Film review: Woody Allen's Magic in the Moonlight
Woody Allen's latest film is no Midnight in Paris, nor an odd-couple classic such as Annie Hall or Manhattan.
Magic in the Moonlight
Starring: Colin Firth, Emma Stone, Simon McBurney
Director: Woody Allen
Category: IIA
3/5 stars
film is no Midnight in Paris, nor an odd-couple classic such as Annie Hall or Manhattan. Cynics will struggle to appreciate this breezy romantic comedy about a cynic who struggles to appreciate the magic of romance. But it's unlikely the director-writer even cares.
The 78-year-old filmmaker seems merely to be going through the motions in this featherweight film without giving much thought to anything. The very first scene, for example, introduces us to fabled English illusionist Stanley Crawford (Colin Firth), heavily made up in yellowface, complete with a Fu Manchu moustache. Going by the "Chinese" stage name, Wei Ling Soo, Crawford makes an elephant disappear on the stage of a packed Berlin theatre in 1928.
One wonders why Allen didn't tackle the yellowface element more delicately, as other filmmakers have done. If he's remotely mindful of sensitive subjects, then he is not showing it with this story, which boils down to a much older man's desperate attempts to counter the lies of a young woman.
A master debunker when he isn't cutting women in half, Stanley is visited backstage by his childhood friend Howard Burkan (Simon McBurney), who invites him to expose a beautiful American mystic as a fraud. Sophie Baker (Emma Stone) is a comically solemn character who is allegedly preying on a gullible family holidaying in the south of France — or is she?
Regardless of her authenticity, everyone in the wealthy Catledge household seems happy with her presence, including the matriarch Grace (Jacki Weaver), who believes Sophie is genuinely able to summon her dead husband's spirit, and the smitten heir Brice (Hamish Linklater), who serenades Sophie with a ukulele.