Debunking The Debunkers- Woody Allen’s Magic In The Moonlight

 

 

 

 

DVD Review

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

 

Magic In The Moonlight, starring Colin Firth, Emma Stone, written and directed by Woody Allen, 2014

 

It is hard to believe that Woody Allen has had some connection with the film industry for fifty years now ever since 1965s What’s New Pussycat?  Equally hard to believe as the film under review, Magic In The Moonlight, attests to is the seemingly never-ending ways that Woody has played the staple Hollywood film boy-meets girl theme. And of course attached to that well-worn theme, unlike most Hollywood boy meets girl movies, you get a full ration of whatever Woody wants to philosophize about at any given moment. Here, and none too soon, is Woody’s comedic defense of rationalism and science against the ever encroaching spread of faith-healers, fortune-tellers, drifters, grifters and midnight sifters trying like hell to set whatever tiny grasp we have on understanding our world back to the dark ages.   

Enter Stanley (played by Colin Firth previously seen in this space being bewitched and bedeviled by Miss Elizabeth Barrett and later as the poor stuttering King George VII) who by night is an illusionist, you know, a magic tricks guys, amazing his incredulous 1920s Jazz Age audiences with his artistry under the name Wei Ling Soo but by day a super-rationalist who has made himself something of a cottage industry out of exposing fortune-tellers, spiritualist, and diviners as the charlatans they are. It is in that role that Stanley is brought into one such a fraudulent example by Howard, a fellow illusionist, you know a guy who conjures up magic tricks, who has been stumped by an America wisp-of-the-will young woman crystal-ball gazer, Sophie (played by fetching Emma Stone) you know somebody who speaks to the dead and stuff like that. This Sophie and her mother are working their act on a rich American widowed mother and her son ensconced in their villa in the south of France, you know the Riviera. The bait: letting the widowed mother “speak” to her late husband. The hook: have Sophie marry into the family and live in the lap of luxury forever after, or until at least 1929 (and maybe after depending on how wise that late husband was).                      

Stanley naturally is more than happy to help out his old buddy Howard, after all they started out as kids together conjuring up whatever kid illusionists conjure up. Once the duel between Stanley and Sophie begins you can get the first inkling that they may be adversaries but there is ever so slight a spark there as Stanley tries to move might and main to debunk Sophie’s various machinations. But he cannot, damn it he cannot, find any fault in her act. He thus begins to question his own super-rational “everything can be explained and if it cannot now it will be by further scientific exploration” way of looking at the world. A tell the world this wonderful fact via a press conference.

But then the plot thickens and he finds that Sophie and Howard have been in collusion, have played, well, played a little sophomoric trick on him to take him down a peg, to avenge Howard’s having to play second fiddle to the great Stanley. Of course all that rationalism versus charlatanism theme that has Woody Allen exercised in this film by having Stanley going on and on about the very real virtues of seeking rational explanations in the end plays second fiddle to that little spark between Stanley and Sophie we witnessed throughout the film. In the end they both were willing to throw over whatever was important to them before, her buying into the wealthy family by marrying that eligible son and he by being the king of the debunkers, in the name, well, of love. Maybe a little too heavy handed with the wry banter on the main theme but an enjoyable film for those who like their boy meets girl films with an intellectual twist. A twist which Woody has been providing for ever so long.