Review: You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger (2010; dir. Woody Allen)

You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger. Dir. Woody Allen, Prod. Letty Aronson, Prod. Co. Mediapro / Versátil Cinema / Gravier Productions / Antena 3 Films / Antena 3 TV / Dippermouth, USA / Spain, 2010.  Main Cast: Gemma Jones (Helena), Anthony Hopkins (Alfie), Naomi Watts (Sally), Josh Brolin (Roy).

It has become increasingly difficult to know what to expect when you go to see  ‘A Woody Allen Film’.  Although different periods of his filmmaking history demonstrate the use of particular aesthetic trends and themes (often depending on collaborators), since approximately 2003 he has been consistent in his films’ generic and emotional inconsistency.  For every ‘light’ comedy, such as Scoop (2006) and Whatever Works (2009), there has been a stark, weighty drama such as Match Point (2005) or Cassandra’s Dream (2007), and films that juxtapose the two to with varying degrees of stylistic integration, such as Melinda and Melinda (2004), and Vicky Christina Barcelona (2008).

You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger falls into the latter category, with Allen using his trademark wit to punctuate what is likely his most emotionally brutal film since Husbands and Wives (1992), a fantastic feat unto itself.  Tall Dark Stranger centres on four primary characters:

Alfie Shepridge (Sir Anthony Hopkins), who leaves his wife and in an attempt to regain his youth, and marries a young prostitute, Charmaine (Lucy Punch), whom he hopes will give him a son to replace the one he lost; Helena (Gemma Jones), Alfie’s jilted wife of forty years who begins seeing a psychic to ease the pain caused by her divorce; Sally (Naomi Watts), Alfie and Helena’s daughter who is in an unhappy marriage with Roy (Josh Brolin), and considers having an affair with her new boss, Greg (Antonio Banderas); and Roy, a formerly celebrated writer struggling to maintain his success while Sally supports them, as he begins a relationship with Dia (Freida Pinto), an engaged woman who lives across the street from him.  Ultimately, this film attempts to draw a correlation between an individual’s happiness and their ability to delude themselves about life’s harsh realities, and most painfully, how one’s delusions can affect those close to him/her.

Stylistically, Tall Dark Stranger contains almost all of the tropes we have come to expect from Allen: warm hues in its cinematographic palette, long takes, a ‘flat’ 1.85:1 aspect ratio, though the camera is far less static than in the bulk of Allen’s catalogue.  He still uses primarily monaural soundtracks including pre-recorded music, largely old 78s, and features lots of talking and quipping in his dialogue.  As sometimes happens with Allen’s films, if he hasn’t established the appropriate rapport with an actor, the dialogue can come out stilted and forced.  If his actors are comfortable using the script as a template to build off and riff on, then the performances can seem very fluid and integrated with the style.  However, Tall Dark Stranger proves a case of wholly sufficient performances, without the smooth rapport of, say, Diane Keaton, Tony Roberts, or Alan Alda.  It is a pleasure to see excellent actors such as Sir Anthony Hopkins, Naomi Watts and Josh Brolin use their tremendous talents bringing an Allen script to life, and he manages to also elicit wonderful performances from Gemma Jones, Lucy Punch, and Freida Pinto, who inhabit and express Allen’s ideas with grace and delicacy.

However, with Allen’s aesthetic style almost firmly cemented, with the exception of a few choice films, what has become particularly interesting is attempting to place him within a particular national identity.  As an American filmmaker with overtly European influences, one could claim that his early films largely set in New York aim to create a different or alternate perspective on American life.  However, with his later films, beginning with Match Point, Allen has set many of his later films in Europe, resulting in the prevalent, though questionable suggestion, that he might be, even inadvertently, saying something about America’s role internationally.  Tall Dark Stranger does, in fact, boast a fairly multicultural central cast; Apart from the British leads Gemma Jones, Anthony Hopkins, Lucy Punch, and Naomi Watts (herself an Australian playing British), there is Freida Pinto, playing Dia, who is seemingly second generation British Asian, as her parents appear with notable accents, and Antonio Banderas, internationally known as a Spanish star as part of his celebrity image.  Josh Brolin plays Roy, the American in the cast.  However, from a screenwriting perspective, the characters are written largely with Allen’s stock range of vocations and neuroses.

It is, however, significant that Allen’s filmmaking style is effectively unchanged from his displacement from America to Europe.  He doesn’t embody a typically ‘American’ aesthetic, if there is such a thing, but it isn’t wholly European either, even if it bears a heavy European influence.  What can be said is that Woody Allen is still making Woody Allen movies, but this one sets my teeth on edge a bit more, in a very good way.

Postscript:

This was originally written, in a different form, for the Journal of American Studies in Turkey.  As part of the aims of the journal, I had to write some things I didn’t exactly believe, though they could be arguably suitable for the text.  If you would like to see the original version, which wasn’t used in the journal, please visit my other blog:

http://fetchingmygoat.blogspot.co.uk/2013/06/review-you-will-meet-tall-dark-stranger.html