So Woody Allen’s newest uninspiration is A Rainy Day in New York (which I rented on Amazon Prime)… and if that title seems a little non-specific, I guess that suits. It does have a plot… two fingers-on-chalkboards go to NYC for a romantic getaway / work vacation and one winds up interviewing a pretentious director and the other wanders around and says things Woody Allen would say. They fall in and out of love a bunch. And it rains. In New York.
As is often the case, Woody Allen gets a good cast together who likely find his credit useful on their resume. In this case, the pretentious boy with the Oh-my-god-are-we-doing-this name of Gatsby is played by Timothee “I’m gonna try this Woody Allen dialog” Chalomet and Elle “I Swear I’m Better than This” Fanning. Selena Gomez, Liev Schreiber, Jude Law, and Diego Luna also show up.
This is really kind of bog standard Woody Allen stuff and I’m not sure if his schtick is just getting old, he had nothing interesting to say and it shows, or if it’s the fault of the actors but the dialog and pretentious ramblings really don’t work. Far be it from me to say he’s ever written dialog that normal people would say, but he’s really out of touch with how people – especially young people – would really talk.
It doesn’t help that Chalomet’s character is just a bag of insufferable pretension and Fanning’s character is a giggling flibbertigibbet. And I like Fanning’s optimistic cheeriness usually but Allen wrote himself a deliberate moron that nobody would want to hang out with. Unless the person is an important older Hollywood man who only sees her as an easy score. Because that’s what women is to these old Hollywood guys, right? I think Woody is trolling his critics… or he’s just off in clueless town.
Basically this is a stodgy, low key, kind of boring movie about characters you don’t want to spend time with. There’s better film makers making better movies with similar characters and tones… and you can even just watch old Woody Allen movies too. This one doesn’t say much and when it does say something, you’d wish it’d just shut up about it.
Score: 69