You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger | Little White Lies

You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger

17 Mar 2011 / Released: 18 Mar 2011

Words by James King

Directed by Woody Allen

Starring Anthony Hopkins, Josh Brolin, and Naomi Watts

Smiling woman with blonde wavy hair wearing a black jacket and white blouse, standing in a library setting.
Smiling woman with blonde wavy hair wearing a black jacket and white blouse, standing in a library setting.
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Anticipation.

We’re due a good one.

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Enjoyment.

Hopkins can only take you so far.

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In Retrospect.

Frothy but uninvolving. Again.

Like many of Allen’s recent out­ings, You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger feels sur­pris­ing­ly slapdash.

Woody Allen – the Not­ting­ham For­est of the movie world. The her­itage you can’t deny but where’s the con­sis­ten­cy? Allen’s own Bri­an Clough era (Annie Hall, Man­hat­tan) might have long passed but there’s still the occa­sion­al Cham­pi­onship play-off (Vicky Cristi­na Barcelona). It’s the unpre­dictabil­i­ty that kills you.

The fact that You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger – his fourth Lon­don-set film – is get­ting released 10 long months after its Cannes debut doesn’t bode well, but at least it’s get­ting a the­atri­cal release. Scoop, his sec­ond, debuted on BBC2.

Things begin flat­ly. Shake­speare said that life is full of sound and fury,’ states the voiceover, and in the end sig­ni­fies noth­ing.’ Noth­ing? Great. Com­bined with Allen’s own fre­quent asser­tions that his films don’t add up to a whole hill of beans, it’s hard­ly an entic­ing start.

Painful expo­si­tion doesn’t help. Char­ac­ters for­go pro­fun­di­ties in favour of just explain­ing what they’ve done, what they’re doing and what they’re about to do. On the plus side, it makes the antics of the ensem­ble cast incred­i­bly easy to fol­low. Roy (Josh Brolin) is a frus­trat­ed novelist,

his wife, Sal­ly (Nao­mi Watts), a wannabe gallery own­er. He spies on his glam­orous neigh­bour (Frei­da Pin­to), she flirts with her charm­ing boss (Anto­nio Ban­deras). Sally’s moth­er (Gem­ma Jones), mean­while, becomes obsessed with psy­chics in the after­math of her ex-hus­band (Antho­ny Hop­kins) mar­ry­ing a younger woman (Lucy Punch). It’s all told with the sim­plic­i­ty of a Lady­bird book, and shows none of the nar­ra­tive flu­en­cy of a film­mak­er who once ele­gant­ly riffed on Dos­toyevsky in Crimes & Misdemeanors’.

That’s the main prob­lem. This is the film of a man who’s lost his mojo. There’s no dis­tinct style, no espe­cial­ly vibrant per­for­mances, no fresh takes on those age-old Allen themes of fate, voyeurism or old blokes obsess­ing on young women. If going to Spain to shoot Vicky Cristi­na Barcelona fired up his love for met­ro­pol­i­tan archi­tec­ture and dra­mat­ic pas­sion, then Lon­don has snuffed it out. The stiff upper lips of posh British thes­ps enun­ci­ate each line with­out the easy-going New York (or Mediter­ranean) swag­ger that his dia­logue relies on, while the set­tings are drab and nondescript.

Hop­kins copes best. Awk­ward nervi­ness has con­sis­tent­ly been Allen’s best way to get a laugh and, despite his Han­ni­bal Lecter infamy, the for­mer Welsh­man is a great dither­er (see The Remains of the Day). But he’s part of a ran­dom gag­gle of neu­rotics who seem utter­ly dis­con­nect­ed. Char­ac­ter back­grounds haven’t been thought through, class­es mix that nev­er would in real life, Anna Friel (in cameo) is inex­plic­a­bly Irish.

Like many of Allen’s recent out­ings, it feels sur­pris­ing­ly slap­dash. Even in Vicky Cristi­na Barcelona he for­got that locals spoke Cata­lan not Span­ish. In a sto­ry as light­weight as this, those annoy­ing dis­trac­tions are the last thing you need.

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