← Back to Reviews
in
CAFE SOCIETY
Woody Allen scores a direct bullseye with 2016's Cafe Society, an expensively mounted, multi-layered, story of romance and mob violence that tells interlacing stories that really shouldn't interlace and makes a couple of squirm-worthy detours, including some on target jabs at the place Woody hates more than anywhere in the world...Hollywood.
The film introduces us to Bobby Dorfman (Jesse Eisenberg), a wide-eyed Jewish youth bored working in his father's jewelry store who moves to Hollywood to work for his Uncle Phil (Steve Carell), a high-powered Hollywood agent. He becomes involved in a romantic triangle with Phil's assistant, who is having an affair with a married man. When that romance goes south, Bobby moves back to New York and begins working at a nightclub run by his brother, Ben, who is a gangster, even though his family is in denial about it, but aren't above using it to their advantage when need be.
The Woodmeister has once again sucked me in with a story rich with characters who are not what they appear on the surface and there were one or two points in this story where my jaw literally dropped, as I didn't see a lot of the detours that this movie takes coming at all. I have to admit to initially being thrown when the movie didn't end when the Hollywood triangle ended, but when Bobby returns to New York, we do see a growth in this character who learned a painful lesson in Hollywood and learned that its glamour doesn't cover up a lot of the same lousy human behavior he left in New York. And just when we see Bobby settling into a new life, including a new romance, his Hollywood past catches up to him and the story veers off into another ugly direction that we don't expect, but it was classic Woody Allen.
As it should be, Woody's intricate screenplay is the star here and Woody the director serves it well, peppering the story with something we're unaccustomed to seeing in Woody's work...some in your face violence that must be expected with any story rich with mob sensibility as this one is, made more alluring by the fact that the story takes place in the 1930's, when being a gangster was totally cool.
Woody once again has a hand-picked cast that is pretty much perfection...Eisenberg lights up the screen as young Bobby and makes the complicated transitions this character makes completely believable and Carell manages to infuse some likability into what is on the surface a totally hissable character. Though I haven't seen a lot of her work, Kristen Stewart also impressed as the apex of the Hollywood triangle and I LOVED Corey Stoll (so memorable as Ernest Hemingway in Allen's Midnight in Paris) as Bobby's brother Ben.
As per usual, Woody has employed exquisite production values to his story, including authentic recreations of 1930's Manhattan and Hollywood, with stunning cinematography and costumes. This is a cinematic journey that doesn't go anywhere you think it's going to go but the pursuit of the mystery is such a pleasure.
Woody Allen scores a direct bullseye with 2016's Cafe Society, an expensively mounted, multi-layered, story of romance and mob violence that tells interlacing stories that really shouldn't interlace and makes a couple of squirm-worthy detours, including some on target jabs at the place Woody hates more than anywhere in the world...Hollywood.
The film introduces us to Bobby Dorfman (Jesse Eisenberg), a wide-eyed Jewish youth bored working in his father's jewelry store who moves to Hollywood to work for his Uncle Phil (Steve Carell), a high-powered Hollywood agent. He becomes involved in a romantic triangle with Phil's assistant, who is having an affair with a married man. When that romance goes south, Bobby moves back to New York and begins working at a nightclub run by his brother, Ben, who is a gangster, even though his family is in denial about it, but aren't above using it to their advantage when need be.
The Woodmeister has once again sucked me in with a story rich with characters who are not what they appear on the surface and there were one or two points in this story where my jaw literally dropped, as I didn't see a lot of the detours that this movie takes coming at all. I have to admit to initially being thrown when the movie didn't end when the Hollywood triangle ended, but when Bobby returns to New York, we do see a growth in this character who learned a painful lesson in Hollywood and learned that its glamour doesn't cover up a lot of the same lousy human behavior he left in New York. And just when we see Bobby settling into a new life, including a new romance, his Hollywood past catches up to him and the story veers off into another ugly direction that we don't expect, but it was classic Woody Allen.
As it should be, Woody's intricate screenplay is the star here and Woody the director serves it well, peppering the story with something we're unaccustomed to seeing in Woody's work...some in your face violence that must be expected with any story rich with mob sensibility as this one is, made more alluring by the fact that the story takes place in the 1930's, when being a gangster was totally cool.
Woody once again has a hand-picked cast that is pretty much perfection...Eisenberg lights up the screen as young Bobby and makes the complicated transitions this character makes completely believable and Carell manages to infuse some likability into what is on the surface a totally hissable character. Though I haven't seen a lot of her work, Kristen Stewart also impressed as the apex of the Hollywood triangle and I LOVED Corey Stoll (so memorable as Ernest Hemingway in Allen's Midnight in Paris) as Bobby's brother Ben.
As per usual, Woody has employed exquisite production values to his story, including authentic recreations of 1930's Manhattan and Hollywood, with stunning cinematography and costumes. This is a cinematic journey that doesn't go anywhere you think it's going to go but the pursuit of the mystery is such a pleasure.