Sometimes, when filmmakers age, they begin to slough off extraneous technique and move towards simplifying. You can see it in Jean Renoir; even more in the Italian master Michelangelo Antonioni who made a film at 90, and in Manoel de Oliveira, the Portuguese director who made a film at the age of 105. All of these directors became progressively more subtle as they grew older, until they worked with tiny moves and slight but potent disturbances in the atmospheres of their movies.
I’d like to think that’s the case with Woody Allen, who is now 80. For the most part, his new film Café Society lives entirely on its surface, but late in the film there’s a quick exchange between two characters that seems to be the single moment in the picture that touches genuine human feeling. One question is whether this moment is accidental and dismissible, or whether it’s the soul of the movie which is heading towards this epiphany from the start. It’s a matter of whether Café Society is terminally superficial, or whether it’s a movie about people who are unable to find or create anything genuine in their lives.
The artificiality is there from the start with a scene at a Hollywood pool party. Woody Allen himself narrates. His heavy New York accent overlays the 1930s Southern California scene, which he says – and it’s true – looks like Technicolor instead of real life. Allen’s narration sounds like a short story – it’s stiff and literary and doesn’t have the cadence of someone talking. It adds to the distance between audience and film. Café Society isn’t a movie that takes you inside itself. It’s not a Spielberg film. You stand outside Café Society and watch what happens, as if it were a diorama of the 1930s.
The dialogue is movie land quick, and also stereotypically pretentious and self-absorbed as the big-time producer Phil Stern (Steve Carell) excuses himself to take a phone call. He pretends it’s from a Hollywood icon, but it’s really his cranky sister back in the Bronx asking Phil to find a job for her son, his nephew.
And that’s how Bobby Dorfman (Jesse Eisenberg) winds up in Hollywood with a new girlfriend, Vonnie (Kristen Stewart). She’s his uncle’s secretary and his uncle’s lover. And that’s what drives Bobby out of Hollywood. But he doesn’t go back to his parents’ Bronx Jewish caricature; he goes to work for his gangster brother at his nightclub in Manhattan.
For decades now, Woody Allen has worked the yellow-gold light that marks many of his films. My wife calls it butterscotch, and in Café Society it’s the color that dominates the interiors of both Hollywood and Bobby’s New York café – everything except the Dorfman home in the Bronx. The shimmering color and design of the film come from Allen’s long time production designer Santo Loquasto, and the Italian cinematographer VittorioStoraro. But it’s also the fundamental problem with the movie. The honeyed light and Allen’s almost kitschy narration make the film feel like a bouncy little trifle. It’s facile; it’s glib; it’s pleasantly amusing; it’s nice to look at. But you have to wonder if Café Society has any guts.Yet there’s still that one moment with Bobby and his New York wife, also gorgeous and called Vonnie, when the ironic layers of deception and betrayal and superficiality coalesce. And there’s the chance that all along Woody Allen has expected us to see the subtlety beneath his brittle surface.
In the 1920s – and afterward – the phrase “café society” referred to the glittery notables who spent their evenings in the great nightclubs. But Café Society – a different pronunciation – was also the name of a Manhattan club opened in 1938 by Barney Josephson, where for the first time black and white musicians and patrons socialized together. Yet once again, Woody Allen has put together a movie in which just about everyone is white. That’s an irony Woody Allen has missed.
