One of the biggest assets that Woody Allen has as a director is his ability to assemble a tremendous array of talent for his pictures. Just about any actor seems to jump at the chance to be able to say he or she was in a Woody Allen picture, and as a result, some of his greatest successes have started with smart casting. And for my money, Allen does some of his best work in pictures where he stays behind the camera. While would seem to bode well for Cassandra’s Dream, a film with a 
formidable cast and with Allen nowhere in sight. And yet the film just sits there like a lump, lacking even a coy, understated ambition to excite, surprise, or even amuse.
As a pair of ne’er-do-well brothers, Ewan McGregor and Colin Farrel should be much more interesting than they are. And as the intriguing and increasingly sinister rich uncle, the talent of Tom Wilkinson is wasted on a script that exsanguinates what should be a story of ambition and passion. Never did I expect to find a Woody Allen picture for which the scenes edited in the trailer are more exciting than the finished product, but that is exactly the case here. The actors are giving it their best, but they are inhabiting characters that we just don’t give a damn about. I wonder if, in the end, Allen stopped caring, too. Because it takes a great deal of apathy to create a film for which terrible end, the climax, as it were, evokes strong feelings of . . . “well, that just happened.” For a man with so much experience, and whose filmography contains so many great, memorable, sustainable works, I can’t see how Allen didn’t recognize that this story was half-baked. Maybe he though the Philip Glass score would save the day. On the contrary, it merely adds to the longing to be watching something better.
Here are this morning’s Oscar-nominated films, alphabetically. The nominees for foreign language film and documentary feature are compiled at the end of the list. (Short format nominees are listed in a 
0 responses so far ↓
There are no comments yet... Leave one in the space below.
Leave a Comment