RIDE TO REMEMBER
‘Wonder Wheel’ spins tale of fate, love and jealously on Coney Island
Woody Allen's 1950s film “Wonder Wheel” boasts some wonderful performances, especially from a diva-like Kate Winslet in the female lead.
But it feels like it was written for the stage, and while Allen and longtime cinematographer Vittorio Storaro acknowledge the problematic play nature of this outing with garish lighting and tragicomic histrionics, it makes “Wonder Wheel” spin a bit self-consciously.
The narrator, who addresses the audience, is Mickey (an earnest Justin Timberlake), a Coney Island lifeguard who is also a graduate student at New York University, studying to be a playwright.
The film tells the story of Ginny (Winslet), who was an actress for a time before marrying her second husband, Humpty, also known as Harold (Jim Belushi), a man who runs a carousel on Coney Island. It's a meager living. Ginny lives with Humpty in a “former freak show” on the boardwalk within earshot of the live shooting gallery. Ginny loved acting so much, she pretends she is acting when she works as a waitress at Ruby's Clam House on the boardwalk.
When she isn't shucking clams, Ginny tries to get her elementary-school age, hookey-playing firebug son, Richie (a good Jack Gore), from her first marriage, to stop setting fires.
Humpty likes to go fishing off the pier and is a recovering alcoholic. Ginny gets migraines and takes slugs of Scotch she hides beneath the sink. In an attempt to add romance to her awful life, frustrated, romantic Ginny begins an affair with — yes — Mickey, a younger man with a studio in Greenwich Village. In addition to hot beach sex, she and Mickey talk about the theater. Georgia Gibbs sings “Kiss of Fire” on the soundtrack. Soon, Ginny, a working-class Madame Bovary with many of the same characteristics as the heroine in Allen's critically acclaimed “Blue Jasmine,” is utterly besotted.
Enter Carolina (Juno Temple), Humpty's sexy, 20-something daughter from his first marriage. She is on the run from her mobster husband, who sends two thugs (Tony Sirico and Steve Schirripa of “The Sopranos”) to find her. When she meets Mickey by accident, sparks fly, and Ginny descends into a maelstrom of anguish and anger.
If this sounds like Eugene O'Neill-light, you'll be happy to hear O'Neill gets a couple of shout-outs, and to know that we are truly on a long day's journey into the night. Ginny has to make a lifechanging, trademark film noir-esque decision while “Kiss of Fire” plays, again.
“Wonder Wheel” has all the right parts, pun intended, including the early reference to the role of fate in human lives. But the dialogue sounds too much like narration half the time, and like the ghost of Tennessee Williams the other half. When Allen talks about fate with a capital F, it sounds to me like it is a synonym for selfishness. Still, towering over the action is the eponymous Coney Island Ferris wheel, dubbed “Wonder Wheel,” and we're still all metaphorically riding on it with all of our ups and downs and thrills and spills. Until we're not.