Cassandra’s Dream
“I’m shocked.” “I’m thrilled.” “You’re drunk.” “You’re depressed.” People are always saying exactly how they feel or telling others exactly how they’re feeling in Woody Allen movies, and in his recent, wretched ones, I suppose it’s helpful, because you can’t tell from the acting. You know the director’s not helping his cast out a bit when Colin Farrell can’t even play a drunk convincingly. “Cassandra’s Dream” is a talky, obvious, maddeningly clunky “moral thriller” with none of the wit and breezy confidence of “Crimes & Misdemeanors” or the impressive twists and turns of “Match Point,” which, barring a miracle, stands as his last good movie. (For those keeping score, he’s 1-for-8 in the 2000s.) Allen again shows a blind eye and a tin ear for the way human beings behave and talk that the London setting — alien to him — only exacerbates. Farrell’s supposed to be an alcoholic, pill-popping compulsive gambler, but these are just words to Allen, who showed you all he knows about substance abuse when Alvy Singer sneezes into the cocaine in “Annie Hall.”
If you care — And even if you do, please don’t see this movie! — Farrell and Ewan McGregor play brothers who turn to murder to get out of desperate financial straits. We can’t do this, blah blah blah, Yes we can, blah blah blah, I can’t believe we did this, blah blah blah, We have to move on, blah blah blah, I can’t put it behind me, blah blah blah. The first Allen movie to be distributed by the Weinstein Co., it’s also the first in quite some time to feature an original score, by Philip Glass (Harvey Weinstein probably thinks of Glass as a stamp of quality, the sort of name Allen’s aging core audience will go ga-ga over). I usually loathe Glass’s phoned-in film scores, but in this case the music itself isn’t bad — it just proves that no matter the source, Allen has no idea how to use music in film. With a few exceptions, he just layers it over the transitional sequences when no one’s talking. The great cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond lends sun-dappled beauty to several outdoor scenes, but again, Allen has given up on stylish camerawork. For a guy who’s made a lot of good movies, Allen’s shortcomings as a director are legion — and, this late in the game, they’re more pronounced than ever.