A Rainy Day in New York (2020)

Film: A Rainy Day in New York (2020)

Stars: Timothee Chalamet, Elle Fanning, Selena Gomez, Jude Law, Diego Luna, Liev Schreiber

Director: Woody Allen

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

A Rainy Day in New York is one of those films that cannot possibly live up to the scuttlebutt around it.  For those who were living under a rock at the time (or just don't regularly read Variety), this was the film that Amazon refused to release after critics of Woody Allen started to publicly deride the company & the film's stars for working with the director due to the allegations levied at him by his adopted daughter Dylan Farrow.  Stars of the film like Timothee Chalamet & Selena Gomez publicly donated their salaries to the Time's Up movement, while the film's other stars Jude Law & Cherry Jones stated that they were not comfortable with the public criticisms of Allen & Amazon's willingness to pull the film due to public opinion surrounding the director.  At the time it wasn't clear if anyone would ever see the movie in America, even as it was released in Europe (Allen even sued Amazon for breach-of-contract, which was settled out-of-court).

Two years later, however, it seems that Amazon is willing to take some risks with the film, and thus a two-year-old movies becomes one of our last minute run of 2020 films as I catch up on movies heading into my Top 10 lists (which I'll release around the 23rd).  Allen has since made another movie (Rifkin's Festival), which has not received an American release date yet, and Amazon, despite basically giving up the film, now has the movie available for rental on its Prime platform.  I'm not going to get into the morality of watching a Woody Allen film; we've talked about that many times on this blog before, and so if you look back you can find my thoughts on it, but this stars a number of people I enjoy (and I do, despite having reservations about Allen as a moral figure, love his movies), so I decided to catch it last weekend & intentionally watched it on Prime for the sheer "eye roll" of it suddenly deciding it was okay to air the film.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie focuses on a New York City weekend getaway to New York between Gatsby Welles (Chalamet), the son of Upper East side money, and his girlfriend Ashleigh (Fanning), who is the daughter of a wealthy banking family from Arizona.  Gatsby is young & pretentious, while Ashleigh is a bit air-headed but beautiful (and wants to be a journalist).  She is brought to NYC to interview a director Roland Pollard (Schreiber), who takes a fancy to her, and eventually she's being courted around by Pollard's screenwriter Ted (Law) and his leading man Francisco Vega (Luna), with the latter also pursuing her romantically; they nearly sleep together before they're interrupted by his girlfriend.  While this is all happening, Gatsby meets up with the younger sister of an old girlfriend named Chan (Gomez), with whom his anxious intellectual is better suited.  The film finishes with them together, the rare Woody Allen movie that has a full, pretty uncomplicated romantic ending.

Like I said, I generally love Woody Allen's movies-they're always so cinematic, and seem to weave together into a similar, consistent tapestry.  But I'm also not oblivious to him making bad movies (some of his later work has a stench about it even if I can appreciate elements), and initially I thought Chalamet was a terrible choice for the "Woody surrogate."  He is far too young, cool, and well, sexy, to ever draw an obvious comparison to Allen, but Chalamet eventually grows into the role.  He's made to spout dialogue that any normal 22-year-old would know, but Chalamet isn't a normal 22-year-old, and it works as the movie goes.  He has an oddly jarring chemistry with Gomez (again, another actor that feels a bit too hip to be in a Woody Allen movie but who yet finds her groove) which feels off-kilter but eventually comes together.  A Rainy Day in New York eventually becomes a good, if not great, entry in Woody's filmography.

The biggest flaw in the film is Fanning.  To be fair, this part is impossible to play well.  The filmmakers never let on just how smart (or dumb, if you're a pessimist) Ashleigh is intended to be-you get the sense at moments that she understands that she can make grown men lose their cool on-purpose just because she's so pretty...but she doesn't land a critical role & if you didn't like the movie, I'm guessing it's because of this part.  I remember reading at the time that Allen was intentionally angering his critics by having a young woman (Fanning would've been twenty or so when this was initially supposed to come out), flirting with a much older director, but Schreiber's role is pretty small, and he's nothing like Allen so I think this was more a coincidence (or something you'd see a lot of in Allen's filmography-beautiful women frequently fall in love with older, insecure guys).

I'd be remiss if I didn't quickly mention the movie's best element-Vittorio Storaro's cinematography.  In a year gasping for first-rate camerawork, this movie has it.  He washes the stars & sets in a golden light, playing with shadows & candles in a way that almost feels like certain scenes are painted.  In a different era, Storaro would've been nominated for an Oscar for both this and his even better work in Wonder Wheel, but there's no way the Academy is touching a Woody Allen movie with a ten-foot pole in the modern era.  But it had to be said-this is one of the most luminous films you'll see in terms of sheer cinematography prowess this year.