‘Cafe Society’ or — A VERY Flat White?
I don’t watch Woody Allen movies anymore; the pain is just too great. That’s because no one made me want to become a writer more than he did ever since I first saw ‘Sleeper’ (1973) as a kid and was hooked. Then I grew up… but I’m not sure Allen’s films did too. Did I fall out of love with him or did his work just become bad, stale, repetitive? Looking back I can genuinely say that the last Woody Allen film I loved was ‘Manhattan Murder Mystery’ (1993) and that was… Christ… 26 years ago. I found I had moved on.
Woody Allen’s 12,0798th film ‘Cafe Society’ (2016) might be the best example of Allen’s inability to look ahead (is that because his dreaded mortality always lurks somewhere in the future?) both in terms of setting and subject matter but it does keep up his recent trend of being borderline unwatchable.
Set in the 1930’s it tells the “story” of Bobby Dorfman (Jessie Eisenberg), a neurotic, Jewish, love obsessed, nervous… and already I was digging my nails into my sofa in annoyance. Here we go again. But maybe Bobby is a decent, likable guy we can get behind and… he’s just hired a prostitute and is now insulting her so, yeeeeeeah. Already I was thinking “Fuck him.”
Bobby travels from New York to Hollywood, as those are the only two places that exist for Allen in America, to get a job with his Uncle Phil (Steve Carell), a powerful talent agent to the stars. Bobby falls in love with Phil’s secretary, Vonnie (Kirsten Stewart), because she looks attractive. However, Phil is also in love with Vonnie because she looks attractive. However, Phil is married and spends a lot of his time telling Vonnie that he is leaving his wife for her even though he never seems to do so… because we’ve never seen THAT in a fucking Woody Allen movie before!
This leads to no soul-searching or growth but a lot of talk of whether people can be faithful or if we can ever get what we want in terms of love as we feel Allen boldly striking out to venture into tediously over-trodden ground that’s been so raked-over and churned-up before in would look like the Somme. Really? We’re going through all this again?!
However, before anyone can come to any answers the film then jumps to New York because it’s better than L.A. and because it’s a Woody Allen movie and, most importantly, to allow Bobby and Vonnie to travel forward in time and re-enact scenes from every single previous Allen movie that has ever fucking been made.
Then there’s some business about gangsters to pad-out the runtime and then the film ends. And by that I mean the film just stops. But it’s at New Year so that’s when things end, I guess.
As I’m sure you can tell, I really didn’t like ‘Cafe Society’ and I haven’t even mentioned the worst part which is Woody Allen’s voice-over. He sounds so tired, uninvested and (no crime here) old that what imperceptible energy the movie might already have just gets totally dissipated by his monotonous droning. It’s less a voice-over and more narrative tinnitus. It’s also the most unnecessary voice-over in movie history either explaining stuff that’s blindingly apparent or obviously there to fill-in gaps Allen couldn’t be bothered dramatising. Indeed, the entire film feels like Allen just rolled out of bed one morning and blearily dictated the entire idea into a tape-recorder and thought — “That’ll do. Let’s just put some pictures over the top of that.”
And yes, they are nice pictures with Vittorio Storaro providing some gorgeous cinematography, but this is Storaro so that’s one of those “obliged to say this” statements. His work also adds nothing to the actual movie and leaving me wondering why the rest of the film couldn’t have been even half as good or deserving as the cinematography. The mismatch in quality between image and script is jarringly incongruous.
And this is a bad script. The declarations of love are toe-curlingly banal and utterly uninspiring feeling like they were written by a talentless twelve-year old rather than an eighty year old man with vast personal and professional experience behind him. The script abounds with exchanges such as –
“You’re amazing.”
“No, you are.”
And this guy won an Oscar?!
There’s also quite a bit of Allen the Apologist popping-up such as the moment when one character delivers the chillingly horrible, yet meant to be cutesy/romantic, line to justify selfish behaviour — “Nothing means anything if you’re actually in love.”Does that include murder, then, or, essentially, any crime under the Sun? That’s the message of the movie folks — you can get away with any vile, old shit as long as you’re in love. Fuck me.
Then there’s also Steve Carell, whom I often quite like, but here seems to have no idea what he is doing, how to play the part or even what his character is. And his love for Stewart is never, at any point, believable but, then again, no one’s love is here.
‘Cafe Society’ is a movie that screams ‘lack of effort’ and that feels churned out, possibly because it was. I found nothing here to enjoy and a lot to loath. I missed the Allen of old with his good stories, flawed yet understandable characters and sparkling dialogue.
Even if he’d bothered to put the effort into giving us a half-decent, semi-satisfying ending would’ve been ni…
