Wonder Wheel (2017)

Film: Wonder Wheel (2017)
Stars: Kate Winslet, Justin Timberlake, Juno Temple, Jim Belushi
Director: Woody Allen
Oscar History: 2017 is the wrong year to try and get nominated for a Woody Allen movie.
Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Every time one of Woody Allen's movies comes out, I struggle more-and-more with whether to see it, but I end up going anyway.  The reality is, that while Woody Allen offscreen is a louse and a jackass, his movies still number amongst my favorite pictures.  No director makes movies quite so cinematic, so attuned to the romantic ideas of a filmmaker creating a body of work in the vein of Ingmar Bergman, Federico Fellini, and Stanley Kubrick.  And so, like clockwork, I hit every Woody Allen movie in theaters without fail, come rain or shine, good reviews or the paltry, the latter being where Wonder Wheel has largely fallen if you go by Rotten Tomatoes metric.

(Spoilers Ahead) This is typical Woody Allen, returning from any sort of European excursions he may have been on before and now settled squarely in Brooklyn, specifically the gaudy sounds of Coney Island.  The movie is about Ginny (Winslet), a waitress in a disappointing marriage to Humpty (Belushi), a carnival barker who is more interested in doting on his long-lost daughter Carolina (Temple) than in realizing that his wife is spiraling.  All of their lives are thrown asunder when Mickey (Timberlake), a lifeguard initially charms Ginny but then falls for Carolina, who is a marked woman after leaving her mobster boyfriend.  The film unfolds with Ginny trying in vain to sabotage Carolina's budding romance, all-the-while watching her real life fall apart in the same fashion as her fantasy one.

Like all of Woody's films, the movie doesn't so much have a start and finish as it does a beginning and a completion.  Allen's movies never have happy or sad endings, but just finales, and this is the case for Wonder Wheel.  The actual plot feels a bit weighed down and heavy (you see where most of the movie is coming a mile away), and the actual film itself is stifled by its leading man.  Timberlake serves as our Woody proxy (there's always a Woody proxy), which is absurd as the former pop star who has become identified with a sort of compensating masculinity in his public persona (compensating in the sense that he never feels at-home with his boy band roots and former teen idol status) couldn't be more opposite of Allen if he tried.

Timberlake's acting career has been a source of consternation for me as a filmgoer, as I'm actually fine with his music (though I think it seems pretty repetitive at this point), but I don't know that he's been worse in a major movie than he is here.  Timberlake has no understanding of Mickey.  He reads lines as if it's a success he memorized them, not getting into the persona of a lifeguard that dreams of becoming Eugene O'Neill.  One gets the sense that Timberlake has no idea that his character is a joke, someone who claims that he's smart because he knows the names of smart people, and you also get the sense that he's never actually read The Iceman Cometh or Hamlet even as he celebrates them within the confines of the movie.  It's a performance that feels like it's being performed by an aging Abercrombie cutout, and you also get the sense that perhaps Timberlake (only six years younger than Winslet in real life, whereas he's eight years senior to Temple) was far too old for this part, and looks kind of ridiculous espousing on women like a man of 20 when he's almost 40.

The movie, though, is nearly saved from its hackneyed plot and failed leading man by Kate Winslet and cinematographer Vittorio Storaro.  Winslet gets an underwritten part, but just nails it as a woman who cannot understand how her life got to where it is, and is clearly in the midst of an emotional breakdown of some sorts.  This isn't really in Winslet's obvious wheelhouse (there's no earth mother routine happening here, and she's hardly a manic-pixie-dream-girl), but it also shows what an immense talent she is that she finds the diamond in the rough of this character.  Ginny is unglued, but clearly the savviest figure in the film, and the emotional final ten minutes of Wonder Wheel nearly confuse you into thinking this was a good picture, as Winslet's character has a breakdown that recalls Vivien Leigh's in A Streetcar Named Desire.  Combined with Vittorio Storaro's sun-dappled mood lighting (has Coney Island ever looked more beautiful onscreen, and when was the last time you saw natural light so fabulously frame the face of an actress like Winslet?), the movie is impossible to dismiss as a trifle, even though Allen has made much better, and somehow Timberlake has never done worse.