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Remember back when the ultimate Woody Allen reference regarding his recent film output went a little something like this - “I prefer his early, funny films.”? Well, there’s a new movie mantra one can use in association with the former American auteur - “I prefer his earlier films, period.” During a self imposed European exile where one return to form (Match Point) has been masked by a series of substantial disappointments, Allen has indicated he will soon return to the US to overhaul is oeuvre. And if Cassandra’s Dream, his latest underperforming offering, is any indication of his motives, the man clearly recognizes the aesthetic slump he is in.
Ian and Terry are two working class blokes from London. Both dream of a better life. Ian works in their father’s restaurant, hobnobbing with businessmen who promise him part in their lucrative real estate deals. Terry is a mechanic, hands constantly dirty and mind stuck in a spiraling cycle of gambling and drink. When he looses £90,000 one night, he goes to his brother for help. Their decision? Seek some financial backing from their benevolent Uncle Howard. He runs a series of successful clinics, and always seems to have large amounts of cash to give the family. But when they ask for his help, Howard turns the tables. Seems he’s under investigation for unethical - even criminal - activities. He needs the boys to do him a favor. He needs them to kill the board member that’s ratting him out. Stunned, Ian and Terry weigh their options. One wants to take care of his pregnant girlfriend. The other wants the money to break out of his desperate life. Together, they must decide what they are - men, or murderers.
Though he’s tackled crime and misdemeanors before, Allen is the last director you’d imagine capable of creating a tense, interfamilial suspense thriller. There’s just too much classicism in him, too much Greek tragedy meshed with hours spent in Manhattan arthouses absorbing every Bergman riff imaginable. Trying to balance the demands of his well-meaning motives with the requirements of the genre leaves Allen unsettled and ineffective, two words that encompass the creative drought evident in Cassandra’s Dream. It’s not just the overdone angst, the push me/pull you problems in the storyline, or the odd sensation of hearing English actors spout the filmmaker’s patented New York-isms. No, the real problem with this talky, turgid exercise in moral ambiguity is that Allen has finally found a cinematic category he can’t fully handle - and the resulting awkwardness is undeniably dull.
While stars Ewan McGregor and Colin Farrell are both accomplished actors, it’s only the latter that makes an impact. Though he chain smokes to the point of distraction, Terry is the weaker member of the conspiracy, and as a result, the one we feel the closest bond toward. McGregor’s Ian is so smugly sure that he’s destined for business acumen greatness that we can’t connect to his perplexed pipe dreaming. At least Farrell’s flawed sibling uses realistic vices - gambling, drink, lying - as a means of making sense of his lax life. If they are supposed to represent two sides of a similarly dispirit coin, we don’t see the connection. Instead, it’s like watching Slack and Slacker complain about their miserable existence in clipped British accents.
Even worse, those around Ian and Terry are like specters, ill-conceived one note supporters that never provide a foundation for their feelings or flaws. Tom Wilkinson’s Uncle Howard, supposedly rich and successful, comes across as vague and poorly written. He has enough money to buy and sell his relatives out of their ever increasing financial worries. He can jet set around the world and keep high living arrangements in three very expensive cities. Yet the minute his ethical lot is challenged by a whistleblower, he has no other option than to ask his nephews to commit murder. If it was a matter of counter comeuppance, a kind of challenge to his young charges to put their morals where their mouth is, Allen needed to run his screenplay through the typewriter a couple more times. As it stands, the half-assed hitman angle feels like a necessary narrative catalyst, nothing more.
Equally uninspired are the other personalities floating around the boys. Claire Higgins mother character is so whiny (‘we’re poor, and it’s all Dad’s fault’) that when Allen tries something novel with her toward the end, we don’t respond. Similarly, there are so many clues and connections being expressed by Terry’s gal pal Lucy that we wonder why she hasn’t called the police and turned the brothers in. Yet the worst offender is Sally Hawkin’s Kate. Spewing lines that would sound arch even coming out of the circa ‘70s mouth of Diane Keaton, she’s the spoiled, slutty actress whose muse is the excuse for her bed hopping indistinctness. We never really care for her, so we don’t see Ian’s fascination. Oddly enough, Allen lets both girlfriends drop at the end, hoping something poignant comes from it. It doesn’t work.
Indeed, all of Cassandra’s Dream is a moody, maudlin miscue. Whereas previous Allen efforts revolving around good people doing bad things had a stigma of social relevance to them, the entire narrative plays like so much UK jive. There is nothing particularly English about what Allen is up to, nothing indicating an insight into people or place. Instead, this is a clear case of locational locomotion - taking a bland, baseless story and sticking it wherever the travel agency takes you. Perhaps in a US setting, without the ephemeral ambience of a European perspective, this material might work. But one senses Allen treading water here, waiting for his next bout of inspiration. Clearly, it’s been a long time coming and has yet to arrive.
Which all leads back to the opening thought. Is Allen helping or hurting his legacy by pumping out the product - ANY product - every 18 months or so? Would his already wounded reputation benefit from a little artistic hindsight, a banishment both creatively and continentally? When something like the incomplete experimentation of Alice or September appear like masterworks in comparison, Cassandra’s Dream really shows its fatal flaws. The only true tragedy here is that a once vital and important filmmaker has apparently lost his way. Whether he finds it upon a return to his native soil remains to be seen. Clearly, the move abroad was a mistake. Cassandra confirms this.
