Allen's latest, the slender social caper You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, is minor but still quite enjoyable. And like other minor Woody Allen pictures it becomes more interesting when placed in their larger context: It's fascinating to watch an artist grapple for as long and as consistently (you might say as compulsively) as Allen has, and with as impressive a troupe of players as he's assembled, with his pet themes of mortality, identity, and moral relativism. Sometimes the films sing, sometimes they grate, but they're always stubbornly making noise, year in and year out. The last decade's uneven roster in particular has amassed, by virtue of its sheer, committed numbers, a choral force that some of the lesser entries could not manage alone.
Each of the major characters in Stranger looks his or her mortality in the face and does what any reasonable person would do: flinch. Alfie (Anthony Hopkins), a soft-spoken, successful London businessman who should be resting comfortably in semi-retirement, woke up one morning and realized that he too must die. His whole life flinched, and his wife of 40-plus years, Helena (Gemma Jones), was shed in the process. "There's longevity in my genes," he says, attempting to convince anyone who will listen that his best years are ahead of him. Implied in that hope is that his best sex is ahead of him as well, and to that end he wastes little time (i.e., a few crummy dates) before going straight for the source. After hiring a daft, careering, seriously built prostitute named (or more likely re-named) Charmaine (Lucy Punch), he makes an honest woman of her and a fool of himself.
If Charmaine's body is Alfie's salvation, the prim, lattice-gloved Helena takes the metaphysical route, finding religion by way of the neighborhood psychic, Cristal (Pauline Collins). Desperate to re-impose some order on her life, where Alfie attempts to capture some alternate version of the past, Helena focuses ardently on the future and follows Cristal's prognostications to a fault. Helena's daughter, Sally (Naomi Watts), and particularly Sally's husband, Roy (Josh Brolin), grow exasperated with her tea-and-crumpets mysticism (though when Helena says she'd like "something to sip on," what she's angling for is whiskey), and the latter two spar like sitting-room gladiators.
Roy, a reasonably successful fiction writer feeling his hold on his creative powers slip, is waiting for his agent's verdict on his latest book; in an early scene with a writer whose first, unpublished manuscript Roy has just finished reading, Allen touches deftly on the way that confidence can be passed back and forth between working artists who also happen to be friends. It's a delicate bond that requires honesty and humility, and a balance that is later overpowered by ego during one of the film's mordant, mock-sinister twists.
With Helena on the lookout for the tall, dark stranger Cristal foresees for her (if not that ultimate, black-clad stranger, as is aptly joked), Roy's ideal is no less rote: After several weeks of watching from his window as, across the way, artistic, exotic Dia (Freida Pinto, whose lush yet sculpted face was made for close-ups) plucks out classical guitar compositions, he decides to ask her out. Brolin gained some weight and a brutish helmet of hair for the role of a floundering writer; drawn to the suggestible Dia like a scavenger in search of a reliable source, his Roy is persuasively charming and seedy enough to give their romance some life outside of its necessity to the plot. Like her mother, Sally is looking forward rather than back -- specifically to having a child and opening her own art gallery -- but when it becomes clear that her marriage is doomed, she lets out some rope on her attraction to her boss, a gallery owner played with perfect, inscrutable sanguinity by Antonio Banderas.
The gang is all here -- the longing, the greed, the random universe and its scrabbling players, the morbid bon mots ("They're often the stiffest competition," Jones muses about her new boyfriend's dead wife), and the know-it-all narration (in this case provided by Zak Orth) -- and as a late Woody Allen entry it hangs together just so. Even more surprising than the usual boners (here often supplied by the cloying narration, which tends to cues of the "And that's when he had his crazy thought..." variety) is the brilliantly choreographed vigor of much of the filmmaking. Many of the scenes are long, demanding, and blocked to within an inch of their lives, though they play with bracing fluidity, the camera pivoting and panning, swanning and gliding gracefully from character to character or room to room; cuts are avoided where at all avoidable, as if not to miss a beat.
That motivated and yet eliding camera work develops a sense of interested sympathy for the characters that might not otherwise be there. It's an unexpected show of formal energy from a director who has said that he doesn't care enough about his work to get too fancy. But then in Woody Allen's world anything can happen, and for better and for worse, anything usually does.