WONDER WHEEL (2017; director: Woody Allen)
Woody Allen’s sense of tragedy is relentless, traditional, bears a powerful whiff of the theater stage and is as unfashionable as could be expected from an 82-year-old writer/director who’s been criticized for his hermetic approach for decades—and it’s only gotten more extreme as he’s aged.
Allen still compares notes with the old masters. What makes him interesting is the conflict between Allen’s year-in-year-out productivity and his modesty. To hear him tell it, Allen’s never made a film that’s fit to be in the same room as Ingmar Bergman and Federico Fellini’s classics. He might also recoil in embarrassment at comparisons of this film to Eugene O’Neill, whom this film explicitly references (in the form of a book of his plays given as a gift) and takes after in Allen’s depiction of dashed dreams and dead ends as embodied by a struggling and hopelessly dysfunctional 1950s Coney Island family. They’re surrounded by color and fun and life—a Ferris Wheel spins continuously outside their living room window and their arguments are often lit by secondhand amusement park lights (gorgeously shot by seasoned cinematographer Vittorio Storaro, in his second film for Allen)—that means nothing to them. Their marriages are too awful. Their lives feel too wasted. Their attempts at respite are too self-destructive.
Kate Winslet gets a whale of a part in the tradition of Allen’s many great roles for veteran actresses. She’s an aging waitress in a loveless marriage who cheats on her Stanley Kowalski slob husband (a great Jim Belushi, who’s having a banner year between this and Twin Peaks) with younger lifeguard/playwright-hopeful Justin Timberlake, who plays the part like a brash Montgomery Clift. Allen needs infidelity in all of his films and Winslet’s character needs it, too. It’s sexy and naughty and adventurous. It’s a strong taste of life when she thought she was half-dead. Complications emerge, as they always do, when Timberlake falls for Belushi’s daughter (from another woman) Juno Temple. It’s Allen’s old “the heart wants what it wants” thing. She’s the ex-girlfriend of a gangster. She ran away from him, but knows too much about his business and is now a target. She’s young and beautiful, a sucker for love herself, with eyes full of hope, yet she’s at a dead end of her own.
Allen’s approach to this is old-fashioned. No music swells during the big moments. He hands that stuff over to the actors. Winslet, in the lead role, gets delicious monologues and twists and turns in her character and thunder and lightning to embody. She gives it her all. This whole movie turns on her eyes and furious movements and sweat.