No U.S. Distributor. Comedy. 95 minutes.
Woody Allen has directed 49 films, beginning with “What’s Up, Tiger Lilly” from 1966, and given the wildly variably quality of the last bushel or two, one wonders if he views life much like Alvy Singer from “Annie Hall” views relationships: “a relationship is like a shark. It has to constantly move forward or it dies.” Maybe Allen feels if he ceaselessly keeps writing and shooting and editing then death can’t catch up to him. Or, another theory, the 83-year old, four-time Oscar winner writes, shoots and edits to distract him from his own inevitable demise. Whatever the reason, it results in what has become an annual trudge to the multiplex to see what the Woodman is up to and hope, increasingly beyond all reason, that this year’s model will at least have a heartbeat, the occasional one-liner or great performance that momentarily reenergizes our love for one of the only remaining, working directors who connect us to a more satisfying, bygone era in cinema.
More likely, though, the result will be an average film based on an average script filled with characters who talk as if history stopped in 1979 and who blithely drop dispiritingly dull-edged zingers because Allen seemingly stopped updating his targets that same year. Such is the case, once again, with “A Rainy Day in New York”, a film that has been making the rounds in Europe (including a premiere at the 2019 Deauville American Film Festival) with nary a basement screening on a bed sheet in the United States. That’s because, lest we forget, its original domestic distributor, Amazon Studios, returned the film’s rights to Allen after, in his words, “25-year-old, baseless” allegations resurfaced that he had molested his adopted daughter Dylan Farrow. Amazon not only deemed “Rainy Day” too toxic for domestic release in the #MeToo era but they also cancelled his 4-picture deal with the streamer and seller of Brita water filters and iPhone cases.
To date, no domestic distributor has picked up the film and while each and every one can surely use its controversies as cover, I’m going to bet that even tiny distributors who dreamed of a splashy pick-up passed because the movie is simply not very good. Even the curiosity factor, which might have sold some tickets outside Woody’s established older audience, would be mitigated by the fact that two of its young stars, Timothée Chalamet and Selena Gomez, expressed regret over working with such a supposed monster and made a public display of donating the money they earned on the picture to charity. I found that move both opportunistic and cowardly, a function of being high-profile members of a generation that trolls social media looking for someone whose actions can be twisted and molded into an unforgivable act of racism, cultural appropriation, misogyny or whatever trumped up injustice will net you the most new Twitter followers. Chalamet and Gomez were merely looking out for Number One before the faceless, aggrieved masses (many doubtlessly having only a vague notion of who Woody Allen is) cancelled them, one of the worst reasons an artist can disown his or her involvement in any piece of art.
Another factor to consider is that the lithe and charming Chalamet, one of the most promising young actors of his generation, one who prefers serious work over silly superheroes, is not up to the task of selling Allen’s tragically antiquated concept of a modern day character, to say nothing of his (let’s put the best face on this) disinterest in conveying how millennials talk and behave. Really, one cannot blame Chalamet for failing to make a real human being out of someone named Gatsby Welles, one of the more artificial personages in Allen’s canon. Presumably a time-traveller beamed directly from Cole Porter’s sitting room, Gatsby is a pseudo-intellectual, piano-tinkling, opera-going, classic literature-loving, poker wiz who attends Ivy League-reminiscent Yardley College and summers in France, a mash-up of attributes that are both distancing and unbelievable.
Flailing in a recognizably Allen-esque way to explain his actions, complain about something or lament his existence, Chalamet tries his darndest to put a fresh spin on Allen’s one-liners lest he become the latest in a failed string of Woody surrogates (Jason Biggs, anyone?) who only booked the gig after the director finally realized he was too old to chase after someone like 21-year old Elle Fanning. Here, Fanning is saddled with the role of Gatsby’s girlfriend, Ashleigh, another ill-formed Allen creation. She’s a journalism major and minor ditz, a combination that never quite gels, fashioned in the spirit of Olive Neal (Jennifer Tilly) from “Bullets Over Broadway” and Mira Sorvino’s title prostitute in “Mighty Aphrodite” but never more than a silly construct and target of leering older men.
The action begins when Gatsby and Ashleigh drop down to New York City where he’s arranged a weekend filled with expensive dinners and upper crust pursuits. But Ashleigh has other plans for her Big Apple sojourn after landing an interview for her school newspaper with big deal film director Roland Pollard (Liev Schreiber) whose existential crisis involving his disappointment with his upcoming film sounds a distant echo of Allen’s long-held (and profoundly unfair) opinion that he’s never directed a film as good as his hero, Ingmar Bergman. Soon Ashleigh, with her prep-school sweater and hair-twirling bubbliness, bails on Gatsby and gets pulled into an extended day and night of sub-screwball shenanigans with Pollard, his screenwriter (Jude Law) and an A-list heartthrob (Diego Luna) with designs on getting Ashleigh to remove that prep-school sweater. It seems that Woody, too old to flirt with a pretty young thing, has split up the chore amongst multiple older characters, as if that would somehow dilute the ick factor.
All this leaves Gatsby yelling at Ashleigh on his cell phone while avoiding his mother (Cherry Jones), who is throwing a fancy dinner party he is loath to attend. Wandering around Manhattan his fortunes look up when he’s drafted to perform in a scene for a friend’s short film, one that happens to involve a romantic kiss with Shannon (Selena Gomez, her almost-distracting chipmunk cheeks and rather inexpressive voice actually pushing out Allen’s dialogue pretty well), the sister of one of Gatsby’s ex-girlfriends.
When you consider how many actresses have an Oscar on their shelf thanks to characters Allen has created and how many dozens of lines of dialogue still elicit a smile when warmly remembered, it’s disheartening to see him continually rehash the same concerns to diminishing comedic effect. But at this late hour, Allen’s hermetic tendencies are not going to change: his New York will still be shot with honeyed romantic reverence (here again by DP Vittorio Storaro, doing fine work if not his best for Allen), comedy will still be mined from men chasing after women half their age and Woody will still refuse to properly acknowledge the age in which we live, nor will he grace us with fresh insights on mortality now that he’s slowing approaching his own.
That said, there will be a time, and it’s coming soon, when there will be no more new Woody Allen films. And despite a Stateside cultural judgment that currently does not rule in his favor, that day will be unbelievably sad. So if a tired and soggy product like “A Rainy Day in New York” is the price to pay to confirm that Woody Allen is still making movies, even ones that are blackballed in the United States, it’s worth it.