A Rainy Day In New York
In much the same way that people enjoy Christmas-time Hallmark movies or YA romances, I find myself drawn to the predictability and warmth of mediocre late-period Woody Allen. Setting aside for a second the insane timing of him releasing in 2020 a film that, amongst other things, concerns itself with three famous veterans of the movie industry trying to get a 21-year-old film student first drunk and then naked—I wanted to give this movie, just like every movie, a fair and legitimate shot before scoffing about it.
And there are things to like about the film! Let me list a few:
- Chalamet and Fanning are clearly ecstatic to be working on the set, and having a lot of fun. And while their characters are insufferable, as demanded by the script, and their performances often feel more like voice work, there is a screwball comedy to their interplay with the larger universe of New York. Woody Allen is, for all these years, funny. He is pretentious, mean-spirited, and in thrall to a sexual politics that I find deeply gruesome, but he can write some funny lines. Beyond the two leads, I think the all-star cast is largely wasted, except for:
- a strangely game Jude Law, who performs as if he's been given the quest of the least charismatic performance possible and unironically delivers it with gusto.
- Selena Gomez, who's also given nothing to do except stereotype, but is very winning and hits just the right level of editorial detachment.
- Allen's series of "city films" (midnight-in-paris, From Rome With Love, etc.) feel like an excuse for Allen to lovingly capture all the cities that he finds beautiful more than to say anything novel: but, to his credit, New York in this film looks lovely, not just in the titular rainy days, but in the quiet piano bars and Upper West Side lofts, lovingly rendered and detailed.
- There is one tiny little bit of truth in the film's framing device, which is that Chalamet's character grew up in New York and has escaped to undergrad and, on a weekend back home, keeps running into a coterie of people who he'd prefer to keep in the past. It strains credulity to imagine this happening in Literally New York; despite that, it feels emotionally true to that first homecoming, or perhaps that first long Thanksgiving weekend—and the unearned sense of maturity that you and everyone else gets to bask in, having come home alive with a little stubble and a little false wisdom, and not wanting to be reminded of your younger self.
I think that's pretty much all of the positive things I can say about the film. What's left is everything else:
- a plot that makes no sense, none at all;
- a number of moments of emotional resonance that feel completely unearned—the bluntest of which has to be the revelation that Chalamet's mother, who you've essentially never met before her monologue and only heard about in vague, obnoxious complaints, is in fact not a stately, urbane, old-money woman, but a call girl. Who gives a shit? You can't unearth a revelation about a woman we've never met!
- Elle Fanning's character's arc is what I find the grimmest. She is written explicitly to be as dumb as a bag of rocks but pretty and driven and comes from wealth—a riff on Rachel McAdams' character in Midnight in Paris, and so many others. Besides the three members of the older generation in this film all first deciding that she is very unintelligent, they then try to sleep with her. None of them ultimately succeeding—not because of Elle's agency, but because of the universe conspiring against her. It's very, very hard for me not to interpret her story in any light besides a cruel one: a person who is not smart enough for Woody Allen and therefore does not deserve companionship.
- Some truly bizarre script choices (Chalamet telling Fanning to meet her not just at MoMA but "the Museum of Modern Art; it's on 53rd street")
If this were a film by a different director — and perhaps had a couple fewer instances of fawning over the protagonist — it's tempting and fun to interpret this film as a very subtle indictment of Chalamet's character, who for all of his name-dropping of art and culture and Real Life, Man! is just like Elle—a trust fund kid who isn't quite smart enough to make it in the big leagues and is not particularly nice or earnest with anyone he meets.
But we know that that is not the case because Chalamet is playing Woody Allen — and there's no one Woody Allen loves more than himself, over and over again.