By David Elliott
Flix Nosh is a personal movie menu, fresh
each Friday.
Note: Nosh 93 will appear on Friday, Jan. 5, 2018.
APPETIZER: Review of Wonder
Wheel.
Recently
we had Wonderstruck (good film) and Wonder (didn’t see it) and, last summer,
Wonder Woman (good woman). If someone
brings back The Wonderful World of the
Brothers Grimm (1962), I will be having
a wonderful time somewhere else.
Woody
Allen’s Wonder Wheel, named for a
famous Coney Island ride, is a retro rummage sale that lives only inside Allen’s
endless spool of nostalgia. In the rude, jostling, postwar ’40s, Ginny (Kate
Winslet) toils at a boardwalk clam bar (shades of Susan Sarandon serving oysters
in Atlantic City). Her waitressing
(shades of Winslet in Todd Haynes’s fine Mildred
Pierce) is essentially rehearsal for domestic duty as the drudge wife of
Coney workin’ slob Humpty (Jim Belushi, also quite a Dumpty).
Into
their idyll of slow rot in a fading fun zone come figures crammed with aching dialog
and melodramatic destiny. Humpty’s cute daughter Carolina (Juno Temple) returns,
pursued by mobsters. Dreamy lifeguard hunk and aspiring writer Mickey (Justin
Timberlake) talks about Hamlet, as if wanting him on rye bread, with some Method
mustard (Timberlake, though fairly subtle, often seems to be channeling Ray
Liotta from GoodFellas).
Mickey
makes a hot play for Ginny, who’s thrilled, and then Carolina, who’s hopeful. Primitive
Humpty growls, bellows, threatens and pleads. If you ever imagined Ernest
Borgnine playing Stanley Kowalski, Jim Belushi delivers, in a Marty manner. The earthy ape is the
only figure attuned to common sense, but like everyone he cooks in Allen’s drama stew,
which has oodles of Odets, chunks of Chayefsky, winks of Williams, explicit mentions
of O’Neill and Greek tragedy, obvious debts
to Simon (Brighton Beach Memoirs) and
Cain (The Postman Always Rings Twice).
Vittorio Storaro, usually superb, photographed by infusing so much stagey, rusty-orange
twilight that the steamy emotions begin to barbecue. As surplus heat, Ginny’s
bored, angry kid is an arsonist, and during
a kiss a torch song wails about a “kiss of fire.”
Allen
is 82, and this is his 47th feature as director-writer. The
perennial “why?” nagging Woody’s career is how he can still make some good entertainments,
while awkwardly panting for approval as a serious artist (as if good comedy were
not serious work). There is quite enough honest, show-savvy pathos in Annie Hall and Broadway Danny Rose for any good career. Digging for depth, he is less
a writer than an underliner. On his messy boardwalk of broken dreams we can
smell the saltwater taffy rotting. This is Allen’s worst picture since Interiors, the 1978 snooze bomb that appeared
to be tracking chilly Edward Albee on the angst-frozen tundra of Ingmar Bergman.
That was ice, this is fire, they’re both crap.
The
one stuck with the tab is Kate Winslet. I’ve never seen her give a bad
performance, but Woody grinds her down. He gives her a big memory speech in
achingly dull close-up. Later he dumbly cuts away, squishing her cri de coeur “Rescue me.” Living with a fat
frog who can never be a prince, fearing her allure fading, Ginny is a pathos puppet.
Allen even gives her vapors of Blanche Du Bois craziness. That derivation mostly
worked for Cate Blanchett in Blue Jasmine,
but Winslet just looks blue and wasted. It’s as if she escaped the Titanic only
to beach at Coney Island with a bad screenplay.
SALAD (A List)
The Dozen Best Leading Performances in
Woody Allen Movies, ranked by my
taste, naturally: Judy Davis in Husbands
and Wives (1992), Martin Landau in Crimes
and Misdemeanors (1989), Diane Keaton in Annie Hall (1977), Michael Caine in Hannah and Her Sisters (1986), Jeff Daniels in The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985),
Mia Farrow in Broadway Danny Rose
(1984), Owen Wilson in Midnight in Paris
(2011), Cate Blanchett in Blue Jasmine
(2013), Mira Sorvino in Mighty Aphrodite
(1985), Scarlett Johansson in Match Point
(2006), Woody Allen in Zelig (1983),
Samantha Morton in Sweet and Lowdown
(1989).
WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)
Orson
decants a vintage memory for pal Henry Jaglom: “(Critic) George Jean Nathan was
the tightest man who ever lived. He lived for 40 years in the Hotel Royalton
and never tipped anybody in the Royalton, not even at Christmas time. (Finally)
the room-service waiter peed slightly in Nathan’s tea. The waiters hurried
across the street and told everyone at the Algonquin … As the years went by,
there got to be more and more urine, less and less tea. And it was a great
pleasure for us in the theater to look at a leading critic and know he was full of piss. And I, with my own ears, heard him at ‘21’
complaining to a waiter, ‘Why can’t I get tea here as good as at the Royalton?”
(From My Lunches With Orson, by
Jaglom.)
ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)
Alec
Guinness did a lot more good work after his 1950s prime, including “delicate
fun being starchy in the Cuban sun of Our
Man in Havana. Co-star Noel Coward snapped in his diary that ‘Alec has
cultivated a zombie-like equilibrium, heavy on the Librium.’ Recessive brooding
and pregnant silences found their summation on TV in spy George Smiley, who
suggests a sand clock yearning for dust, yet so humanly. Smiley, a Brit-Zen
sphinx, goes far past Gunnness’s wise Jedi knight in Star Wars (loving the income, Alec found the fan crowd a bore).”
(From the Alec Guinness/The Horse’s Mouth
chapter in my book Starlight Rising:
Acting Up in Movies, available from Kindle, Nook and Amazon.)
DESSERT (An Image)
A great movie image is more than a still,
it’s a distillation.
Jep
Gambardella (Toni Servillo) savors his Roman terrace vista in The Great Beauty (Janus Films, 2013;
director Paolo Sorrentino, cinematographer Luca Bigazzi).
For previous Noshes, scroll below.
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