Two stars. Rated PG-13, for suggestive content, occasional violence and a fleeting drug reference
By Derrick Bang
Once or twice each year, I come
across a film whose mere existence is baffling.
They’re not bad, at least not
overtly; they’re simply bewildering. We endure them for somewhere between 90
and 120 minutes, and then the lights come up, and we frown at each other with
the same unspoken question: Is that it? Seriously?
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| It's love at first sight, at least for Bobby (Jesse Eisenberg), when Vonnie (Kristen Stewart) agrees to show him all the wonders of Hollywood's film colony. Alas, the course of true love never is steady in a Woody Allen film. |
And why, precisely? What was the point?
Woody Allen’s newest is just such
a film.
The package is attractively
wrapped: Production designer Santo Loquasto transports us back to 1930s New
York and Hollywood with an opulent level of verisimilitude. The actors are
luxuriously garbed by costume designer Suzy Benzinger, every member of the
large ensemble cast well selected for each part.
Allen supplies narration
throughout the film, often with the same passionate, poetic devotion that he
displayed for the Big Apple in 1979’s Manhattan.
The various characters seem reasonably interesting, the story’s unusual
romantic triangle an intriguing hook on which to hang what we expect will be an
homage to Golden Age cinematic classics.
Doesn’t work out that way.
Café Society is a textbook case of a movie
being all dressed up, with nowhere to go. I’ve no idea what Allen intended us
to gather from his bizarrely random script, unless it’s the oft-stated cliché
that people are remarkably adept at screwing up their own lives. But even that
doesn’t seem quite right, because several of these characters do get their heart’s desire.
With an oeuvre as lengthy and varied as Allen’s, we tend to categorize each
new film on the basis of its many predecessors; this one feels like a clumsy
blend of Crime and Misdemeanors and Radio Days, if the latter’s young
protagonist were half a generation older. That’s a rather unholy mash-up, to
say the least, and Allen doesn’t do anything remotely interesting with it.
Café Society also is burdened with far too
many sidebar characters, many of whom don’t get the attention they deserve.
Their various side issues don’t integrate well with the core narrative, leaving
us to wonder why they were included in the first place.
The storyline, more or less:
Bronx-born Bobby Dorfman (Jesse Eisenberg),
not satisfied with joining his father’s jewelry business, decamps for the much
more exciting life he imagines awaits on the opposite coast, in Hollywood.
Bobby has an entry of sorts: his uncle Phil (Steve Carell), a high-powered
agent who drops famous names, like adjectives, into every spoken sentence.
At first blush, Phil seems a
superficial, puffed-up phony who merely talks a great show, but no; turns out
he really does know and represent
everybody from Errol Flynn to Judy Garland. Even so, he’s too self-obsessed to
waste much time with a nephew, and so hires Bobby as a glorified gopher and
assigns his secretary/assistant, Vonnie (Kristen Stewart), to look after the
kid.
