A Rainy Day in New York (2019): and a grim day for Woody Allen fans (Review)

You might have missed it, but A Rainy Day in New York briefly became the first Woody Allen film to hit number one at the global box office. This is, admittedly, because it was May 2020 and nothing else was out – a strong showing in South Korea was enough to bag the top slot (and will surely have Allen hurriedly knocking together a script called Midnight in Gwangju or Vicky Cristina Seoul). Still, it’s a remarkable result for a film which looked as if it was never going to be released, following its original distributor Amazon’s verdict to shelve it for being “unmarketable”. Many people – not least Allen, who sued for breach of contract – assumed the decision was driven by the post-#MeToo focus on the sexual abuse allegations against him. This suggestion briefly united the pro-and anti-Woody camps in deriding Amazon’s disingenuousness; who hires Woody Allen in the 2010s, then expects us to believe they were shocked to discover he has a controversial personal life?

Fortunately the streaming giant has a ready-made alibi in the form of Signature Entertainment’s DVD and digital release. The verdict that A Rainy Day in New York was unsellable doesn’t have to be based on allegations of abuse, it could have been based on simply watching the film. An indifferent retread of familiar Allen themes starring Timothee Chalamet and Elle Fanning as mini-Alvy Singer and mini-Annie Hall, it skips between various storylines and star cameos without gathering any kind of comic momentum, and closes with a monologue from Cherry Jones that might just be the most insanely out-of-nowhere character revelation since The Room‘s infamous “I definitely have cancer” line.

Chalamet and Fanning’s characters have a series of bizarrely antiquated obsessions – Charlie Parker, Vittorio de Sica, cigarette holders – that might be charitably read as an observation of moneyed young hipsters. Then they get out into wider society and it turns out everyone in this film’s vision of modern New York is exactly like this. I’m not complaining that Allen has an immediately recognisable comic voice, but as recently as Midnight in Paris he could manage the basic writing technique of differentiating between registers of dialogue: Rachel McAdams’s Republican parents spoke differently to Salvador Dali. No such luck in A Rainy Day in New York. The only character who doesn’t immediately understand a Truman-era cultural reference is Kelly Rohrbach’s Teri, and she’s a sex worker, who are always a slightly alien species in Allen’s films. When Chalamet’s excruciatingly-named Gatsby Wells meets her, he hires her to pretend to be his girlfriend at a society event, blowing five thousand pounds on this sketchily-conceived plot. Blue Jasmine‘s status as the last Woody Allen film that has some sense of perspective on its characters’ fabulous wealth therefore remains unchallenged.

A Rainy Day in New York frequently comes back to films and film-making, which you might be forgiven for assuming Allen has some insight into. No such luck: Liev Schreiber’s acclaimed director turns out films with titles like Winter Memories, and Diego Luna’s A-list film star is attached to a remake of White Heat (is it going to be on Disney Plus?). There’s no acknowledgement that the modern film industry has drifted some way from the European auteur pieces Allen venerates, and fair enough, Amazon might have considered an octogenarian director grumbling about the Marvel Cinematic Universe even more “unmarketable” than what they got. But it might have had some sort of comic vim, some sense of purpose that the finished film lacks. As with too many recent Woody Allen films, A Rainy Day in New York seems to be saying nothing beyond “I have the financing to make a film”, and the dialogue slips effortlessly from the memory. The only line that made me laugh was Gatsby’s reaction to an exhibition of pharaonic artefacts – “Those crazy Egyptians, they put all their money on an afterlife!” – and I’m not sure how funny that was meant to be.

Defenders of Allen’s late films often point to his classical visual style, and that is in evidence here, though it seems to be more the work of cinematographer Vittorio Storaro than Allen himself. Despite shooting on digital for purely financial reasons, Storaro’s work nevertheless has a gold-hued richness that would suit a more cared-for movie. The only other points of light are in the supporting cast. Chalamet and Fanning struggle to overcome their irksome characters, but Liev Schreiber’s usual sullen performance is actually refreshing when set against all this over-caffeinated cod-screwball. Selena Gomez, meanwhile, is genuinely good as a character who could have been little more than a plot contrivance. Even the best of her previous roles haven’t suggested the kind of tangy, withering sarcasm she unleashes here; someone should get her to do it in a better movie.

Those of us who occasionally have to remember which late-period Woody Allen film is which may end up remembering this as “the one with Selena Gomez”; certainly that would be kinder than the other distinguishing mark. Your critic went into A Rainy Day in New York expecting not to talk about the allegations against Allen beyond the scene-setting at the beginning; aside from anything else, nobody is going to change their minds at this point. This quickly proved impossible. The ill-advised moments include allusions to Roman Polanski, the song ‘Thank Heavens for Little Girls’, lines like “She was so sexually advanced she performed oral sex at a bar mitzvah” and a lot of other things Allen should have thought better of. This may appeal to the part of Allen’s current audience who champion him as a cancel culture charity case, that peculiar modern phenomenon where people pretend to enjoy art because they think it’ll own the libs. Those of us who would prefer to enjoy Allen’s work because he was one of the most witty, singular voices in American cinema may find themselves feeling unexpected sympathy for Amazon’s marketing team.

Thank you for reading Graham’s Review of A Rainy Day in New York

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