It’s a 1930s-style screwball comedy for the first half—and then Woody Allen starts stomping on his characters’ hopes, dreams and hearts and the film becomes something else. The mistaken identity gags become mere mistakes. The blossoming romances die on the vine. The froth fizzles.
The setting is Golden Age Hollywood, circa 1936 or so, and Allen is here to celebrate its dreaminess with Vittorio Storaro’s sumptuous cinematography (his first work with Allen) and a script that offers a blizzard of references to old movie stars, directors, producers and studio heads. At the same time, Allen also undresses the illusions of love. Again. As usual.
Every year Allen makes a new cinematic salad from the same ingredients that he’s used for decades. Infidelity and old jazz music are always there. They’re the greens and the vinaigrette, to be expected. From there, Allen might add atheism, a period setting, conflicted Judaism, bickering Jewish families, an intellectual ideologue and luscious views of urbanity like so many carrots, peas, salmon, strawberries, walnuts and goat cheese. Occasionally, he’ll throw in a murder that’s treated less as a crime story and more as a morality tale.
ALL of that is here. This movie is one packed plate. I think the only Allen staple it’s missing is the artist’s neurosis/narcissism (the film industry people depicted here all work the business side rather than the creative side). It’s imperfect, but not one of Allen’s bad ones. Jesse Eisenberg is fine as the New York City boy who goes to Hollywood looking for a job, but he also gets saddled with the Woody Allen surrogate role, previously tackled by the likes of John Cusak, Kenneth Branagh, and Owen Wilson, that can be more distracting than amusing. Parker Posey is a welcome presence as a down-to-earth socialite. The Most Valuable Player though is Steve Carrell who brings real gravity to the role of a Hollywood big shot who’s got a hundred plates spinning at once in his bang-up professional life and yet is as easily wounded as any other fool when it comes to the complications of love.