A Rainy Day in New York, review: Woody Allen's latest is both feeble and ugly
Dir: Woody Allen; Starring: Timothée Chalamet, Elle Fanning, Selena Gomez, Jude Law, Diego Luna, Liev Schreiber, Rebecca Hall. 12 cert, 89 min
A Rainy Day in New York can’t, per se, be blamed for Amazon’s refusal to distribute it in 2018, cancelling its contract with the man who made it. Nor is it the film’s fault that three of its actors, including leading man Timothée Chalamet, repented their involvement, giving their salaries away to an assortment of rape charities rather than being seen to profit. For all that, you’d have to blame the long-standing child abuse allegations against Woody Allen (which he has denied and of which he has not been found guilty), dating back to 1992, when his 22nd film, Husbands and Wives, came out. (This is his 48th.)
No, there’s nothing especially provoking about this particular Woody Allen joint – even if, by force of habit, it does have at least one subplot to raise eyebrows, about a depressed veteran filmmaker (Liev Schreiber) trying his luck with Elle Fanning’s eager blonde undergrad, who’s in town to interview him for her campus paper. If you’ve seen enough of Allen’s post-prime annual doodles – and trust me, you probably have – you could easily mix this bit up with a dozen similar flirtations which either seem to be commenting obliquely on Allen’s notoriety, or else incorrigibly trolling us by this point. There’s nothing he tried in Manhattan he isn’t still willing to give a further shake for old time’s sake.
The only crimes we can truly lay at the film’s own feet are being ugly-looking, feebly acted, and a watery blend of flimsy and laboured – business as usual for a good three-quarters of the films Allen’s turned in this side of the millennium. Borrowing an idea from Fellini’s 1952 romcom The White Sheik, Allen has moved it – ish – to the contemporary Upper East Side, where his young cast rattle off middling Woody Allen dialogue and make doomed attempts to scan as present-day college students.
Any way you slice it, you’re going to struggle with Gatsby Welles (Chalamet), a rebellious aesthete from super-upscale “Yardley College”, who complains that everything’s BS in time-honoured Holden Caulfield style, and loves quoting poetry at people to catch them out. As a stooge or bad guy in this flimflam, he might have got us somewhere, but Allen has disastrously misidentified him as a likable protagonist, dragging Chalamet through the plot’s deluge of minor mishaps while leaching him altogether of his usual charm. The difference between his fabulous Little Women performance and this? A director who knew what she was doing.
It’s Gatsby’s idea, when his girlfriend Ashleigh (Fanning) gushes with joy over landing the hotel-junket interview, to show her the best Manhattan has to offer, booking a plush suite with a park view and scoring tickets to everything. He wants to do this hush-hush – his killjoy Republican parents are holding a dreaded soirée – and gets the hump when Ashleigh’s allotted hour with Schreiber’s gloomy auteur stretches out into a whole afternoon. Lunch gets cancelled, the heavens open, and both sweethearts are shuttled across town on separate, fidelity-testing, and increasingly damp escapades.
With a little recalibration, Fanning’s sheer vivacity could have made her a peachy main character here. While Selena Gomez acquits herself, no one but Fanning is truly all in: she has a dinner scene getting tipsy with a playboy film star (Diega Luna) where every giggle upstages the last. It insults her talents as a breathless ditz when the script keeps smirkily insinuating she’s anyone’s, involving her not just with Luna and Schreiber’s characters but the latter’s screenwriting partner (a pointless Jude Law). Highbrow references fly above Ashleigh’s head for no other reason than to mock her intelligence.
For his third straight film, Allen has triple-Oscar-winner Vittorio Storaro behind the camera, but the treacly period glow of Café Society and Wonder Wheel crashes into the gutter this time. Shot after shot has some weird yellowish light source poke in from seemingly nowhere in the midst of heavy rain, or in mid-close-up. Internal commentary on aesthetics is not Storaro’s friend. “There’s something charming about that elegance,” Gomez’s character uselessly says of Sargent’s Madame X, in a mid-film detour to the Met. Who wouldn’t rewrite that line? Or let Chalamet play his role more sadly, as some lost and bedraggled chancer? Even the basics here – changing your mind about love in the rain – feel mishandled, the insights fortune-cookie-ish. Elegance is a way off.
Opens Fri June 5 through Signature Entertainment
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