Review of "Magic in the Moonlight"
I know it isn't a book, but I am reviewing the film I saw last night. I should be writing, so this will be quick. I should also say that my friends LIKE this film, so it could be that I am just a curmudgeon.
Magic in the Moonlight.
Audiences, by and large, can tell when they’re being spoon-fed a film that someone somewhere thinks they will like, that will make a nice ker-ching noise at the box office. Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris was so much fun that we didn’t care – though if you try watching it a second time, its magic is much muted. In Magic in the Moonlight, I think we’re being spoon-fed, and it’s a nice, slightly tart apple sauce. Colin Firth and Emma Stone provide the love interest, the South of France provides the scenery, and nobody really provides the comedy.
The curiously leaden acting from Firth, and the dialogue in general, do pick up after the first twenty minutes or so. Emma Stone is pretty sparkly and interesting to watch, and the scenes with Aunt Vanessa, played by Eileen Atkins, are just out-and-out fine. When Atkins is on screen, you feel as if you are in the presence of someone who is in control of the situation to her fingertips; you feel instant respect.
The direction is very hasty; lines are spoken as soon as a new scene comes, with no time to stop and look. Think of a French film, where the camera lingers – it’s as if Allen is terrified that he will be labeled boring, so everything has to be kept at a nice, clipping pace. Actors – particularly Firth - deliver their lines at breakneck speed, as if they have been learned and then repeated, rather than thought of. It makes you remember that you are watching a film.
So - Firth's acting is curiously leaden, and Allen's direction is curiously bad. Isn't it then possible that this is all on purpose, as Firth and Allen are both prettty unassailably excellent in general? Is there a kind of modernist determination to show that everyone assumes roles, that everything is fake, including the hero’s arrogant cynicism and including the fact that the hero is just a projection of light on a screen? Is Sophie's use of the word "ironic" when she and Stanley are in the observatory, a nicely positioned clue that, if Stanley were smarter, would make him understand things a lot faster? If this is the case, then it's too subtle for me. It just looks badly directed, Woody Allen or no.
Allen's breathless direction also doesn’t particularly suit the look of the film, either, which is very beautiful. One would like to linger. It is pleasant to cycle through rainy Cambridge to get to to the ivory frocks and sun-drenched gardens of 1920's France, even if it is the extra-gleamy France of Hollywood.
The Big Point, made once every thirty or forty seconds, is that Colin Firth/aka Darcy/aka Stanley, is a CYNIC, and does not believe in the spiritual world, or, by extension, in love. He is, one can safely assume, in for a Big Surprise. Oh look, there he is, being surprised. Oh, and look again, another old male director casting the male romantic lead at 54, while the leading lady (who is really great) is just 25. The boy her own age is funny, of course, as a handsome air-head who plays the ukulele and promises her great riches, but we all know that she should choose the cynical, world-weary aging intellectual who discovers finally that he can love.
I don’t have any problem with Allen, in case it seems like it. I love Manhattan, Blue Jasmine, Annie Hall, Take the Money and Run, lots of them – and the cinematography here was really very lovely, but I almost wish I had stayed at home last night. If you want to see something excellent, go and see the Philip Seymour Hoffman film, A Most Wanted Man. It’s much, much better than staying at home.
Magic in the Moonlight.
Audiences, by and large, can tell when they’re being spoon-fed a film that someone somewhere thinks they will like, that will make a nice ker-ching noise at the box office. Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris was so much fun that we didn’t care – though if you try watching it a second time, its magic is much muted. In Magic in the Moonlight, I think we’re being spoon-fed, and it’s a nice, slightly tart apple sauce. Colin Firth and Emma Stone provide the love interest, the South of France provides the scenery, and nobody really provides the comedy.
The curiously leaden acting from Firth, and the dialogue in general, do pick up after the first twenty minutes or so. Emma Stone is pretty sparkly and interesting to watch, and the scenes with Aunt Vanessa, played by Eileen Atkins, are just out-and-out fine. When Atkins is on screen, you feel as if you are in the presence of someone who is in control of the situation to her fingertips; you feel instant respect.
The direction is very hasty; lines are spoken as soon as a new scene comes, with no time to stop and look. Think of a French film, where the camera lingers – it’s as if Allen is terrified that he will be labeled boring, so everything has to be kept at a nice, clipping pace. Actors – particularly Firth - deliver their lines at breakneck speed, as if they have been learned and then repeated, rather than thought of. It makes you remember that you are watching a film.
So - Firth's acting is curiously leaden, and Allen's direction is curiously bad. Isn't it then possible that this is all on purpose, as Firth and Allen are both prettty unassailably excellent in general? Is there a kind of modernist determination to show that everyone assumes roles, that everything is fake, including the hero’s arrogant cynicism and including the fact that the hero is just a projection of light on a screen? Is Sophie's use of the word "ironic" when she and Stanley are in the observatory, a nicely positioned clue that, if Stanley were smarter, would make him understand things a lot faster? If this is the case, then it's too subtle for me. It just looks badly directed, Woody Allen or no.
Allen's breathless direction also doesn’t particularly suit the look of the film, either, which is very beautiful. One would like to linger. It is pleasant to cycle through rainy Cambridge to get to to the ivory frocks and sun-drenched gardens of 1920's France, even if it is the extra-gleamy France of Hollywood.
The Big Point, made once every thirty or forty seconds, is that Colin Firth/aka Darcy/aka Stanley, is a CYNIC, and does not believe in the spiritual world, or, by extension, in love. He is, one can safely assume, in for a Big Surprise. Oh look, there he is, being surprised. Oh, and look again, another old male director casting the male romantic lead at 54, while the leading lady (who is really great) is just 25. The boy her own age is funny, of course, as a handsome air-head who plays the ukulele and promises her great riches, but we all know that she should choose the cynical, world-weary aging intellectual who discovers finally that he can love.
I don’t have any problem with Allen, in case it seems like it. I love Manhattan, Blue Jasmine, Annie Hall, Take the Money and Run, lots of them – and the cinematography here was really very lovely, but I almost wish I had stayed at home last night. If you want to see something excellent, go and see the Philip Seymour Hoffman film, A Most Wanted Man. It’s much, much better than staying at home.
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