Dir. Woody Allen, USA/Spain, 2010, 98 mins
Cast: Naomi Watts, Gemma Jones, Anthony Hopkins, Josh Brolin
Review by Carol Allen
Woody Allen’s cinematic excursions into London and London characters (Match Point, Scoop and Cassandra’s Dream) have met with somewhat limited success. This one deals with the lives of an interlinked group of mostly middle class people in contemporary London. It is familiar, indeed well trodden Allen territory in terms of observing the frailties and foolishness of a group of people, who seem intent on sabotaging their largely privileged lives.
Middle aged Helena (Jones) has been dumped by her husband Alfie (Hopkins), who is chasing his lost youth and after their divorce marries a very chavvy prostitute, Charmaine (Lucy Punch). Helena takes comfort in rather a lot of whisky (“something to sip”, as she describes it) and the comforting prophesies of a charlatan fortune teller Cristal (Pauline Collins). Her daughter Sally (Watts) has a rocky marriage to a failed (American) novelist Roy (Brolin) and works in an art gallery owned by Greg (Antonio Banderas), to whom inevitably she becomes attracted. Meanwhile her husband fancies the young woman he observes through the bedroom window of a neighbouring flat.
The high calibre cast that Allen has once more attracted do their stuff nicely. The most convincing performance comes from Jones, who is touching in her needy loneliness, and there is also one particularly well handled scene between Sally and Greg, where she tries to tell he boss about her feelings for him. The story is handled in an amusing manner but overall it just meanders along quite pleasantly but with no particular shape and nothing very much to say, apart from the fact that people fall victim to their illusions as they bumble along with their lives. Compared to the masterpieces of Allen’s earlier film making, this is very small beer. Structurally the film has something in common with Mike Leigh’s style but without Leigh’s depth of characterization, perception, sharp observation of English social mores and sense of underlying tragedy. Unlike Allen’s other London movies, this time he doesn’t seem to feel compelled to show us the sights of London every five minutes but sticks to the places, where this rather well heeled group live. There are some visual oddities however. The supposedly cramped but book filled flat where Sally and Roy live has a distinctly odd “survival from the seventies” look about it. Flats in such prime real estate areas as this one have mostly today been taken over and developed into “luxury apartments”. In contrast the enormous apartment overlooking the Thames which Alfie buys for his new wife is OTT in its screaming modernity and extravagance.
Although the story could just as easily be set in New York as London, the actors in the main manage to convince us that they belong in this city, despite the annoying and unnecessary American accented voice over narration, but two of them are badly misconceived. Despite the sterling efforts of the actresses playing the roles, Cristal is written like one of those pseudo working class charwomen from a thirties or forties film and Charmaine is so over the top that she seems like a refugee from the Catherine Tate Show or Little Britain. It is true that middle aged men trying to recapture their youth can make some pretty silly choices in terms of younger women, but it’s difficult to believe that Alfie, as played by Hopkins, could be so blatantly foolish as to fall for such a caricature.
