WONDER WHEEL
When someone sounds out a lament for a ‘simpler time’, you’ve got to parse what they’re actually yearning for. When, say, Kirk Pengilly sounds the lament for some lost, prelapsarian golden age of yore, he’s not just longing for those days when a woman’s ass was under male dominion, but moreso a time in which women were put in their place, and white-male-privilege sailed on unchecked.
Wondering what Woody Allen is yearning for, well, that might get even creepier. The most overrated director in the history of cinema has spent much of this century, on screens, making middling, mediocre-at-best movies full of nostalgia for some dreamy vision of the past; fantasias that, perhaps, take him back to some place of boyhood innocence. This is not surprising given that Allen just turned 82, and has long passed the point, in life, of having more to look back on than to look forward to.
Allen is a self-professed, um, ‘romantic’, and this nostalgia for the past is in keeping with romantic yearning. In Midnight In Paris, one of his few films of the 21st-century to justify its existence — as in, made because it had an actual idea to discuss, not just because he has to crank out a film a year — Allen explored these themes; somehow settling on the notion that yearning for some distant time is a form of delusion, even as he did the same thing himself. Nostalgia, as ever, ain’t what it used to be.
Wonder Wheel, Allen’s latest film, is another soapy valentine to the past: to old fashions, and old-fashioned theatricality. It’s set, with a weird lack of specificity, in “the 1950s”, in another lilywhite vision of America, where another batch of stars spout overwrought dialogue and insufferable Dixie jazz tweedles away incessantly. If you want to get in the mood to see Wonder Wheel, play this song seven times in a row (the amount of spins it gets on the soundtrack, herein) and let me know if you’re not ready to commit random acts of violence against any man in a straw-boater holding a washboard.
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It all begins with, well, white credits on a black screen and insufferable Dixie jazz, of course. But, then, we meet lifeguard Justin Timberlake, delivering to-camera narration that beats down the fourth wall with face-palming simplicity. He announces himself as storyteller thusly: “I relish melodrama and larger-than-life characters”; which means that, soon enough, a bunch of caricatures will be yelling at each other. Timberlake ain’t just a lifeguard — sitting aloft his beach throne, casting judgment on those below — but a playwright by night, out to experience “the romantic narrative of the writers’ life”, to write about “the tragic human condition, and how we have to lie to ourselves to live.”
Enter Kate Winslet, tragic heroine, and veritable rewrite of the Tennessee Williams-esque dame Cate Blanchett played in Blue Jasmine. “I am playing a part,” she says, early, “I’m just playing the thankless role of the waitress.” Often, when screenwriters employ such self-referential devices, they’re described as being clever; even too clever. But, here, all this meta dialogue is ever so stupid, not only failing to flatter in-on-the-joke viewers, but drawing attention to how elemental the writing is.
“I’ve become consumed with jealousy!” Winslet exclaims, in one of the film’s (many) worst moments; Allen’s script failing the most basic tenet of screenwriting: show, don’t tell. “Oh, God, spare me the bad drama!” Winslet yelps, later on. And, though this line is supposed to be with a wink to the audience, this sardonic dialogue spoke aloud my sincere hopes for a film that lays on the tragic melodrama all too thick. Even if it always leavens the heaviness with endless bouts of Coney Island Washboard.
Wonder Wheel is, indeed, set on Coney Island. There, in the shadow of the ferris wheel that gives the film its name, Winslet lives with her “oafish” husband Jim Belushi, a potbellied, wifebeater-wearing, fishin’-loving carnie; Belushi having seemingly modelled his work on Jackie Gleason in The Honeymooners, all the better to deliver his many threats of domestic violence to wife and redheaded-stepchild (weren’t the ’50s swell?!). Winslet’s a waitress in a clamhouse, but, in a former life, she was an actress; her slide from artistic life into a blue-collar one breeding bitterness.
When she picks up an affair with Timberlake, he serves as a ray of light in an otherwise dreary life; after they fuck under the boardwalk, he even whispers sweet nothings in her ear, peddling dreams of rescue that’ll never come to pass. She’s made tragic heroine — another Woody woman-going-off-the-rails, turned screeching harridan by the final act — with the arrival of Belushi’s grown-up daughter from a previous marriage, Juno Temple, a waify dame on the lam from her mobster husband, turning male heads wherever she goes. Inevitably, Temple ends up falling under Timberlake’s gaze, and, so, with screenplay piling on and stagey nature unbowed, a love triangle develops, in which the delusional woman becomes a victim of fate. Or, perhaps, the male ego.
So, just in case you’re scoring at home: yes, Woody Allen has made a movie in which a male narrator/storyteller leaves a middle-aged woman for her much-younger stepdaughter. After years of the film-biz ignoring stories about Allen’s private life — due to his sainted status and perennial profitability — Wonder Wheel is the first film of his to arrive in a climate in which the old separation-of-art-and-artist debate is being shelved for outrage, activism, and box-office boycotts.
Like almost all his 49 features, Wonder Wheel is too flimsy to stand up to much scrutiny; this merely the latest half-baked concoction served up simply so Allen can keep up his film-a-year pace. Its writing is lazy and self-congratulatory, its acting hammy and overwrought, its social resonance negligible. It’s a tragedy that’s staged and edited as if it’s a comedy; only, at this point, Allen can’t even write a decent joke.
It’s bad, but, then again, almost all his movies are. For so long, Allen’s awful filmography has been granted some incongruous sense of lustre and credibility, with Hollywood celebrities lining up to appear in them, and critics/viewers giving them a pass because of their maker. But, with the life-and-times of their maker now in question — a searing Dylan Farrow op-ed detonated the day it was released in Australia; Allen’s working relationships with Harvey Weinstein and Roy Price no longer seeming so innocent — one wonders how this Woody Industry can keep on rattling on, oblivious to the changing world around it.
In the face of a changing world, it’s no surprise that Allen returns, time and again, to the safety of the past; or, moreso, the past as he imagines it. But, it turns out, with Wonder Wheel, that foggy nostalgia is the least of the film’s problems. Whether or not you suspect that Allen is a terrible person, Wonder Wheel is undeniably a terrible movie.
