Movie: You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger
Starring: Josh Brolin, Naomi Watts and Gemma Jones
Writer/Director: Woody Allen (Annie Hall)
Duration: 98 minutes
2.5 stars out of 4
Could we believe that all these characters in You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger (to paraphrase Will Shakespeare) find life to be full of sound and fury, but in the end signifying nothing?
Some like Helena (Gemma Jones) are content with that uncanny feeling that love will emerge from the darkness, out of a magical box and end up being rather meaningful. Others seem to reject this supernal serendipity and frustrate their relationships to the point that a new love would be the best medicine.
Cue the Woody Allen music, the classic credits and cynical one-liners. You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger is every frame a Woody Allen, but it does wrong what many of his great movies do right: it uses circumstance as a catalyst, but never allows itself to unfold through character choice and consequence.
The scenarios are there, but they seem to be extracted from Woody Allen cereal boxes. You have the once-in-love-now-in-hate couple Sally (Naomi Watts) and Roy (Josh Brolin), a respectable writer having trouble publishing his latest novel. Also Helena, the wide-eyed, casual-drinking mother of Sally who is obsessed with the guidance of a fortune teller (Pauline Collins).
Her ex-husband Alfie (Anthony Hopkins) piles up on Viagra and marries a floozy, expired Hollywood actress (Lucy Punch, originally to be played by Nicole Kidman), who’s a caricature screenwriter Ben Hecht defined as “any woman under 30 who is not actively employed in a brothel, with many exceptions.” Of course she’s a prostitute, perhaps a gold digger, under the wing of poor Alfie whose ignorance stifles his ability to distinguish love from nether stimulation.
Who are these ‘tall dark strangers’? The title itself has the tone of prediction, hopefulness, yet a little foreboding. These strangers could be the escape, the perfect match, or something further abreast from those. Helena crushes not on a tall-dark stranger, but a short-stout bookshop owner named Jonathan (Roger Ashton-Griffiths).
For Helena, he’s not a Prince Charming, but their impractical romance is comforting for them.
You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger has the charm, wit and tenor of Woody Allen, but every scene acts like chunks to a block rather then effortlessly forming a whole piece. Every event that takes place is so satisfied by its circumstantial existence that it never develops into something plausible or tightly knit. When the characters are exposed to love and temptation the script feels forced rather than natural.
Two precise examples: Sally finds an attraction to her new boss Greg (Antonio Banderas)—I mean, it’s Banderas, the casting choice itself gives her the right. Of course when things begin to heat up Greg asks Sally to the opera, where sparks will fly. A second scenario involves Roy crushing on the woman across the window—Dia (Slumdog Millionaire’s Freida Pinto). We are only given two scenes of flirtations (which come in cold long shots) and one café date to assume that this sudden romance forces Dia to break up with her lucrative fiancée.
Allen never emphasizes consequence here. Every encounter runs on autopilot to some thinly-tied conclusion that speaks for itself instead of through the characters. They perform such impulsive and audacious actions without even suggesting what compelled them to. Woody Allen creates one detrimental foil: these tall dark strangers never develop the inkling to become something painfully real.
Otherwise You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger is a slightly amusing Allen movie, and its appeal can only be ingratiated by those willing to forgive the film’s flaws. There are many. If only when those affections predispose themselves to inflictions could we see what those were and what it all meant—at least in the classic Woody way.
You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger falls short of the director’s best contemporary films—Match Point and Vicky Cristina Barcelona—but it still has the sly sarcasm of a gifted-neurotic director, who this time, is more keen on the arrival of the tall dark strangers than what in fact they represent. I suppose it’s fitting: in itself, the movie signifies nothing.
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