WONDER WHEEL ★★½
(PG) 101 MINUTES
The decline of a great artist is no fun to watch. Woody Allen seems to be running on empty now, situating his stories in cliched versions of the past, slapping together character and situations with little care or passion, except as bile and bitterness take him. He's 82 and the only thing that seems to interest him is getting square – largely with women.
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Trailer: Wonder Wheel
On Coney Island in the 1950s, a lifeguard tells the story of a middle-aged carousel operator and his beleaguered wife.
Cafe Society, the picture before this one, was set mostly in Hollywood of the 1930s, with a few scenes in New York. It was bathed in beige light, like a Saturday Evening Post illustration of the movie colony at play – all plus fours and Packards. It wasn't about much – someone falling for someone they shouldn't, as usual – but at least it had an edge of sardonic humour to temper the bitterness.
Wonder Wheel doesn't even have that vestige of humour. It's just nasty, but with a central performance from Kate Winslet that almost saves it from banality. I said almost. She plays Ginny, a fading red-headed beauty who could once have had a career on stage and screen. Now she lives in a cramped apartment behind a shooting gallery at Coney Island, where her husband Humpty (James Belushi) sells tickets to the merry-go-round. He's a decent if simple man when she can keep him off the sauce. Sure, he beats her kid from an earlier marriage but the boy Richie (Jack Gore) is a thief and a firebug.
![Kate Winslet's Ginny is the butt of Woody Allen's poison pen.](http://web.archive.org./web/20180115110732im_/https://www.fairfaxstatic.com.au/content/dam/images/g/z/y/8/m/k/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gzy8z0.png/1512627469145.jpg)
The pressure mounts when his 25-year-old daughter Carolina (Juno Temple) shows up with a suitcase and a sob story. She has run away from her gangster husband, the guy Humpty warned her not to marry. She tells him she's "a marked woman". They're gonna kill me, dad, because I talked to the cops.
The movie is set in the 1950s and soaked in red, the way the last one was dipped in beige. The great Vittorio Storaro shot both movies, and one wonders what he and Woody were aiming for: a sort of hyper-realism perhaps, not to be confused with reality. Wonder Wheel seems coloured like a garish Coney Island postcard – the richness of Kodachrome but with the red dialled up to 11. That matches the narration, by a summer lifeguard who's really a writer looking for his own melodrama. Mickey (Justin Timberlake) is about to become the beef in this film's stew. Ginny falls for him, but hard. They leap into each other's arms under the boardwalk, down on the sand. Tawdry but torrid.
The recreation of Coney Island leads us to think we might be in for something diverting – a stylised romantic drama with quirky locations like Francis Ford Coppola's One from the Heart, only with more jokes. Alas, no. There are no jokes, unless you count the casting of Steve Schirripa and Tony Sirico from The Sopranos, again playing wise guys. In fact, it's a filmed play, shot mostly in the one cramped apartment set above the Coney Island shooting gallery, whose pings and clangs we hear in the background.
Woody knows it's a play. Even the dialogue is fashioned to sound theatrical. Winslet's character too, is a deliberate evocation of a Tennessee Williams-style character – and here we get to the nub of the problem. The hatred and shame, the fear and loathing that Williams poured into his female characters came directly from his upbringing and his own bitter heart. Blanche DuBois (A Streetcar Named Desire) and Amanda Wingfield (The Glass Menagerie) were monstrous creations, but there was a kind of love between writer and character, as there needs to be. They were his monsters.
Ginny is Woody's version of monstrous femininity too, but I couldn't feel the love. She's a compendium of needs and insecurities who turns darker and nastier as the play progresses, the butt of Woody's poison pen. Winslet gives her everything, without fear of looking bad, and she pulls off a couple of astonishing scenes – but it's as if she's working alone. Allen is notorious for his lack of direction with actors and here it shows, as it did in Cafe Society. Why does he want to do a sub-standard version of Tennessee Williams anyway? Why not try for a return to the once-high standards of Woody Allen?