Stale Act: MAGIC IN THE MOONLIGHT

Woody Allen works so quickly that it’s hardly surprising he tends to alternate his more interesting efforts with movies that clearly could’ve used some extra revisions before filming. You don’t make a film a year for over forty years without making a statistically notable batch of stinkers. (There’s your obligatory reference to Allen’s large body of work.) When he’s good, he’s good, but when he’s bad, the movies sit there slowly dying before your eyes. To make a metaphor out of his favorite music style, he’s a jazz virtuoso who has noodled around the same notes for so long, he’d rather hit bum notes than stop. His latest feature, Magic in the Moonlight, is as somnambulant a picture as he’s ever made, a snooze from frame one. It’s easily one of his weakest efforts.

It tells a dusty story of a world-famous magician (Colin Firth) asked by his best friend (Simon McBurney) to help investigate a pretty young psychic (Emma Stone) and her stage mother (Marcia Gay Harden). He fears they are scamming a rich widow (Jacki Weaver) and her grown son (Hamish Linklater) who have fallen for a phony baloney medium act hook, line, and sinker. It’s a fine screwball setup, but it’s played without a pulse, without wit, and completely devoid of inner life. It looks pleasant, filled up with sun-dappled cinematography by Darius Khondji in widescreen compositions showing off sumptuous locations in the south of France. Set in the Jazz Age that was deftly exploited in Midnight in Paris, there’s no magical realism here, just characters in period garb trading the stalest of bon mots.

There’s a dash of Pygmalion in reverse to the proceedings, as a stuffy British gentleman is determined to unmask the young lady’s attempts to pass herself off as something she’s not. In inverting the classic concept, comedy is lost to condescension. It’s not about a man helping a woman, but instead tearing her down and lording his superior position and power over her. (It’s hard to escape thinking of various Allen scandals with such flatly played underlying ugliness.) That there’s a romance involved – not to mention one with such an age difference – makes it all the more difficult to get on board. Firth is a perfect pompous fussbudget and Stone’s wide eyes and flapper’s physique make a fine foil. I especially liked the way she twitched her eyes wider when receiving her “mental vibrations.” But the plot turns so slowly, situations developing without much in the way of conflict or character. There’s nothing to latch onto.

The worst of it is, I can easily imagine a charming period comedy that could be made with this ensemble and crew. It looks wonderful, the ensemble has a talent for crisp comic scenarios, and Allen can be a funny writer. But none of that appears on screen. It’s so thinly developed, with supporting roles fading away and the leads dutifully making their characters’ arcs hit their marks. Allen’s investigation of a skeptic and a scam artist matching wits is tired. The characters can only be as witty as the script allows, so they come across as gullible drips. And every time a character finds something close to genuine emotion, it’s played off with a scoff. If the movie wasn’t going to take itself too seriously, that’s one thing. But to be light and airy without providing a single pleasing development, tickling thematic construct, or interesting turn of phrase is to be nothing at all.

(Senti)mental: SILVER LININGS PLAYBOOK

In Silver Linings Playbook, characters at once sharply drawn and broadly sketched bounce off of each other with personalities informing every bit of dialogue that zings around the room. This film has writer-director David O. Russell squarely in his wheelhouse, orchestrating ensembles through funny quips on their way to deeply felt characterizations, much like his 1996 indie screwball Flirting with Disaster or the family scenes in 2010’s The Fighter. In Playbook, Russell (working from a novel by Matthew Quick) makes broad, yet well defined, character studies out of a plot that’s part recovery drama, part romantic comedy, part sports film and part dance movie. It’s not as complicated as it sounds and goes down oh so smoothly.

The film starts with a woman (Jacki Weaver) checking Pat, her adult son (Bradley Cooper), out of a mental hospital. He’s had a breakdown that matches the collapse of his marriage. Now living with his mother and freshly unemployed father (Robert DeNiro), Pat thinks that if he can put his life back together convincingly enough, he’ll win back his wife. This seems like denial, seeing as she got a restraining order on him. He seems like a smart man, but he’s unable to face his problems head on. His therapist (Anupam Kher) encourages him to stay on his medication, encouragement he’s quick to ignore. He obsessively jogs, reads, and lingers on the edges of his former life. Sometimes he lingers too closely, leading a friendly cop (Dash Mihok) to wander over and remind the family about certain court-ordered distances.

Realizing that living in the past is no help, friends and family set up a dinner at which Pat can be introduced to Tiffany (Jennifer Lawrence), a widowed young woman who has been through more than her fair share of therapy. It’s not clear what their relationship will develop into, although it’d be nice if they could find some way to ease their anguish together. Russell frames their tentative steps towards friendship in likably loose scenes of brisk comedy and bracing emotional truths. The ensemble features characters with their own goals and aspirations – DeNiro needs to win money gambling on football games; a mental patient (played by a funny, restrained Chris Tucker) just wants to find his way out of the hospital; Weaver is desperate to see her family whole again – and Russell weaves the strands of plot and character together in a nicely handled balancing act. By the time the movie involves a high-stakes dance competition such developments seem only natural.

Cooper and Lawrence have pleasant chemistry that’s fraught with crackling irreverence. They’re drawn to each other by their inappropriateness, each with a tendency to flatly state what should not be shared in polite company. They have no filters. At their first meeting, he bluntly asks how her husband died. They bond over their shared experiences with antidepressant medications. There’s a certitude to their speech, a hard edge to their movements, and yet a hesitancy in the eyes, as if they’re convincing themselves as much as the rest of the world that they’re okay. She ambushes him while jogging with a sharp “Hey!” They run together until they end up in front of a diner. “Do you want to eat here?” he asks. It’s a date. They speak with the sparkling speed of the wittiest romcoms, but spit each line as if wedging it into the moment, as if the words can’t be contained. Altogether, the strong ensemble inhabit the roles with care and nuance, bringing the broader tendencies of the screenplay pleasingly down to earth with Russell’s casual camerawork assisting.

It’d be easy for the film to turn cutesy or schmaltzy and, though it’s certainly an easy crowd-pleaser, it treats the characters’ mental problems with a degree of seriousness where a lesser film would use them as a simple plot device or, worse yet, an affliction for which romance is a perfect panacea.  No, instead Russell builds a satisfying Hollywood ending that accepts the characters for who they are, recognizes their individual capacities for change, and dares to find them a happy ending that fits just right. As far as the genres and character types Russell’s dealing with are concerned, he’s not exactly reinventing the wheel, but isn’t it nice that he’s managed to make just about the best possible wheel he could?

Love and Marriage: THE FIVE-YEAR ENGAGEMENT

Lacking the focus and bite that gave Nicholas Stoller’s bad-break-up island-getaway comedy Forgetting Sarah Marshall its notable power, his newest film, The Five-Year Engagement, starts strong, but gets softer and lousier the longer it goes on. It follows Tom (Jason Segel, also the co-writer) and Violet (Emily Blunt), who keep pushing back their wedding date whenever they encounter new obstacles. He’s a chef in San Francisco, but she gets a job offer at the University of Michigan. Why not take the job, move across the country and delay the wedding? The timing just doesn’t work out, but they love each other. They’re devoted and supportive. But why rush? They’ll be spending their whole lives together, after all. What’s another year? Or two? Or three?

As the story slips through events that take place over the course of what is eventually the five years of the title, it becomes a relatively lengthy, shapeless movie that meanders from scene to scene. At first it’s a rush of parties and preparations, but then time stretches out and seasons turn. Tom’s parents (great character actors Mimi Kennedy and David Paymer) and Violet’s parents (Jim Piddock and Jacki Weaver, so frightening in her Oscar-nominated role as the crime family matriarch in Animal Kingdom) would like to see them married sooner rather than later. The wedding is always on the horizon, but the distance to it never seems to shrink. Tom sees his goofy friend (Chris Pratt) receive the promotion he would have gotten had he remained in San Francisco. Violet sees her sister (Alison Brie) get married and have a baby.

But those happenings are more than half a country away from Ann Arbor, Michigan, a great city in its own right. It’s a charming college town that nonetheless provides wintry challenges to these Californians. And the people they meet are certainly friendly and challenging in ways related to their individual eccentricities. Violet’s boss (Rhys Ifans) and colleagues (Mindy Kaling, Kevin Hart, and Randall Park) and Tom’s newfound friends (including pothead sandwich maker Brian Posehn and stay-at-home dad Chris Parnell) are supportive, if eccentric. They know their way around local bars and hunting weekends respectively. The couple tries again and again to get wedding plans off the ground, but for one reason or another the date is pushed back again and again.

A wobbly mix of shapelessness and sharpness gives the movie its lackadaisical approach. The main problem here is the way it becomes clear that Tom and Violet have a pretty good relationship. I’m glad that the filmmakers at first steer clear of stupid movie-plot conflicts as ways to push back the wedding. It seems perfectly reasonable to avoid rushing into marriage, especially when Tom’s struggling to restart his chef ambitions in their new environs and Violet is trying to navigate the start of a promising career in academia. They love each other and, even if professional goals frustrate them at times, it doesn’t seem to effect their essential compatibility or their enjoyment of each other’s company, even when they argue. In the film’s most quietly funny and painfully accurate scene, Tom lashes out, complaining about his seemingly stagnant path in life, and finally says that he’d like some alone time. Violet gets up to go into the next room, but he calls after her. “Where are you going? I want to be alone here with you.”

What’s so unexpectedly sharp and recognizably humane about this film is the way it soberly approaches romance from a practical standpoint. This isn’t a swoony love-conquers-all Hollywood concoction. This is a movie that acknowledges in a serious, albeit in a mostly comedic context, the difficulties of blending two lives into one, especially when the people involved are struggling to get their lives as individuals started. It’s a movie about the futile pursuit of future perfection when the present is pretty good already.

By the movie’s back half, though, the sweetness and laid-back observation of this couple living their lives becomes just another romantic comedy. Contrived conflicts arise that divide the two, causing them to rethink their entire relationship. The plotting devolves into a distended version of the standard strained crisis before eventual reconciliation that can be found in so many romantic comedies, even some of the good ones. What’s particularly disappointing about this change is that the movie starts as a nicely unconventional look at romance, questioning a pressing need for matrimony when things seem to be so unsettled. The easy charm of the cast and the likable rapport of Segel and Blunt remain, but the supporting cast has been underdeveloped and the jokes have been a bit undercooked and so they just can’t carry the slow switch into formula. The whole thing starts to take on a feeling of an affable but lumbering episodic mess.