Mag­ic in the Moonlight

Mag­ic in the Moon­light is a bit like hav­ing lunch with your age­ing par­ents: strained, over­ly famil­iar, some­times amus­ing but sel­dom gen­uine­ly fun­ny – you count the min­utes until it’s over only to spend the rest of the day wish­ing that it had nev­er end­ed. A quin­tes­sen­tial ​“late” work from a film­mak­er who has, in his wan­ing and con­tro­ver­sial years, become less of an artist than he is an insti­tu­tion, this new one finds direc­tor Woody Allen effort­less­ly regur­gi­tat­ing his most famil­iar modes and tropes with such élan that the movie’s medi­oc­rity ends up being its great­est charm.

It’s the kind of sto­ry that Allen could write in his sleep. Per­haps he did, as it’s hard to imag­ine when the endur­ing­ly pro­lif­ic 78-year-old could have found the time. We’re dropped into Berlin between the wars (1928, to be exact), as Stan­ley (Col­in Firth) per­forms his mag­ic tricks for a packed crowd of gawk­ing socialites. On stage he’s ​“Wei Ling Soo” (a fla­grant­ly ori­en­tal­ist char­ac­ter com­plete with yel­low-face and a Fu Manchu mus­tache), but under­neath the iffy get­up he’s a mas­ter illu­sion­ist with a stiff upper lip and a flag­ging sense of wonder.

A ded­i­cat­ed real­ist who Allen’s script even­tu­al­ly soft­ens into an every­day cyn­ic, Stan­ley enjoys defraud­ing spir­i­tu­al­ists more than he does spend­ing time with his new fiancée, and he can’t resist the chal­lenge when an old friend invites him to inves­ti­gate a beau­ti­ful Amer­i­can medi­um who’s embed­ded her­self with­in a rich fam­i­ly on the French Riv­iera. And so, the plot mov­ing for­ward with the mechan­i­cal trans­paren­cy of a car that’s lost its hood, Stan­ley put­ters down the coast until he reach­es the impos­si­bly pic­turesque cliff­side estate where he meets the bewitch­ing Sophie (Emma Stone).

Allen guides the sto­ry on auto-pilot, effort­less­ly push­ing anoth­er fan­ci­ful premise to its log­i­cal con­clu­sion. Like a sweet Sun­day mat­inée that aspires only to divert its audi­ence, Mag­ic in the Moon­light would rather be con­sis­tent­ly com­fort­able than occa­sion­al­ly cap­ti­vat­ing. Allen indulges in Dar­ius Khondji’s post­card per­fect cin­e­matog­ra­phy and Sonia Grande’s immac­u­late cos­tume design, parts of a rarely refined clas­si­cal aes­thet­ic that make it feel almost irre­spon­si­ble not to appre­ci­ate the film as a whole.

Firth game­ly repris­es the Mr Dar­cy type that launched his career, while Stone is in per­fect sync with Allen’s neu­rot­ic rhythms, her breezy je né sais quoi unsur­pris­ing­ly much eas­i­er to appre­ci­ate when she’s not being used as Spi­der-Man bait. The dance between them is light and sudsy, des­tined to be lit­tle more than a foot­note in a grad­u­ate student’s essay about illu­sion, hyp­no­tism, and trick­ery in the films of Woody Allen.

It’s tempt­ing to scoff at yet anoth­er of Allen’s increas­ing­ly prob­lem­at­ic May-to-Decem­ber love affairs, par­tic­u­lar­ly as the feath­er­weight com­e­dy hinges on a bright young thing reviv­ing an old­er man’s sense of romance, but Mag­ic in the Moon­light res­onates because it’s old-fash­ioned (bor­der­ing on archa­ic), the kind of movie that no one wants to see any­more, but every­one will miss when it’s gone. The film might be bet­ter served pre­mier­ing direct­ly into the reper­to­ry cin­e­mas of 2055, but the sun is com­ing, so why wait?