YOU WILL MEET A TALL DARK STRANGER (Sony, 2010) D: Woody Allen, w/ Naomi Watts, Josh Brolin. Rating: NN DVD package: none Rating: NN
Woody Allen may be among those who think that the more art resembles life, the better it is. In You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, he’s made a drawing-room comedy with the humour and plot contrivances left out, a pedestrian movie about ordinary people making serious but equally ordinary life-changing decisions that usually work out badly.
Afraid of aging, comfortably moneyed Alfie (Anthony Hopkins) ditches wife Helena (Gemma Jones) for a trashy young gold-digger (Lucy Punch). Helena turns to drink and a psychic. Meanwhile, their daughter (Naomi Watts) is warming to her gallery-owner boss (Antonio Banderas) and fed up with her failed-author husband (Josh Brolin), who’s putting the moves on the young hottie across the way (Freida Pinto). Things go wrong, and in the end, an arch narrator intones the moral.
That narrator and the chipper score are our big clues that this is a comedy. The characters and situations are played straight and bland. You might be amused. Or not.
The high-powered cast does a good job, and Allen provides them all with solid dramatic moments, though Hopkins fares best, since his character is most racked by mixed emotions.
There are no extras, but it’s easy to imagine the actors gushing about working with Woody.
EXTRAS Widescreen. English, French audio and subtitles.
