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Wonder Wheel
A richly complex performance from Oscar winner Kate Winslet is the main attraction in the latest offering from Woody Allen, a melodramatic period piece from 2017 called Wonder Wheel which suffers due to an overly intense story and dialogue that doesn't fit the characters delivering it.
It's Coney Island in the 1950's where we meet Winslet's character, Ginny, a severely unhappy housewife who is married to the boardwalk's carousel operator (Jim Belushi) and the mother of a young son who is a pyromaniac. Ginny's life begins to look up when she meets a handsome lifeguard and aspiring playwright named Mickey (Justin Timberlake) and begins an affair with him which gets complicated when Mickey meets Carolina (Juno Temple), Ginny's stepdaughter who has just blown onto the boardwalk after deserting her gangster husband who has sent people to find her.
I've always been hot and cold with Woody Allen and I do prefer his not so serious work but there's just a little too much going on here for all of it to work. The Woodmeister attempts to set up this atmosphere of nostalgia that should inspire warm and fuzzy feelings that is the canvas for the story of a love triangle that turns very ugly due to the fact that the characters of Ginny and Mickey are painted in serious mud tones. I found having the Mickey character serve as narrator for the story and having him speak directly to the camera was a technique for a story much lighter in tone than this one. Yes, Goodfellas and Casino had narrators but those narrators were not speaking to the camera, a storytelling technique more associated with comedies but it just didn't work here because there were very few laughs going on here.
The story didn't provide a lot of laughs, but I still found myself riveted to the screen despite the fact that most of the dialogue was way too sophisticated for these characters. This is forgiven with the character of Mickey because he is an aspiring writer but it didn't change the fact that he shouldn't have been narrating the story because he was hardly an objective outsider sharing the story, which I could have accepted if the character had turned out to be as sincere as he is originally presented.
Despite an unpleasant story that tied my stomach up in knots and not in a good way, I could not turn away thanks to some solid acting. Justin Timberlake's baby face and baby blues were a perfect counterpart to his somewhat scummy character and Jim Belushi was convincing in a role that I kept picturing John Goodman in, but Kate Winslet easily walks off with the acting honors, chewing up scenery in a performance that provided equal doses of sympathy and danger. This character goes from Laura Wingfield to Blanche DuBois in the blink of an eye and never allows you to take your eyes off her. This kind of unhinged performance might have brought her an Oscar nomination in another year and it is her work in this less than stellar Allen effort that make this worth a look alone.
A richly complex performance from Oscar winner Kate Winslet is the main attraction in the latest offering from Woody Allen, a melodramatic period piece from 2017 called Wonder Wheel which suffers due to an overly intense story and dialogue that doesn't fit the characters delivering it.
It's Coney Island in the 1950's where we meet Winslet's character, Ginny, a severely unhappy housewife who is married to the boardwalk's carousel operator (Jim Belushi) and the mother of a young son who is a pyromaniac. Ginny's life begins to look up when she meets a handsome lifeguard and aspiring playwright named Mickey (Justin Timberlake) and begins an affair with him which gets complicated when Mickey meets Carolina (Juno Temple), Ginny's stepdaughter who has just blown onto the boardwalk after deserting her gangster husband who has sent people to find her.
I've always been hot and cold with Woody Allen and I do prefer his not so serious work but there's just a little too much going on here for all of it to work. The Woodmeister attempts to set up this atmosphere of nostalgia that should inspire warm and fuzzy feelings that is the canvas for the story of a love triangle that turns very ugly due to the fact that the characters of Ginny and Mickey are painted in serious mud tones. I found having the Mickey character serve as narrator for the story and having him speak directly to the camera was a technique for a story much lighter in tone than this one. Yes, Goodfellas and Casino had narrators but those narrators were not speaking to the camera, a storytelling technique more associated with comedies but it just didn't work here because there were very few laughs going on here.
The story didn't provide a lot of laughs, but I still found myself riveted to the screen despite the fact that most of the dialogue was way too sophisticated for these characters. This is forgiven with the character of Mickey because he is an aspiring writer but it didn't change the fact that he shouldn't have been narrating the story because he was hardly an objective outsider sharing the story, which I could have accepted if the character had turned out to be as sincere as he is originally presented.
Despite an unpleasant story that tied my stomach up in knots and not in a good way, I could not turn away thanks to some solid acting. Justin Timberlake's baby face and baby blues were a perfect counterpart to his somewhat scummy character and Jim Belushi was convincing in a role that I kept picturing John Goodman in, but Kate Winslet easily walks off with the acting honors, chewing up scenery in a performance that provided equal doses of sympathy and danger. This character goes from Laura Wingfield to Blanche DuBois in the blink of an eye and never allows you to take your eyes off her. This kind of unhinged performance might have brought her an Oscar nomination in another year and it is her work in this less than stellar Allen effort that make this worth a look alone.