As a young man I loved Woody Allen's films. Smart and funny and inspiring me with ideas I hadn't yet wrestled with, I consumed them religiously. Sure I ignored those that felt rather self-indulgent, more and more of them started to feel that way as I got older, so I focused on the ones I could truly love. But as I learned more and more about him as a person it became harder and harder to enjoy his work, especially as his films became an outlet for him to justify the worst aspects of his character. And along with me much of the world began to catch up and his films started to feel less and less relevant.
Will A Rainy Day in New York be his last film? Made as his star was falling, filled with a cast of the latest It Players, it got delayed as less and less people were comfortable with him, finally being dumped with a very limited release. Sure there are his defenders, mostly folks who say we should "separate the art from the artist" but as his art has been slipping into something that feels repetitive, that becomes a less convincing argument. Still, in light of all the amazing films I have enjoyed of his, and the fact that he may never get another film released, at least not for a long time, I figured I would give his New York one last visit.
But this Rainy Day really is all you would expect it to be, a rather tone deaf exploration of young women's attraction to elder artists and odd men's obsessive sexual jealousy. The characters are all anachronistic, fascinated with things that are rather irrelevant to their generation, and desperate to be funny. Yet few of the jokes land or feel fresh. Very little in Rainy Day felt like anything we haven't seen from him before.
And all of this is presented in the gimmick of the titular Rainy Day. The actors spend most of the movie wet and while this works for Chalamet, it actually made me feel cold watching it. The dialogue is overly self-conscious about this, making sure we understand how romantic this gimmick is. However the film never actually gives us romance. None of the connections have that spark, especially not the one that ends the film, which has the least chemistry of the bunch.
Perhaps the irrelevance of Allen's (possibly) last film is appropriate. A Rainy Day in New York shows him going out with a wet whimper, recycling old ideas and tired jokes, while a bunch of people run around in the rain in New York.
A Rainy Day in New York
Starring: Timothee Chalamet, Elle Fanning, Selena Gomez, Jude Law, Diego Luna, Liev Schreiber, Suki Waterhouse, Rebecca Hall, Cherry Jones,
Writer/Director: Woody Allen
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