'You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger'

You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, again, has Woody Allen portray an array of characters who are deeply unhappy and frustrated by their choices in life. Allen's film is structured around two couple whose marriage has, or is bound to fail. Helen and Alfie are an upper middle-class couple. Just about to get a divorce, Alfie, struggling to come to terms with the fact of getting older, leaves his wife Helen, who, after a failed suicide attempt, sips her way through London, burdening her daughter and trying any kind of self-help available to modern woman. She eventually finds console in her visits to the charlatan fortune-teller Crystal. Alfie finds his form of recreation in more mundane territory, namely in his affair and eventual marriage to Essex actress/call-girl Charmaine. In the middle of it all, we find Sally, Helen's and Alfie's daughter, married to the failed novelist Roy. Sally starts her new job and delicately flirts with her boss Greg, a dashingly handsome Spaniard gallery owner. Roy, for his part, becomes obsessed with lady in red he spies on from his window.

All is not well in the Allen universe, as Sally and Roy eventually split up only for Roy to end up with the girl next door, Dia, after having stolen the identity of his writer-friend in a coma in order to pass the latter's brilliant first novel off as his own. Sally wants to open her own gallery with a loan her mother has promised her and as such find fulfilment in her career. Sadly, though, her mother Helen has become entangled in the occult and developed such a dependency on Crystal that she refuses the loan, as the stars are aligned in an unfortunate manner. The last scene leaves us with Helen and her fiancée who owns an occult bookshop, happily planning their life together.

The first scene has the narrator borrow Macbeth's statement that life is a tale, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing, setting the deeply nihilistic frame for the rest of the film. The spectator realises from the beginning that the characters will not have a great chance at happiness as they struggle through their day-to-day, alienated to the point of resentment.

Gemma Jones shines in her role as Helen, a sad and lonely ex-wife who is faced with spending the rest of her life on her own. She manages to play Helen with a naivete which becomes destructive. In her, for lack of a better word, idiocy, Helen is self-indulgent to the point of being obnoxious as the word of her fortune-teller becomes gospel.

In this universe, personal success is not a matter of intelligence and subjective worthiness is no guarantee for happiness. Alfie, meanwhile, indulges in a few months of sexual bliss while in the end being left with the horrible realisation that he has made a terrible mistake all the while not knowing whether the son he so desperately wanted, is his or not.

One can see what Allen intended to create with his film, a think piece/character study set in middle-class bohemian London about alienation and the absurdity of social interactions all of which infused with a sense of groundlessness and nothingness. Unfortunately, Allen manages to create one of those rare films in which the characters remain lifeless, even though the performance of the actors, with exception of Josh Brolin, is superb. Brolin's performance appears staged and wooden, he lingers awkwardly in the frame and whoever gave him that haircut should be shot. Granted, Brolin's character Roy is supposed to be socially awkward, conscious of his failure as a writer, sadly, there is a difference between an awkward performance and performing someone awkward. The characters reactions' often seem strange, even within the Allen parameters. How would a young woman ever find it flattering if an older man from across the street confessed to spying on her while she undressed?

The only character I wholeheartedly enjoyed, despite of her almost cartoon-like performance, was the Charmaine character. Yes, she is one-dimensional, yes, she is a stereotype, however, she is at the same time rather sweet in a child-like manner. There is nothing contrived about her nature, she is a gold-digger and sleeps around, in the last scene, however, she appears honestly dejected in becoming conscious of letting Alfie down.

Anthony Hopkins, for one, is at his best as he decides to play Alfie with a gravity which gives this comparatively ridiculous character a profoundly sad and heart-breaking quality, as we realise that his desire for Charmaine was not only spurred by sexual desire, but furthermore by the yearning to have another son after the death of his first one. Hopkins delivers one of his most compelling performances in the last scene in which his face contorts in a exhausted, empty and painful expression as he demands a DNA test.

The biggest, or most noticeable let-down, however, proves Allen's dialogue, which seems utterly unfamiliar with the British idiom. Roy asks Dia whether she loves her fiancée and she replies that yes, she loves him, but sometimes she 'wavers'. I don't think anyone in Britain, since the times of Henri James, has ever used this word again. After half an hour and what felt like 150 'isn't it's and 'darling's I was ready to scream and slap Allen across the face with a piece of battered fish. Even Gemma Jones sounds contrived, as Allen attempts to make the British actress sound even more British.

Allen's You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger depicts life as a series of self-delusions and disappointments which, in the end, amount to nothing. Unfortunately, this is also the most fitting description for the film itself.