Okay, let me try and break this all down for you. We've got Roy (Josh Brolin, going Method with a weight gain), an author who wrote one great book and has failed with each subsequent attempt, and he is married to Sally (Naomi Watts) who takes a job at an art gallery and becomes smitten with her flirtacious boss (Antonio Banderas) while Roy becomes smitten with the lovely Dia (Freida Pinto) - likely the most underwritten female character you will see this year in a major motion picture - who lives in an apartment across the courtyard and is engaged to be married. Sally's mother Helena (Gemma Jones) has been left by her husband (Anthony Hopkins) who, in the midst of a late-life crisis, has married a much, much younger woman, Charmaine (Lucy Punch), an ex-trick-turner. Helena has turned to therapy in the form of astrology and nags endlessly at Sally and Roy - while drinking all their liquor - and winds up in love with a kind-hearted owner of an occult bookshop who is still in love - and still converses - with his deceased wife.
Overseeing all this is a narrator (Zak Orth) who keeps us up to date with explanations so no one misses the deeper meaning of the various goings-on and this, of course, is the same stylistic device the Woodman employed on "Vicky Cristina Barcelona" but there it felt it much more genuine, and maybe it just felt much more genuine because Penelope Cruz's Oscar-winning work was so violently, frighteningly sincere that it somehow made all the scripted coincidences ring true.
To ensure the audience grasps the fact all these characters fail to recognize happiness when they have it, the screenplay requires certain events to take place and so these events take place regardless of whether or not the events themselves feel authentic. Dia falls for Roy why exactly? He asks her out to lunch and there is a brief scene or two with some uninteresting dialogue and she's suddenly breaking off her marriage. These sorts of sped-up plot devices are all over the movie. It just hurries everyone along to where they need to go so the necessary points can be made. It's as if Allen can no longer be bothered with the inner-workings of his character's minds which, in turn, makes it come across as if no one is thinking for his or herself.
The narrator trots out the ancient Shakespeare line about how life is "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." Well, there a bit of sound, not much, and there is a little fury, I guess, though it's mostly fraudulent fury, but there is no question that in the end this film doesn't signify much of anything. Why can't Woody start writing actual screenplays again and stop serving up these classroom exercises in metaphysics?Source URL: https://extravagancedeplumes.blogspot.com/2010/10/you-will-meet-tall-dark-stranger.html
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