Wonder Wheel
Woody Allen has made so many great and near-great movies that every new release begins with an audience wondering — is this going to be another one? Usually, within about 15 minutes, the answer is apparent, and usually the answer is no. That’s how it works, even with the best. Babe Ruth hit a lot of home runs, but most of the time he made an out, and when he did get a hit, it was usually a single.
Allen’s latest, “Wonder Wheel” is a single — or maybe it’s a single stretched to a double on the basis of some fancy base running (acting) by Kate Winslet. In almost any other filmmaker’s oeuvre, this film would be considered a highlight. But for the director who made “Hannah and Her Sisters,” “Match Point” and “Blue Jasmine”? It’s right up there with “Melinda and Melinda” and “Scoop.” Good, not great.
It takes place in the Coney Island of the 1950s, a colorful place made yet more colorful through Vittorio Storaro’s nostalgic cinematography. The amusement park has seen better days, but it’s still a place of working-class dreams, where average people can buy thrills and laughs with just the change in their pockets. Juno Temple enters the scene, in a pretty dress, looking the embodiment of 1950s young womanhood. She is trying to find her father, who works running one of the rides.
In order to enjoy “Wonder Wheel,” it is necessary for the audience to accept a convenience of the plot that doesn’t make much sense: Carolina (Temple) has left her mobster husband and has told her story to the FBI. Now she’s a marked woman. So what does she do? She decides to go stay with her father (Jim Belushi) and stepmother, Ginny (Kate Winslet) at their place in Coney Island. This is the first place that gangsters would look.
Even worse, with the approval of her family, she takes a waitress job in a restaurant, where anyone might recognize her. Obviously, there are entire packs of lemmings with better survival instincts than the people in this movie.
Temple is more adult and aware here than elsewhere, as radiant and idiosyncratic as a studio-age star. Yet despite the drama surrounding her character, “Wonder Wheel” is really the story of Ginny, who is desperate for love and security and has given up on her explosive, alcoholic husband. On the beach one day, she meets a lifeguard, Mickey (Justin Timberlake), and they start an affair.
Woody Allen is perhaps better than any other American filmmaker at depicting the gradual process by which love can go from idyllic to hellish. He also has a way of finding grand moral issues — the matters of conscience that define entire lives — through seemingly small events. Like so many of Allen’s movies, “Wonder Wheel” traces the moral journey of a sympathetic character, who deserves everything she wants. But as beautifully played by Winset, she wants it too much.
Timberlake is interesting here, in that he is very good at the moment-to-moment emotions, and yet there is something faintly artificial about his performance, overall. Then again, there is something artificial, or at least heightened and operatic, about the entire movie — the sets, the colors, the situations, the performers. Belushi takes it way over the top as the alcoholic husband and father, as abandoned and fascinating as an understudy tenor finally getting to go on in “Pagliacci.” Yet, like Timberlake, there is something true at the core of what he’s doing.
If there’s a weakness to “Wonder Wheel,” it’s that, in the end, all the bigness and bluster don’t land with an impression of importance. Things happen in the lives of these people, and we watch, and we understand that it’s all a very big deal — for them, not us. All the same, “Wonder Wheel” engages our attention from beginning to end.