"Wonder Wheel" - a great Woody Allen film?

I chose Wonder Wheel 2017, by director-writer Woody Allen, because a] Coney Island in its heyday was a fun holiday site and b] Kate Winslet is a fine British actress.

In 1950s Coney Island in Brooklyn NY, the sad wife Ginny (Kate Win­s­let) lived in a flat that looked directly onto the park’s looming Ferris wheel. The attraction blocked her view of the oc­ean and threw deep, ex­pressionistic light on the flat’s dilap­id­ated interior and its shabby inhabitants. The Wonder Wheel behind the flat relentlessly turned, even while going nowhere.

 

The Wonder Wheel, Coney Island, 1950s

Reviews of the Arts

She was a miserably married woman whose af­f­air with a local man was disrupted when he accidentally met up with a young woman. Ginny frown­ed often, shuddered with sorrow and had a sweaty, oiliness on her skin. Alas for her, she worked in a clam house on the board­walk, a crappy job for someone who had originally wanted to be an actress. Fortunately Ms Winslet filled her shabby character with activity, not loud screaming.

Ginny’s cute son, Richie (Jack Gore) had a tough home life as well, with a miserable mot­her and an alcoholic step-father. He avoided school whenever possible, snuck into cinemas as often as he could and lit random fires.

Husband Humpty (Jim Belushi) was a hard working carn­ival man who showered infrequently. As long as he was sober, Humpty seemed to provide a stable home for the family. Yet even when the characters used often blunt language and dis­played raw emotions, I knew that Belushi was acting well. The ch­aract­eristics I couldn't cope with in men were violence and al­coholism, so I was cringing in parts of this film.

When Mickey (Justin Timberlake), a lifeguard and romantic, eyed Ginny off, she fell for it. The film became Gin­ny’s story, but she never sounded con­fident. He was an aspiring play­wright and while he was still holding on to his literary ambit­ions, he maintained a flat in Greenwich Village.

The film was narrat­ed by Mickey in a voice-over, sometimes speaking directly into the camera. But why was Mickey chosen? Wonder Wheel was def­initely one of Allen’s stagiest films, but I didn’t like the staginess and I didn’t like Timberlake’s acting. Never mind; for a while Mickey offered Ginny a respite from her everyday grind.

Then we noted Carolina (Juno Temple)'s arrival, Humpty’s estranged daughter from an earlier marriage. She was on the run from her gangster husband, a very bizarre situation as it turned out. When Carolina showed up at their door, their little home be­came uncom­fort­ably cramped, both physically and emotion­ally. Into this volatile mix, Carolina caught Mickey’s eye and an awkward love triangle of sorts start to form, a triangle Car­olina had no clue she was part of.

Justin Timberlake, Kate Winslet (centre) and Juno Temple meeting together.

IndieWire  

I don’t know anything about cinematography so read New York Times. Cinematographer Vittorio Storaro enjoyed the use of moving colour; his cinema­tog­raphy lit up the frames with saturated hues. The camera gave the story visual flow, but the characters seemed to move very slowly. As has always been the case with Woodie Allen films, the actors were uneven. The strong Ms Winslet stayed strong, while the rest of the cast members did what they could with varying degrees of success. Ginny, who yearned for something better than clam houses and brutality, could easily have appeared over the top. Stilted, overly bright and over­written acting!

It was all leading to the film’s piece-de-resistance, a short, one-shot take of Ginny’s breakdown. It was a remarkable perform­ance by Winslet but it was also deliberately over-the-top. In any case, none of the char­acters, ex­cept for Ginny, was well developed.

When the film was written, few knew that Harvey Weinstein and ot­h­er powerful males would shock the entertainment industry. But Woody Allen’s name was also mentioned in the press releases! In 1993, he was sus­pect­ed of touching up his adopted daughter and actually DID marry his very young step-daughter in 1997. Critics have of­ten uneas­ily ignored his history, but why would he want to raise the topic himself? Yet even without Woody Allen’s creep­in­ess, Wonder Wheel was seen by many an exaggerated, artificial jumble.

For decades director Woody Allen managed a relatively easy sep­ar­ation between his work and his questionable private tastes with succ­ess­ful films like Vicky Cristina Barcelona. In this post-Weinstein era, critics have suggested films will be viewed through a diff­erent, sharper lens.

carousel operator Jim Belushi and his aggrieved wife Kate Winslet

The Spokesman

Dargis wrote that this film was one of Allen’s more unfortunate contributions to cinema, however I disagree. Admittedly I am not an American, not working class, not married to an alcoholic and have never seen husbandly viol­ence in friends' or family homes. Instead I would argue that the film was the ironic result of Allen’s very dark sense of humour and perhaps personal bitterness about life.