Woody Allen has Chalamet Fever
At the behest of a literary friend with whom I share a love of all things New York, I’ve gone ahead and consumed the newest Woody Allen flick. I miss a lot of things, I find. I miss when you could watch such a jazzy, classical romp and want the simpler things for yourself and a girl you were manic for: a townhouse apartment full of classy souvenirs, tickets to the opera, to the Knicks maybe. I miss when you could argue with a person in the street, or share an ice cream with them, or declare your intentions by planting your face on theirs. I miss when you could watch a Woody Allen flick and not think to yourself, So just what the hell was he thinking there exactly.
A pair of clueless rich kids go to an artsy-fartsy college called Yardley, perhaps deliberately fashioned as the sort of place that used to breed writers and socialists. New York itself still represents a sort of Valhalla for the perennially dissatisfied, for kids who want to do a little bit more than attend all the happening parties and perpetuate staggering wealth. Timotheé Chalamet plays the boy, of course his first name is ‘Gatsby’, who pisses on the family legacy by trivialising lectures and gambling his pocket money, often successfully. His girlfriend Ashleigh, played by Ms. Elle Fanning, is your perfect American sweetheart: plucky, enthusiastic, agreeable, exactly the sort of woman it must infuriate modern women to watch this director obsess over, film-after-film. Not so much the sort who will flit between different kinds of men as the brand who will so willingly do their bidding.
Gatsby arranges for a weekend ‘in the city’, the way old money used to, when Ashleigh secures herself an interview with an avant-garde film director for the college newspaper. Liev Shreiber as Roland Pollard is everything Woody Allen isn’t, I suppose purposely, even if he laments twice about having been married to a woman with a “state of the art overbite.” His screenwriter Ted (Jude Law) drags Ashleigh to his best friend’s Manhattan apartment, (after Pollard storms out of watching his own movie in some disgust), and thereby catches his wife in the logistics of adultery. Ashleigh smiles infectiously through all of this, and through a careless jaunt with Pollard’s charismatic lead actor, because Allen likes a woman who can devastate demanding men by merely giggling at them. Cue the classical piano, and also the cloudburst over 51st and a timely taxi someplace too.
Gatsby, meanwhile, laments over Ashleigh blowing him off for reasons she keeps promising to explain. (I enjoyed, amongst other things, that she keeps getting the hotels wrong – where lunch is to be, and where retirement.) Whilst walking down ‘the old neighbourhood’, ah, the nostalgia, he runs into a film student friend who bears a more than passing resemblance to Woody Allen, and who would dig it if he could quickly perform a screen-kiss with Chan (Selena Gomez); a girl with a nice face and an attitude, and who (really) doesn’t mind doing film major friends small favours. Her spikier nature and superior intellect to Ashleigh’s preoccupies Gatsby while he waits with increasing desperation for his actual girlfriend to get her shit together. Allen learned not to waste everybody else’s time with existentialism about seven movies ago, so at some point there isn’t much to stuff their conversation with … besides where the hell is Ashleigh.
I could sort of predict Gatsby taking a prostitute to his mother’s societal get-together in the final act, and Ashleigh stumbling out of a famous actor’s apartment in her underwear (to flee his partner), and even the glorious little sketch in which Gatsby’s brother considers leaving his new wife because her laughter sounds unique. This used to be the charm of Woody Allen films, before you looked a little closer and considered the time and place he continues to pine for exactly – where young people have uncaring access to telephones, where an actress named Selena Gomez is granted the agency to exist in a movie like this, but not to luggage any of her actual heritage; or where young people feel shitty about wealth, about having access to it, and so perform bratty rich kid rituals in feeble rebellion.
That said, Allen knows I loved the old beats. Those loving shots of the city only he, Spike Lee and Marty Scorsese can shoot from such an acute angle of affection, those revelatory close-ups, and that dry American wit you must now peruse ancient American novels for. It broke my heart to wake up, actually, from such an intricately woven fairy tale.
