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OK, so I saw this...pretty good overall. Doesn't really feel at all like a Woody Allen film for the most part, except for a few lines here and there and scenes of the wealthy having lunch in lavish rooms making Robert Altman-esque overlapping 'idle rich' cocktail conversation. And I'm a Woody Allen fan - but a fan who feels that Woody's been rather off his game for a while.
What is refreshing is that it's a very quiet, intense film...and the lead actor is very much NOT your typical Woody Allen male lead. He's not playing "The Woody role," in other words - unless it's the lying, scheming, manipulating, desperately selfish part of Woody. Brian Cox (of X2 fame) is here doing nice stuff as a high-class father, actually all the actors do a fine job. Scarlett is beautiful and sexy, yes, but also really gets the desperate, totally neurotic, lost, needy, completely dysfunctional aspects of her character. At times I found myself thinking 'wow, this is the same girl who was the quiet subdued type in Lost in Translation.'
The film goes in directions I didn't honestly expect it to go, especially with a title that suggests a lighter romantic comedy. I won't do spoilers here, but let's just say in many ways, it reminded me of a sort of remake of "Crimes and Misdemeanors" but with an even worse lying, cheating character a la Iago.
The movie is sometimes ham-handed in the way it says 'this is a sweeping tragedy!' by having the lead character talk about how much he loves tragedy, doesn't believe in God, there is no justice, no order, etc. and then having opera soundtrack of tragic operas during suitable scenes, but even so, the opera during the super-dramatic scenes still worked and tugged at my heartstrings.
Since the thesis of the film is that there is no God, no justice, no order to the universe anywhere to be found, it's all luck. Everything is luck and if you have the bad fortune to be very unlucky, you're just screwed. Sometimes it's also ham-handed because we get that this is the thesis of the film, and long after we've gotten that, characters talk about luck and how important it is to be lucky. We see in the way scenes play out how one character or another avoids or incurs disaster by just being lucky or unlucky.
At times I felt like this thesis is a bit tiresome, like a moody teenager dressed all in black who goes around repeating "there is no God, no order, no justice...the universe is black empty nothingness, all chaos, all luck, no order at all..." But I have to say, as a quiet, intense character piece, the film really works. And I liked that almost none of the lines sounded like "Woody Allen lines." Also, there are almost no jokes in the entire film. |
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Basically.