Allen’s bittersweet ‘Café Society’ is an amusing, tasty morsel
In his 1977 film Annie Hall, Woody Allen most famously declared about Los Angeles that “I don’t want to move to a city where the only cultural advantage is being able to make a right turn on a red light.”
Nearly four decades later, he’s crafted a partial apology to the West Coast in the amusingly bittersweet Café Society, but it’s not a love letter to contemporary L.A. Instead, it’s a message in a bottle from the Old Hollywood of stereotype, a burnished, rose-colored remembrance that shares a nostalgic sensibility with one of Allen’s most popular recent films, Midnight in Paris.
It’s the ’30s, but there’s little hint of any Depression in this glowing, picture-postcard Los Angeles. The world of super agent Phil Stern (Steve Carell) is a roundelay of mansions and meetings, parties and publicity.
Into his life walks young Bobby (Jesse Eisenberg), a nephew from New York City and a nagging reminder of his Jewish working-class roots. One of his other nephews, Ben (Corey Stoll), is just a two-bit gangster.
Bobby needs a job, so Phil hires him as his flunky around the agency and asks his secretary, Vonnie (Kristen Stewart), to show him around town. It’s obvious from the first stop on her tour of the stars’ homes that these two crazy kids are going to fall for each other, but there’s one catch: She has a boyfriend.
Eisenberg is effective as Allen’s mouthpiece and stand-in, the naive yet weary-beyond-his-years and somewhat annoying guy snagged on the sharp point of a love triangle. Of course, Allen (who also narrates) gives him the funniest lines.
But it’s Stewart who is the most memorable here, playing an emotionally conflicted woman torn between two men and two lives; she is both seduced and repulsed by the siren song of Hollywood.
The last part of the film is set in New York, but it’s the shimmering vision of Los Angeles that stands out, gleaming in gold and orange hues. No doubt, Allen owes a debt to veteran cinematographer Vittorio Storaro for that. (And with Whiplash director Damien Chazelle’s heavily anticipated celebration of Los Angeles, La La Land, coming this Christmas, this could turn out to be quite the year for lush L.A. imagery.)
If it’s August, moviegoers can always count on a new Woody Allen film. Just keeping up such a rigorous schedule is an achievement for the 80-year-old director. That he can continue to make movies as watchable as Café Society — which, while a bauble that is far from his best work, certainly is much better than some of his recent films, like Magic in the Moonlight — is a testament to his continued creativity.
In the end, the film doesn’t totally upend Allen’s notion that L.A. is a seductively shallow place that has to resort to celebrating the ability to make a right turn on red to feel better about itself. In Café Society, it just looks so gorgeous while doing it.
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Café Society
☆☆☆ 1/2 (out of five)
Director: Woody Allen
Cast: Jesse Eisenberg, Kristen Stewart, Steve Carell
Rated: PG-13 (violence, a drug reference, suggestive material, smoking)
Running time: 96 min.
This story was originally published July 20, 2016 at 12:40 PM with the headline "Allen’s bittersweet ‘Café Society’ is an amusing, tasty morsel."