MAGIC IN THE MOONLIGHT
2 out of 5 stars
Director: Woody Allen
Stars: Colin Firth, Emma Stone, Jacki Weaver, Hamish Linklater
PG, 97 minutes, opens Thursday
Anyone who has made 44 feature films – and few filmmakers outside the cinema's earliest decades have – at the hectic pace of one a year is going to have a misfire or two. But Magic in the Moonlight, an uninspiring yet familiar tale of faith, reason and romance, may well be one of the poorest pictures Woody Allen has conceived and released. Previous dips, such as 2012's To Rome With Love or 2002's Hollywood Ending, improve simply by comparison.
The period romantic-comedy has all the trappings of a Woody Allen production, from the familiar tone and type of the introductory credit sequence to the entanglement of an ageing man with a younger woman, but it plays with repetitive precision. It's as if outlines were put in place to mark the film's structure, but they were never subsequently fleshed out and finished.
Colin Firth works very hard to make Allen's shorthand worthy. He plays Stanley, a successful English stage magician, first seen making an elephant disappear in a 1928 Berlin theatre. Stanley is swiftly invited to the south of France by his friend and fellow illusionist Howard (Simon McBurney) to debunk a young female medium who has entranced a wealthy American family. The idea of exposing a fraud with rational thought so excites the arrogant Stanley that he puts off a holiday with his fiancé.
Even Howard, a friend since childhood, credits Stanley with "all the charm of a typhus epidemic", and there's just a hint of civility to his mocking disdain. Firth finds the dry humour and secretive affection in the character, but the often docile dialogue doesn't help to distinguish what has become the stock role of his career: the haughty Englishman who has his head turned but can't accept it (that is, Mr. Darcy rides again).
Stanley is soon needling Sophie (Emma Stone), a hammy spiritualist accompanied by her watchful mother (Marcia Gay Harden), whose relaying of messages from the beyond has opened the purse strings of Mrs Catledge (Jacki Weaver, with a quivering note of nervousness to her American accent), a rich widow, and won the heart of Brice (Hamish Linklater), her daffy, ineffectual son and heir.
The banter between Stanley and Sophie is often boilerplate. He is a man of science, she is a woman of faith, while the clash of the two schools and their beliefs are stated and restated with bald certainty. "It's all phoney," Stanley keeps airily declaring, even as Sophie displays a knowledge that's inexplicable and events start to perplex him.
Stanley's refusal to believe what he can't explain extends to accepting love's redemptive joy, but it's hard to fathom the attraction between the laid-back adversaries. Firth is literally twice Stone's age (53 and 25-years-old respectively), and while that age range might reflect the era, the best you can suggest is that Sophie is terrified of Brice's adoring ukulele serenades, the only off note amid the refined luxury and burnished light she has become accustomed to.
Stone looked lost in her last period role, playing a 1940s crime lord's moll in Gangster Squad, although her wide-eyed openness and tart retorts fare better in Magic in the Moonlight, even if Allen has left her character to be circled by Firth's. Stanley comes to appreciate Sophie more than the audience ever can.
Even as he has put existential gags into the vernacular of pop culture and publicly squirmed under mortality's certainty, Woody Allen has littered his film with the inexplicable and the otherworldly. Never, however, have they inspired such a dry scenario. Stanley's inability to explain, let alone expose, Sophie leaves him confused and then excited, but the progression is perfunctory.
In 2006's Scoop, Allen had a supporting role, also playing a magician, who eventually finds himself being transported to the afterlife upon dying. It was an unexpected and comically profound upsetting of Allen's signature beliefs, and nothing in the schematic path laid out here comes close to matching it for invention or revelatory wit.
The great cinematographer Darius Khondji bestows a welcome texture on the prominent pastel colours, and does wonders with the nominally candle-lit seance. But Magic in the Moonlight is a serious step backwards after the tragic denial of last year's Blue Jasmine, a film that had much to say about the people living in the different strata of contemporary America.
The later-era works of some revered directors are noted for their austerity, and Allen has certainly become brusque with his storytelling this century, but this is a first draft that simply fails to hold together. No sleight of hand can change that.
