You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger

As reliable as the seasons themselves is Woody Allen's annual film release. Allen is a one-man production studio, turning out a film every year, serving as writer and director and, until recently, often starring as well.

The results tend to swing as wildly as a pendulum in an Italian horror flick. For every critically acclaimed movie, such as Vickie Cristina Barcelona or Sweet and Lowdown, there's a flop along the lines of The Curse of the Jade Scorpion: a project both artless and inexplicable.

Almost worse are films that feel like pale tracings of earlier projects, ably-made movies like Match Point or Whatever Works (though the latter film was elevated by Allen's decision to cast Larry David in the role that he would normally have played himself: David took a so-so script and ran wild with a sparkling performance).

It's into this third category that You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger falls. Allen is up to his usual tricks--the eclectic casting, the jittery humor centered on failure and death--but the movie fails to take on any spark, and even Allen's trademark barbs (sour, neurotic witticisms that, when they work, fly by with a snap) fall flat, in part because the cast don't have Allen's grasp of screwy delivery, but also because the film itself is just too soggy to permit for any light and lively verbal jousting. Rather, everything here is dense, dispirited, and dragging.

Helena (Gemma Jones) has been deserted by her husband, Alfie (Anthony Hopkins, seeming more engaged here than he has in years), who is going through a late midlife crisis--call it a five-sixth life's crisis. While Alfie takes up with a call girl name Charmaine (Lucy Punch, channeling a Little Britain character or three), Helene, heartbroken and suicidal, seeks solace from a psychic who soothes her with promises of a brighter future ("You're bathed in rose light, my darling"--words as intoxicating to Helene as the glass of scotch the seer hands her).

The movie is another of Allen's medications on mortality and life's messy meaning (or lack thereof), so it's to be expected that everything the psychic promises comes true--more or less. This includes a prediction about a new book written by Helene's son-in-law, Roy (Josh Brolin, who forsakes his tough guy persona for something more rumpled and woolly). While Roy, a flash-in-the-pan novelist, waits and worries by the phone for word from his publisher, his wandering eye takes note of a pretty young girl across the way. Helene's psychic doesn't foresee what comes of his attentions, but the audience does.

Helene's daughter, Sally (Naomi Watts), might notice her husband's affections straying, except she, too, is enamored of someone else--her new boss, an earnest, kindly art dealer named Greg (Antonio Banderas, whose roaring sizzle has subsided to a genuinely warm sweetness, sort of like George Clooney with an accent). Hearing about Greg's marital unhappiness only tempts Sally all the more to ditch her own unsatisfactory husband for something that might prove more suitable--if only she can work up the nerve.

That's the main motive for just about everyone in the film, really. Roy has lost his confidence as a writer; Alfie's anxieties about life winding down can only be assuaged by the idea that he might still, late in life, produce a son; Helene simply wants a man, and might actually secure one if she can get past her own hysteria. The thing is, it's not really funny; a nebbish is funny because try as he might, he's still a nebbish, and his efforts may be heroic in nature but will never be heroic in scale. This lot, on the other hand, seem like they'd be perfectly competent, if they'd just get over their own baroque dramatics. It's boring to watch, and one wonders whether Allen found their contortions, and the film's convolutions, equally boring to chart out.

At times, it feels like Allen's heart was only half in it. The film's central joke--that the "tall dark stranger" of the fortuneteller's cliche is clad in a black cowl and carries a scythe--is a piquant one, but Allen has been playing with variations on this same theme forever, and when it comes to nuance or detailed character study he's just not in the game here, settling for broad strokes and generic types. If this film does anything, it retroactively casts some of that "rosy light" the psychic sees, along with auras presumably, on Whatever Works, which was at least a celebration of life's weird, lesser-walked paths and oddball coincidences: the very random stuff out of which we can at least manufacture meaning for ourselves.

An irritatingly lively narrator (Zak Orth) tries to prop up the mood and stitch together the disparate parts of You Will Meet A Tall, Dark Stranger, informing us as to who the movie's parade of characters are and what they are up to. But we don't really need explanations: this is Allen's oldest schtick, revolving around the oldest tropes in the narrative toybox.