Wonder Wheel

Wonder Wheel will make just about any audience member question Woody Allen's decision to release one film a year.  This is a surprisingly amateurish melodrama filled with dull scenes and a repetitive narrative that repeats the same notes and sometimes even the same dialogue multiple times in a single dramatic moment.  This often plays out like a first draft that Allen pulled out of the bottom of his desk drawer, brushed up a bit, and then brought before the cameras before it was truly ready.

To be fair, the movie is beautiful to look at, thanks to cinematographer Vittorio Storaro’s efforts to bring the beaches of Cony Island in the 1950s to life.  But everything that happens within the story and the people who inhabit it never demand our attention.  The story is narrated by a lifeguard named Mickey (Justin Timberlake), who frequently breaks the fourth wall and talks directly to the audience as he tells his tale.  It's a distracting choice on Allen's part, especially since this is largely supposed to be a dramatic piece.  The narration aspect seems a bit too cute to be in a movie like this.  He tells us the story of Ginny (Kate Winslet), a woman unhappily married to a drunken lout named Humpty (Jim Belushi) and stuck in a dead end job as a waitress.  She lives on the grounds of Cony Island in a small home above the park's shooting gallery, and is generally unhappy as she deals with her verbally and sometimes physically abusive husband, as well as her young son, who is a budding pyromaniac. 

She begins a secret love affair with Mickey, as they both share a love for playwrights like Tennessee Williams.  Ginny was an actress once, but gave up on her dreams to get married to a musician.  Then that relationship ended, she ended up with Humpty a few years later, and life has been downhill ever since.  The affair is the first small bit of happiness Ginny has felt in years.  It's about this time that Humpty's estranged adult daughter from a previous marriage, Carolina (Juno Temple), walks in.  She was married to someone in the mob, but when she learned too much, her husband put a hit out on her.  Now she needs a place to lay low, and moves in with the couple, taking a job as a waitress at the same restaurant Ginny works at while putting herself through Night School.  Eventually, the lovely young Carolina catches Mickey's eye, and Ginny's small bit of happiness becomes threatened.

We're supposed to be watching Wonder Wheel with mounting interest as the pieces of the plot fall into place, and hint at elements of betrayal, lies and revenge.  But as a melodrama, the piece is curiously muted.  Nothing registers, certainly not the overwrought writing of Allen's screenplay, or the largely annoying performances.  Both Winslet and Belushi are unappealing here as a couple who probably have no right being together.  Both seem like they would be happier somewhere else, and as the movie dragged on (despite only being around 100 minutes, it feels a lot longer), I began to sympathize.  This is a movie that overplays every emotion and overstates every word, but it somehow manages to be meaningless because there's just nothing here.

In the past, whenever Allen would do a drama, he would at least have something interesting to say about the human condition.  But, he has little to nothing to say here.  It's a simple and basic love triangle story that we have heard too many times before, and we quickly begin to realize that we didn't need to hear it again.  At least not like this, where not a single character or moment manages to stand out.  We can see the fates that are going to befall these characters from miles away, but we just don't care.  There is no connection between the material and the audience watching it, so I felt myself at a constant distance for a majority of when the film played out.  There are also lengthy monologues or conversations that take place in a single setting, and make me wonder if this perhaps started out as a stage play.  If that's the case, Allen did not find a way to adapt the material cinematically.  Despite the lovely look of the film, the direction is lifeless and inert.

Wonder Wheel will appeal only to the die hard fans of Woody Allen, who feel the need to watch every film he puts out.  As he continues to sour his reputation with his mad quest to put out a new movie every year, you kind of want the guy to just slow down or stop for a while.  The process is obviously draining him of his creativity, and his sense of what works when it comes to plotting out a dramatic story.

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