Woody Allen spinning his wheels
Woody Allen claims to ignore reviews, but you have to wonder with an anodyne effort like “Wonder Wheel,” set in 1950 on New York’s Coney Island. He seeks to please but, like a carnival punter hoping for a kewpie doll, his aim is cockeyed.
Bereft of ideas, the octogenarian writer/director recycles popular older ones, like the May/ September romances and gangster subplots of innumerable Allen joints.
And remember the Coney Island preamble from Annie Hall, with Allen’s Alvy Singer giving us the sweet and lowdown of life inside an amusement park? It’s the whole megillah of “Wonder Wheel,” with Justin Timberlake’s arrogant lifeguard character Mickey subbing for Alvy as he plays the narrator and male protagonist.
Mickey’s a playwright wannabe who vows to one day pen a “profound masterpiece.” In the meantime, he’s happy to bed unhappily married matron Ginny (Kate Winslet), who waits tables in a clam restaurant and who dreams of getting unhooked from her alcoholic fisherman husband Humpty (Jim Belushi).
“Profound masterpiece” isn’t how anybody would describe Allen’s “Wonder Wheel” screenplay. The dialogue-heavy plot lards in love-triangle complications by way of Humpty’s prodigal daughter Carolina (Juno Temple), who suddenly returns to the fold with Mickey in her adoring eyes and mobsters on her tail. (Perhaps we should call this familiar Allen conceit deus ex machine-gun.)
The look of the film similarly prompts nostalgia for better Allen excursions. Did you love Vittorio Storaro’s “golden hour” lighting from “Café Society”? It’s back big-time, assaulting the eyeballs as hair and faces explode in a blaze of overexposure that looks more like incompetence than art.
Everything strains to serve an underwritten story that resembles a community theatre stage production more than a major motion picture. None of the characters are remotely credible, with the exception of Winslet’s tragic Ginny, who loves neither wisely nor well.
Allen’s growing indifference to his work can’t stop a pro like Winslet. Her Ginny could be a pathetic figure out of silent-era melodrama, but Winslet gives her full voice as a woman raging against the twin terrors of time and disillusionment.
She succeeds in spite of the film, which “just seems to go from one drama to another,” as Mickey observes at one point, pulling his gaze away from his navel for a moment.