Café Society fails to deliver a kick
Jesse Eisenberg a flat stand-in for Woody Allen as neurotic New Yorker
Ah, the good old days. After the Coen brothers with Hail, Caesar!, Woody Allen is the latest filmmaker to revisit Hollywood’s golden age, turning his sights on L.A. in the 1930s for his new movie Café Society — through the lens of a neurotic New Yorker, of course.
Jesse Eisenberg stands in for Allen, doing his best to capture the master’s winning mix of selfdeprecation and off-the-cuff wit. He only half succeeds, though it’s open to discussion whether that’s due to Allen’s (under-)writing, the size of the shoes he has to fill or the outright impossibility of the task.
Eisenberg plays Bobby Dorfman, a wide-eyed young buck from the Bronx who heads west, hoping to find his fortune in Tinseltown. He calls up his uncle Phil (Steve Carell), a powerful agent to the stars who does everything with bluster and namedrops like there’s no tomorrow. Well, actually, Bobby’s mom calls Phil first — this is a Woody Allen film, after all — urging her brother to help his nephew out, to which he begrudgingly agrees.
Phil blows Bobby off, before eventually giving in. He asks his secretary, Vonnie (Kristen Stewart), to show the boy around. And so we have something resembling a spark. Stewart makes an impression as the cool, coy love interest, giving her character an intriguing mix of coquettishness and mystery.
It’s Eisenberg who comes off flat. In his heyday, Allen’s performances were driven by neuroses, and his dialogue imbued the doubts and dubious decisions of his characters with a steadyhumming electrical charge.
Eisenberg, though amiable, doesn’t have the same juice. And he seems unsure just how to play things, at times attempting to mimic Allen’s quirks, at others simply failing to command the screen.
Not that Allen fares much better. Appearing only in voice-over — perhaps attempting to inject his story with a much-needed sense of direction — he sounds disengaged, even awkward.
On a brighter note, Vittorio Storaro’s cinematography, Santo Loquasto’s production design and Suzy Benzinger’s colourcoordinated costumes make for sporadic moments of visual splendour.
Bobby and Vonnie eventually hit it off, only to be thwarted by her competing affection for an older man — one of Allen’s go-to themes, go figure.
It all moves along at a snail’s pace, and when the dramatic moments come, it’s hard to feel invested.
The action moves back to New York for an equally noncommittal final act. The ending resonates with a brief moment of poetry — something missing from the rest of this mildly amusing, meandering film.