one of the few good things in it, referring both to the standby prediction of fortune-tellers and to death. As Helena’s exasperated American son-in-law Roy tells her when she’s extolling Cristal’s psychic powers, he believes only in ‘That tall, dark stranger we’re all going to meet some day’. (The title is too long, though, for Odeon Covent Garden technology: the ticket printed out as ‘Meet Dark Stranger’.)
The Big Issue published in the Chris Sullivan piece on cinema in the week of Meet Dark Stranger’s release excerpts from an interview with Woody Allen, in which he talked again about humanity’s cosmic insignificance and people’s need to comfort themselves with fantasies to shut out the horror of the meaninglessness of life. Religious and supernatural beliefs were of course the first things he mentioned but sex and making art were also included on the list. With Meet Dark Stranger, Allen has done a swift about face from his last movie, Whatever Works: this one appears to be a corrective to the philosophy expressed in the title of the previous one. A character in this new film says that ‘illusions can be better than medicine’ and the narrator reminds us of her remark at the end of the picture. (Medication, if I remember right, is on Allen’s Big Issue list in any case.) I thought some reviews, in this country anyway, were unfairly hard on Whatever Works but I take it all back – not so much because of Meet Dark Stranger‘s oddly smug nihilism (although that makes it the most dislikeable Woody Allen film I’ve seen) but because the man who wrote and directed it seems to have reached the point of thinking that, if human existence is pointless, you can make a film that’s narrow-mindedly slapdash and it doesn’t matter at all. The voiceover narration (Zak Orth this time) is smug and awkward but with a tactical edge that wasn’t there in Vicky Cristina Barcelona or Whatever Works. (The smugness and awkwardness were there in the two earlier films.) Here the narrative’s purpose is partly to conceal the lazy, meandering storytelling.
I found it hard to tell whether Woody Allen couldn’t shape or couldn’t be bothered to shape the material; anyway, he’s developed a group of characters and situations who fail to hold his interest, let alone ours. His lampooning of beliefs in the spirit world, reincarnation etc would disgrace a crappy television sitcom: ‘I think you may once have been Cleopatra or Joan of Arc’, suggests Helena’s new beau, occult bookseller Jonathan. ‘Well, you know’, she replies, ‘I’ve always been drawn to all things French so I think perhaps …‘. It’s hard to know if it makes things better or worse that Woody Allen must know how pathetic this is. He’s bored – even on a satirical level – by people who believe there-are-more-things-in-heaven-and-earth etc. The psychic Cristal disappears after a few scenes (Pauline Collins plays her with character actress verve so maybe that’s just as well.) The only thing that gives the material any novelty is the fact that psychics are so old hat that it feels like it was in a former life that anyone bothered to take the piss out of them.
Scenes with any comic tension in Meet Dark Stranger are few and far between. The one that works best is when Helena’s daughter Sally and her boss, art gallery owner Greg, arrive outside her home in his car after a night at the opera (his invitation). Greg, who’s had a few drinks, is friendly and takes so long to say goodnight that Sally’s hopeful he wants to prolong the evening as much as she does. The halting conversation is truly suspenseful, and charmingly played by Naomi Watts and Antonio Banderas. Yet the last exchange between these two is unpleasantly acrid (not the actors’ fault). Sally, dismayed to learn that Greg is in a relationship with the artist friend Sally introduced him to (Anna Friel), decides to leave the gallery and set up her own with another friend. At her final meeting with Greg, Sally masochistically insists on knowing from him whether, if she’d made it clearer she was available, he’d have had an affair with her instead. Greg’s refusal to give a straight answer is because he doesn’t want to hurt Sally by telling the truth but his evasion is just as painful. We’re presumably meant to see the hope that Greg reciprocates her feelings as a pitiful illusion on her part but Naomi Watts’ Sally is too sane and pessimistic for us to accept this. Woody Allen uses the everyone-needs-a-comforting-fantasy moral of the story as mechanically, and unconvincingly, as the everything’s-a-matter-of-chance theme in Match Point.
Sally’s more deeply persisting expectation that her parents will carry on subsidising her life is also eventually disappointed, although that expectation comes across less as an illusion than as flagrant arrogance on her part. Naomi Watts is a fine actress but she seems fundamentally uncomfortable in this role. Her accent slips occasionally (there’s one line with a real Australian twang, later on she pronounces ‘imbecile’ two different ways in successive sentences). But the discomfort goes deeper than that: Watts actually creates a more convincing character than Woody Allen has a right to expect but she gives off a sense of knowing this is a pointless exercise because of Allen’s contempt for the people in Meet Dark Stranger. This is even more true of Josh Brolin as Sally’s husband, the devious failed writer Roy. Brolin gives Roy some substance and variety in his early scenes but Allen has it in for the character in such a big way that the actor is on a hiding to nothing. Brolin’s made to look almost repellently squat and Roy’s chasing after Dia, the beautiful Indian girl he spies on in her room opposite the window of his apartment, is so obnoxious (and inexplicably successful) that you want him to get his comeuppance. (Freida Pinto, vacuously lovely in Slumdog Millionaire, isn’t bad as Dia.) In Allen’s scheme of things, when a thirty year old woman is pursued by a septuagenarian it’s because he wants to suppress his fear of declining powers; when a different woman of roughly the same age is stalked by a man like Roy, in his early forties with plenty of years left, it’s because he’s an egocentric lech.
To be fair to Woody Allen, perhaps he doesn’t see Alfie and Roy that differently. Perhaps Alfie, like Boris in Whatever Works, was written by Allen as a self-satire (although Alfie’s obsession with keeping physically in trim doesn’t sound much like his creator) – and meant to be as contemptible as the characters here who are looking to extend their lives in a different, posthumous way. But Anthony Hopkins plays Alfie with such empathic depth and wit (he’s in a different league from anyone else in the movie) that you find yourself rooting for him. And Hopkins, who still looks in good shape at 73 but who naturally makes us think of him in earlier, younger roles, has the presence (actually more presence than I think he used to have) to make Alfie an almost tragic figure. It’s as if Woody Allen, although he didn’t plan the character this way, thought better of it once he saw what Hopkins was bringing to the role. You could look on that positively and take the view that Allen is too good a director to let his preconceptions obstruct an actor’s interpretation. Or you could be more negative and remark the coincidence that Woody Allen is a man in his seventies whose current wife is more than three decades his junior. Would he have been as non-interventionist if, say, the actress playing Helena had made us identify with her supernatural longings?
Fine as Anthony Hopkins is, Alfie’s kind of motivation has of course been comically dramatised before and better. I was reminded of Rose, the Olympia Dukakis character in Moonstruck, baffled by her husband’s unfaithfulness with a woman half their age, and the felicitous exchange between Dukakis and Danny Aiello as her daughter’s intended, Johnny:
‘Rose: Why do men chase women?
Johnny: Well, there’s a Bible story… God took a rib from Adam and made Eve. Now maybe men chase women to get the rib back. When God took the rib, he left a big hole there, where there used to be something. And the women have that. Now maybe, just maybe, a man isn’t complete as a man without a woman.
Rose: But why would a man need more than one woman?
Johnny: I don’t know. Maybe because he fears death.
Rose: That’s it! That’s the reason!
Johnny: I don’t know…
Rose: No! That’s it! Thank you! Thank you for answering my question! …’
Some scenes in Meet Dark Stranger are shockingly clumsy in conception and play really badly: like the stand-up row between Dia’s family and her fiance’s, who’ve gathered to celebrate an impending marriage only to learn that she’s breaking off the engagement to go with Roy instead; or the sequence when Sally comes home in a foul mood because she’s discovered Greg’s having it off with her friend and the phone rings with bad news from Roy’s publisher; or the encounter between the anxiously possessive Alfie and Charmaine’s handsome young trainer at Alfie’s gym (Theo James, who confirms the good impression he made in A Passionate Woman on television last year). The plot twists are really obvious (even I could see them coming) and snidely designed to show that – in some ways – it’s true we live more than once. When Archie asks Helena if they can start again, she’s got a new life with Jonathan (rather honourably played by Roger Ashton-Griffiths). The friend (Ewan Bremner) whom Roy thought was dead and whose manuscript he stole and got published begins to emerge from his coma.
Woody Allen’s London is, compared with his New York, remarkably impersonal – black cabs, rain, and so on. (Spain was a vague idea too in Vicky Cristina Barcelona but at least the interaction of the American and Spanish characters made the location essential to the story.) And Allen doesn’t ‘hear’ English actors as well as Americans, even if this isn’t quite the problem here that it was in Match Point. Anthony Hopkins is fine, perhaps because Allen is familiar with him from American films, but Gemma Jones overplays Helena’s garrulous anxiety (and she’s idiotically dressed: she looks like a dyed-in-the-wool spinster from the mid-twentieth century trying to appear jaunty – it’s one of the feeblest jokes in the film that, at one point, Helena sets herself up as a private wardrobe consultant). As Charmaine, Lucy Punch shows a lot of comic resource in a crudely conceived role (which, strange as it seems, was to have been played by Nicole Kidman). Plenty of other good British actors have small parts and are more or less wasted in them – the likes of Lynda Baron, Christopher Fulford, Philip Glenister, the late Geoffrey Hutchings, Celia Imrie and Christian McKay. At both the beginning and the end, the narrator tells us ‘Shakespeare said’ that ‘Life is full of sound and fury, signifying nothing’. No mention of Macbeth. Of course this isn’t unusual: people will attribute to Shakespeare such wisdom as ‘Neither a borrower nor a lender be’, ignoring the fact that the words express the character of the man, a pompous professional creep, who speaks them in Hamlet. But it’s depressing when a writer of Woody Allen’s calibre resorts to this – especially when his purpose in doing so is as meretricious as it is here. (And it’s infuriating that he won’t even quote the line properly.) Would he be happy to think that people years from now will claim that the lines he supplies to the delusional fools in You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger reflect his own point of view? There’s not a high risk of that, though; no one will remember this film.