Woody Allen’s latest film – his productivity actually renders that critical phrase obsolete, even as it is typed out – is a brittle, strained and verbose tragi-melodrama set in New York’s decaying Coney Island resort in the 1950s, or an eerily exact clone of that place on another planet. It appears to pastiche an O’Neill play or a production-line studio picture from Hollywood’s golden age. There is lots of expository dialogue and characters saying lines like: “I’ve become consumed with jealousy!”
In Allen’s heyday, its premise might have functioned as the subplot or showcase for a much fizzier central comedy situation, though even here there are flashes of fun, as we repeatedly cut away to a small pyromaniac boy whose hobby periodically jolts the movie out of its somnolent seriousness, and finally tints the action with mysterious dread.
Wonder Wheel has impressive production design; there is a painstaking and in some ways amazing artificiality in its colour and light. Cinematographer Vittorio Storaro has taken the decision to suffuse almost every single one of his shots with a golden sunset glow. Bizarrely, there is a scene in a movie theatre in which two characters are whispering in the auditorium’s darkness and a slant of this golden light somehow falls across them. Is it sunset? Did someone open a curtain in there?
The weirdest moment of all is when leading lady Kate Winslet is delivering a post-coital speech to her lover under the boardwalk with the tide out. It is supposed to be night. Sure enough, that golden glow breaks across Winslet’s face – and yet, bafflingly, this coppery flare fades out halfway through the speech leaving just the silvery shade of, presumably, the moon. What happened to the fictional sunset? Was there a problem with the lights? Not for the first time recently, I wondered if Allen had used the correct take.
Winslet plays a harassed waitress called Ginny in her late 30s, unhappily married to a plump, morose schlub called Harold “Humpty” Johnson (Jim Belushi) who runs the carousel ride at the Coney Island fair. Their apartment appears to be within the fairground itself, with its unending rackety din giving Ginny a permanent migraine: she’s secretly tippling from a bottle kept under the sink. They have a small son, Richie (Jack Gore), who likes boxes of matches and cans of gasoline.
But then Humpty’s grownup daughter from his first marriage shows up: the sexily distraught Carolina (Juno Temple) who is now on the run from the abusive man she married – a gangster, that now very familiar film-plot-enabler of Allen’s late period. The Johnsons have no choice but to take Carolina into their cramped flat, but Ginny’s quiet desperation is relieved by her romantic escapade with a handsome young man studying for his master’s degree in modern drama and working part-time as the beach lifeguard. This is Mickey (Justin Timberlake) who, in his insufferable and supercilious way, narrates the action, musing about tragedy. It is his role as narrator that perhaps explains the stylised amber light.
Wonder Wheel is not a total loss, being marginally better than his recent films Irrational Man (2014) and Magic in the Moonlight (2015), though a bit more joyless than Café Society (2016). It is acted with a robust dinner-theatre conviction, particularly by Winslet, for whom this is actually a good role. Timberlake’s character, however, resembles a kind of very lifelike android, and the plot itself functions like a clockwork contrivance made of painted pieces of balsa wood, and feels as if it has all the depth and life of the painted hoardings we see at the fair, one of which reads: “Barrel of laffs”.
Nobody unwinds or relaxes, no one breaks out of the trance. There is no comic performance, and no really tragic performance either. Winslet has a perennially stunned or stymied look – not irrelevant or unconvincing in her situation, in fact, but nothing erupts into life, nothing lets rip, nothing catches fire, except the piles of driftwood or waste paper which that malevolent little boy sets light to – when he’s not sneaking off to the movies. Is he the future genius of this story?
