Woody Allen (2017)

When Wonder Wheel opened in the US in late 2017, with the MeToo avalanche gathering force, the film’s lead, Kate Winslet, was at pains to defend Woody Allen.  She praised his ability to write strong roles for women, acknowledged the sexual assault allegations made against him in the 1990s but said she ‘didn’t know Woody and I don’t know anything about that family [sic]’.  She concluded that, ‘Having thought it all through, you put it to one side and just work with the person.  Woody Allen is an incredible director’.  At the time, Griffin Newman, Ellen Page and Evan Rachel Wood had said publicly they regretted working with Allen and wouldn’t repeat the experience.  Within a few weeks, Dylan Farrow had given a highly-publicised interview on CBS and plenty more actors from Allen films had joined the renouncing ranks (Greta Gerwig, Mira Sorvino, Rebecca Hall, Timothée Chalamet, Rachel Brosnahan, Natalie Portman, Colin Firth, Marion Cotillard, Chloë Sevigny, Joaquin Phoenix, Hayley Atwell).  On 28 January 2018, Kate Winslet received the Dilys Powell Award for Excellence in Film from the London Film Critics Circle.   In her acceptance speech, Winslet, who has also worked with Roman Polanski (on Carnage in 2011), said, without naming names, ‘that I realised that I wouldn’t be able to stand here this evening and keep to myself some bitter regrets that I have at poor decisions to work with individuals with whom I wish I had not’.

Kate Winslet’s awkward change of heart and the list of names above underline the dictionary definition of ‘me too’ as ‘relating to the adoption or imitation of another person’s views or policies, often for political advantage’.  Movie people have often stood accused of navel-gazing but watching your back is clearly now the order of the day.  Private Eye captured the zeitgeist nicely in a recent piece, headlined ‘Just to be clear, I never liked Woody Allen’ and credited to ‘Ann Actor, Ann Otheractor and Ann Y-onewhoknowswhatsgoodforthem’.  On the other hand, there’s Germaine Greer, also an award recipient this January (‘Australian of the Year in Britain’).  In what the Sydney Morning Herald described as a ‘wide-ranging interview’ before the prize-giving reception at Australia House in London, Greer ‘challenged the #MeToo movement and fobbed off calls to end Woody Allen’s career over renewed allegations he sexually assaulted his adopted daughter’, pointing out that ‘It was 20 years ago, so you want him to stop making movies now?  It might be a good idea because he’s probably no good any more’.  I went to see Wonder Wheel with these things firmly in mind – along with a feeling of relief that Allen hadn’t decided to make another comeback in front of the camera.  If he had, this new picture – in the maelstrom of moral censure and commercial panic sweeping the film world, in the light of the All the Money in the World shenanigans – might not even have made it into British cinemas.

In Wonder Wheel, Kate Winslet, for whatever reason, does seem uncomfortable as Ginny, an ex-actress who now works as a waitress in a clam shack at Coney Island in the early 1950s.  She and her husband Humpty Rannell (Jim Belushi), who works on the carousel rides, are both into their second marriage.  Humpty’s first one ended with the death of his wife, Ginny’s in divorce when she was unfaithful to her husband.  This second marriage, to a man twenty years her senior, is physically unsatisfying to Ginny, who’s started an affair with Mickey Rubin (Justin Timberlake), a would-be playwright and NYU student, working during the summer as a Coney Island lifeguard.  The Rannell household also includes Richie (Jack Gore), Ginny’s young son from her first marriage.  The unexpected reappearance of Carolina (Juno Temple), Humpty’s grown-up daughter from his, is the catalyst to the unhappy events of the story.  Humpty broke off contact with Carolina when she abandoned a college education to marry her mobster boyfriend Frank.  That relationship went wrong and Carolina gave evidence to the FBI about Frank’s racketeering activities.  Now a marked woman, she begs Humpty and Ginny to give her refuge from Frank’s henchmen and they do.  When she and Ginny bump into Mickey one day, Carolina is instantly attracted to him and vice versa.   From this point onwards, things go from bad to worse, especially for the two women.

At the start, Mickey, speaking to camera, introduces the time, the place and himself.  From an early stage, Wonder Wheel has a forced quality, teetering on – then over – the brink of cliché and melodrama.  For a while, I wondered if most of what was on screen was in Mickey’s mind – a romantic tragedy in the manner of Eugene O’Neill (his literary hero) that he longs to write.  The characters’ interactions are often pretty stagy:  perhaps the Rannells, as they went about Coney Island, caught the eye of the underemployed, ‘imaginative’ lifeguard and he wove them together and into a story.  As the film goes on, this comes to seem unlikely, though it may be what Woody Allen initially had in mind but couldn’t work through.   Mickey claims to have done military service in World War II but he might just as well, from everything else we see of and hear from him, be a callow egoist of normal student age.  Allen’s conception of Ginny is similarly indecisive, in terms of her former performing career.  She tells Mickey she appeared in an O’Neill play but with the immediate deflator, ‘it was only as one of the whores’.  Yet in the climax to Wonder Wheel, she puts on make-up and one of her old stage costumes, comes on like a bargain basement Norma Desmond-crossed-with-Blanche-Dubois, and brandishes a kitchen knife, yelling at Mickey, ‘Oh God!  Spare me the bad drama!’

Woody Allen doesn’t spare us the bad drama in this film and the dwindling ranks of his loyal fans would be hard pressed to argue that Wonder Wheel is a success.  Even so, it becomes gripping – and largely because it’s not working.   All the characters are sketchy.  Little Richie is a movie-loving pyromaniac – just those two characteristics.  Being married to the mob hasn’t had the slightest effect on Carolina’s sweet innocence (just as Mickey is not in the least tempered by war).  She is purely, if that’s word, the latest of Allen’s idealised nymphs (which nowadays makes for uncomfortable viewing, even if you’re agnostic about the facts of his personal history).  There’s also some careless plotting typical of twenty-first-century Allen.  For someone on the run from the mob, Carolina hardly keeps a low profile once arrived at Coney Island.  Ginny introduces her to Mickey; Carolina isn’t interested in how the two know each other and never suspects in conversations with her that Ginny too has feelings for Mickey.  It would be nice to think Woody Allen means to suggest it doesn’t occur to a twenty-something there could be anything between Mickey and a woman as old as Ginny, who has her fortieth birthday in the course of the story.  It’s more likely that Carolina’s incuriosity is a matter of convenience.  In spite of all this, though, the film is very different from Allen’s previous one, the going-through-the-motions, indifferent Café Society.  Wonder Wheel paints a bleak picture of human relationships but at least in the end the pessimism seems genuinely felt.

When Mickey finally walks out on Ginny and the kitchen knife falls from her hand, Kate Winslet’s perfunctory gesture is doubly expressive – it’s as if she, as well as the woman she’s pretending to be, realises it’s futile to keep acting.  Up to this point, Winslet’s efforts to get inside Ginny’s skin and bring her to life have been almost painfully assiduous.  As in Steve Jobs (2014), an American accent tends to reduce her vocal freedom and colour.  More important, she struggles to give depth to the protagonist’s careworn desperation:  the anxiety Winslet gives off seems to be her own as much as Ginny’s.   Yet she is, as always, a forceful, wholehearted actress so that you want her to succeed:  when she drops the knife, her performance finally and retrospectively coheres – a weird piece of screen magic.  The shallowness of Justin Timberlake’s portrait of Mickey isn’t a problem in that Mickey, whether or not this was what his creator intended, is a shallow character.  Timberlake’s looks are also very suitable for the role.  He’s actually in his mid-thirties, the age that Mickey effectively claims to be, but also passes as someone younger, physically as well as emotionally.  Carolina is unsatisfactory for all the reasons set out above but Juno Temple is genuinely charming in the role.  Like Winslet, Jim Belushi, for all his effectiveness, seems to be straining to find more layers than the script provides.

Kate Winslet’s knife moment may express something on behalf of Woody Allen too.  In the closing stages of Wonder Wheel, he also finally gives up – on his half-baked artifices of the has-been actress and the writer with more ambition than evident talent.  Allen seems to be telling himself and us there’s no longer any point embellishing the miserable situation he’s created.  The film’s encroaching glumness has already given the old songs on the soundtrack, especially the repeated ‘Coney Island Washboard’ by the Mills Brothers (which dates from the 1930s), an increasingly acrid flavour.  The at least partly nostalgic effect of period songs in numerous other Allen films dissipates.  Vittorio Storaro’s lighting of the first images of the Wonder Wheel Amusement Park and the beach gives them a cheerful and appealing look though the colour has a hint of the processed unnaturalness of seaside postcards.  That stays with you, thanks to the curdling quality of what follows – so does Mickey’s opening warning that Coney Island, in 1950, is already well into its lengthy decline.

Allen had already shot his next film, A Rainy Day in New York, by the time the Dylan Farrow scandal had started to bloom again.  It can hardly have helped him that his and Mia Farrow’s son Ronan, who has publicly condemned his father for several years now, wrote the pivotal New Yorker feature ‘From aggressive overtures to sexual assault:  Harvey Weinstein’s accusers tell their stories’.  The feature appeared in the 23 October 2017 issue of the New Yorker, exactly the same date, according to Wikipedia, on which shooting of A Rainy Day in New York was completed.  Since Woody Allen is now both persona non grata and eighty-two years old, his 2018 movie may well prove to be his swansong.  If it is, it will have an apt, summing-up title but it could also be superfluous.  The inexorable, dispiriting Wonder Wheel already feels like a last gasp, though it’s not a whimper.

15 March 2018