Pas by "YOU WILL MEET A TALL DARK STRANGER"

[Carl M. Zapffe]

http://www.catsmeowmoviecritic.com/id343.html

"YOU WILL MEET A TALL DARK STRANGER" (2010)...B- ... I am usually a fan of Woody Allen and his many quirky movies, but this film turned out to be quite a disappointment. The title, easily associated with fortune telling, would ordinarily promise something lighthearted and romantic, but this movie is a dark and hopeless cinematic treatise on the foolishness of humanity, especially when it comes to the foibles of love. The characters make foolish choices only to find their situation worse than before in a film with little or none of the vaunted Allen wit, charm, sly asides, or comedy. I am not used to seeing a Woody Allen movie with so few intelligent or even interesting characters.

Rather than finding heaven on earth in the form of a new love interest, nearly all of them end up in a hell entirely of their own making. Saddest of all, Sally (Naomi Watts), the one truly good and decent character in the film, ends up left with nothing due to the weakness and silliness of those closest to her. The movie is like a game of musical chairs where everyone changes partners for someone they fancy at the moment only to find out too late that it is a step down. Each affair is one of the heart rather than the brain. 

Alfie (Anthony Hopkins) leaves Helena (Gemma Jones), his wife of more than 40 years. Helena, a silly, shallow woman if ever there was one, promptly latches onto Cristal (Pauline Collins), a charlatan of a fortune teller, who then becomes her emotional support. Of course this will be at a considerable cost as Cristal leads her on with feel good promises of a new love interest and a happier life just around the corner. 

Alfie, a wealthy, retired businessman, quickly proves that having brains isn't any help either when he quickly, too quickly, proposes to Charmaine (Lucy Punch), a cheap floozy who presumes to have been an actress but works as a call girl. I suppose that this segment was supposed to have been funny, but I found her role and their relationship to be so wildly overdrawn that they just came off as being pathetic.

Alfie carries some baggage from his marriage in the form of a son who had died, and now he is trying to recapture his youth and maybe get a male heir in the bargain. If a bargain, it will be a bargain with the devil, as he and Charmaine have nothing in common and she begins to milk him for all she can get just as Cristal is milking his ex-wife for all she can get.

Their daughter, Sally (Naomi Watts) has a trying marriage with Roy (Josh Brolin), a writer who found modest success with his first novel but has struggled ever since to complete the followup. His manuscript is at the publishers, and he dies every day waiting to hear from them. To pass the time, he proofreads the unsubmitted manuscript of a poker buddy and marvels at his friend's talent.

Meanwhile, he is penniless, and they subsist in their modest apartment thanks to her mother who has been paying the rent. This allows Helena to feel that she has the right to drop in any time, especially after a fortune telling session where she raves about the new silliness of the moment. Sally tolerates her visits without complaint, but they drive Roy up a wall. 

Sally desperately wants a child, but Roy won't allow it. Truth be told, he has been fantasizing about the lovely and exotically dark-skinned woman who dresses, and undresses, in red in the apartment across the alley. He chats her up and invites her to lunch one day. Dia (Freida Pinto, "Slumdog Millionaire") inspires him to write, and she loves being his muse as her father is also a writer. The clinker for Roy is that she is engaged and shortly to be married to a man who spends far too much time on the continent. Left alone for long periods of time, Dia is too young and too vulnerable to refuse his attentions. 

Sally has been looking for work to help pay the rent and she finally comes up a winner when she is hired to be the personal assistant to Greg (Antonio Banderas), the owner of a chic London art gallery. Quickly proving her worth to him since this was her field of interest, Sally finds that working in close proximity with such a handsome man who is separated from his wife leads to romantic fantasies of her own. 98 minutes and surprisingly rated R for some language for a film that should have been rated PG-13.

Carl M. Zapffe,

The Cat's Meow Movie Critic

http://www.catsmeowmoviecritic.com