Café Society – first look review | Little White Lies

Festivals

Café Soci­ety – first look review

11 May 2016

A woman with auburn hair, wearing a white blouse, gazes intently at the camera against a blurred natural backdrop.
A woman with auburn hair, wearing a white blouse, gazes intently at the camera against a blurred natural backdrop.
Despite an effer­ves­cent Kris­ten Stew­art, Woody Allen’s frothy peri­od com­e­dy fails to deliv­er a coher­ent message.

Café Soci­ety is about when lov­ing a per­son doesn’t lead to a life togeth­er, yet that love lingers on, turn­ing peo­ple into dream­ers. The prob­lem is that most of the film is devoid of this idea, and indeed any emo­tion­al ten­sion. By the time direc­tor Woody Allen shows us his sen­ti­men­tal hand, this admit­ted­ly styl­ish film – replete with dis­mal one-lin­ers about women – is near­ly over. Whether the final stretch does enough to recal­i­brate what has come before is a ques­tion for each view­er to answer.

The film is divid­ed in time, place and qual­i­ty across two 1930s set­tings. Allen is at his best on his (and the main character’s) home turf. Once the sto­ry reach­es New York City, lost love has added a lay­er to the grat­ing Bob­by, played by Jesse Eisen­berg, whose Allen imper­son­ation – flat­ten­ing his typ­i­cal cadences and prick­ly mag­net­ism – is a seri­ous misjudgement.

Café Soci­ety begins with Bob­by leav­ing his Jew­ish New York­er fam­i­ly for the bright lights of Hol­ly­wood. He is hop­ing that Uncle Phil (Steve Carell), a big-time exec, will be his fast tick­et to mak­ing it in the busi­ness. Noth­ing moves faster, how­ev­er, than the arrow that Phil’s sec­re­tary Von­nie” (Kris­ten Stew­art) lodges in his heart. She is in a rela­tion­ship so Bob­by set­tles in as her atten­tive friend – with a side­line in creep­i­ly appre­cia­tive com­ments – wait­ing and hop­ing. The ear­ly part of the film plays like a peri­od screw­ball com­e­dy drained of dynamism. It has all of the right beats and none of the right charm.

Key char­ac­ters are not who the script believes them to be. When Von­nie describes Phil as, so alive and full of ener­gy,” it is hilar­i­ous. Phil is a life­less lunk, no mat­ter how many times his char­ac­ter answers a call from a famous per­son – it’s a baf­fling­ly robot­ic per­for­mance from Carell. You’re very naïve,” is a Bob­by descrip­tor. This doesn’t fit a young man who pro­gress­es his career through nepo­tism and oppor­tunis­ti­cal­ly hangs around a girl with a boyfriend.

Stew­art is the best thing going here, grace­ful­ly ris­ing above the non­sense to play a girl caught between two men. But the script is wrong about her too. She is no angel”. Her allure is world­ly prag­ma­tism. Still, it’s dif­fi­cult to care about char­ac­ters who are all self­ish and one-dimen­sion­al, what­ev­er delu­sions the cre­ator has about them, and regard­less of the glam­orous movie bus­tle tak­ing over in the admit­ted­ly ele­gant pro­duc­tion design of a background.

It quick­ly becomes appar­ent that Café Soci­ety isn’t a mechan­i­cal exer­cise by a worka­holic auteur. There is some­thing that Allen is get­ting at and build­ing towards, even though he does him­self no favours by puff­ing up many social sit­u­a­tions with wit­ty ban­ter’ root­ed in the swag­ger­ing mas­cu­line idea of women as birds of par­adise. Blake Live­ly pro­vides pleas­ant back­ground dec­o­ra­tion, tit­ter­ing polite­ly in the face of sex­u­al aggres­sion. Oh, men!’ you can imag­ine her say­ing to her friends.

The whole struc­ture of the film moves towards some­thing that is sweet and light and dreamy and mature. The focus is not on the chat­ter­ing ensem­ble of char­ac­ters or the tying up of way­ward nar­ra­tive strands, or rel­a­tive degrees of human dark­ness, as explored in Allen’s 1989 film Crimes and Mis­de­meanours. These ele­ments are mere­ly sideshows to the wist­ful ker­nel of an idea that Allen is des­per­ate­ly try­ing to transmit.

Café Soci­ety is a mel­low­er film than we are used to from the direc­tor. The headache-induc­ing prat­tle of Mag­ic in the Moon­light and Mid­night in Paris is even­tu­al­ly dis­placed by a qui­et reflec­tive­ness. It may come too late to quash the film’s many prob­lems, but hope­ful­ly we will see more of this side of Allen in future. The mes­sage of Café Soci­ety is that the pass­ing of time makes you dream more, so let’s see what dreams may come.

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