I already knew Elle Fanning was a good actress long before I finally settled in to watch – over Valentine’s Day weekend, no less – Woody Allen’s utterly marvelous and unconscionably delayed film, A Rainy Day in New York, a work that in a sane world would be cause for delight rather than (Trumped-up) controversy. I’ll get around eventually to my disdain and contempt for how an unholy troika of Farrows (Dylan, Mia, Ronan) exploited and trashed the Me, Too movement as a vehicle for their lies and propaganda, but in the meanwhile – and ultimately, forever – there’s the movie itself and its soul-stirring, wryly amusing, ruefully well observed virtues. Although Allen paid homage to Fellini’s great early film The White Sheik within a segment of his clever omnibus To Rome With Love, here he devotes an entire canvas to similar themes of seduction via the movies. Rainy Day has no fewer than three White Sheiks, as the guileless heroine Fanning plays finds herself swept away, in turn, by a burnt-out film director (suavely embodied by a selfless Liev Schreiber), a seemingly secure scenarist (Jude Law), and a flamboyant star (Diego Luna) who makes his entrance in black eye-mask and pirate shirt against a wide-angle, soundstage backdrop painted sky blue. The role represents a triumph for Fanning, who navigates this urban equivalent of Alice in Wonderland with such poise, grace, humor, and loveliness… she would almost certainly have been a contender for an Oscar and other major awards on the strength on her endeavors here, were it not for the shameful blacklisting this innocent film received.
Although I seldom take in new films anymore, preferring to bask in the 1930s and ’40s, I did see and was mightily impressed by Fanning’s ethereal charm, a while back, in Francis Coppola’s otherwise worthless Twixt. Any performer who can skillfully meet the demands of being a ring leader for the Teen Undead, as Fanning did, earns my unbounded admiration. (She effortlessly outcircled her more experienced co-stars Bruce Dern (miscast as a small-town sheriff) and Vil Kilmer (as bloated as Brando in Apocalypse Now, minus a certain presence of mind), both of whom disgraced themselves in Coppola’s trashy script.)
In Rainy Day, the unjustly maligned Woody Allen gives Fanning a surprisingly expansive role. Initially, Fanning’s college student Ashleigh Enright appears to be purely a ditz, in the Billie Burke mold. And yet what shading and range the actress reveals as her auteur’s narrative stretches out. Her performance slowly builds to its peak: a restaurant scene opposite Luna, in which Ashleigh drunkenly expounds on her date’s simple question: Do you have a boyfriend? I won’t quote from her answer, except to say this – that Fanning’s embodiment of Allen’s delicious insight into romantic trickery could stand as a master class for any serious student of comic acting. Decades ago, I thought the same thing about Sally Kellerman in George Roy Hill’s perennially sublime A Little Romance. As a pretentious, high-strung American actress living in Paris, Kellerman’s Kay at once relished being in France while detesting the French. At one point, she and her AT&T executive husband, sympathetically played by Arthur Hill, accept – at his insistence – an offer of a ride from a déclassé Parisian cabbie, who happens to be the father of their daughter’s boyfriend. Kay reluctantly agrees, and when the taxi driver mocks their goodwill by treating them as just another fare, Kellerman wordlessly rebukes Hill: “See, Richard,” her eyes insinuate, “what your well-intentioned liberalism has gotten us into.” Like Kellerman, like Billie Burke, like Joan Blondell, Fanning inherently has the gift of gesture; the text becomes nearly secondary to her physical expression. And Fanning’s pause for emphasis (she’s photographed in front of a painting of a female nude) emphasizes her power and Ashleigh’s powerlessness – she comes up for air for a long second, then asks Luna, “What is this wine?” – the vin rouge that has made Ashleigh forget herself as she speaks her truth. For this viewer, it was an absolutely breathtaking moment.
There isn’t a miscast performer or a bad actor – onscreen – anywhere in Rainy Day. Even the smallest roles are impeccably realized, and coming comparatively soon after the twin atrocities of Irrational Man (Allen’s worst film – wretchedly written, acted, and directed) and Café Society (largely insufferable aside from good work by Kristen Stewart, Blake Lively, and Sari Lennick), that’s saying something. Rainy Day in New York lacks the intense, dramatic highs of Allen’s previous film Wonder Wheel, yet it also sidesteps the misjudgments that marred Wonder Wheel. No one here, mercifully, consults a philosopher to determine which woman to date. On their third consecutive picture, Allen again collaborates with the multi-Oscared cinematographer Vittorio Storaro. The nearly pastel Rainy Day, appropriately, doesn’t have the saturated, brilliantly hued deep blues and vivid pinks and anguished reds of the Coney Island-set Wonder Wheel, yet Storaro deftly indulges in beguilingly watery effects, such as actors photographed through rain-drenched car windows, their features impressionistically disfigured in the mist.
Allen’s script for Rainy Day has a suppleness that was entirely AWOL from the heavy-handed maneuvers of Irrational Man and Café Society. One of his wittiest jokes here has to do with someone casually mentioning a fundraiser for Jeb Bush. (Griffin Newman’s timing is a treat.) Two or three years ago, when Rainy Day was to have had its debut, the line was probably funny then. Hearing it now, with the weight of the Trump insurrectionist nightmare behind us, and I watched the movie on the day that 43 cowardly Senate Republicans acquitted the murderer Trump for a second time, this small riposte about a failed candidate from a political dynasty takes on all sorts of colors and tones in regret and sorrow.
Allen – has there ever in film history been a more astute screenwriter for women? – also shapes a poignant monologue for the great actress Cherry Jones. Jones, clad in a flowering yellow ball gown, looks very different here than when I first fell in love with her in 1999’s Cradle Will Rock, yet her powers, her sense of command, are even more intoxicatingly strong. The empathy Allen shows with the plight of the Jones character – this isn’t something that someone who’s actually guilty of the accusations lobbed against him would be capable of. Why can’t – or won’t – his detractors see that?
Selena Gomez, likewise, makes a joyous impression as Chan – Ashleigh’s rival for the affections of the movie’s male lead, played by Timothée Chalamet. (It hurts my teeth to type “Timothée,” by the way.) As the wise-cracking Chan Tyrell, Gomez emerges as Allen’s fiercest heroine since Christina Ricci vamped through Anything Else. Chan isn’t the manipulator that Ricci’s Amanda was – she’s all warmth underneath her catty badinage. Gomez imbues the role with fine comic shading and believability, even when she’s using slang that probably hasn’t been heard since the spring of 1983.
As Gatsby Welles, the story’s abrasive yet sensitive protagonist steeped in jazz piano and high-stakes poker (“I need a drink… I need a cigarette… I need a Berlin ballad…”) Chalamet should be proud of his performance. There has rarely been a more persuasive Woody surrogate. Chalamet should also be ashamed of himself for his public betrayal of Allen. Why a performer, who seems to possess not inconsiderable skill and native intelligence, would want to toss in his lot among badly misinformed no-talents a la Mira Sorvino, Ellen/Elliott Page, Colin Firth, and Greta Gerwig in mindlessly doing the Farrows’ dirty work will – or may – forever be a mystery. One doesn’t get the news from Instagram.
When I look at and listen to A Rainy Day in New York – the soundtrack bounces with one ebullient Erroll Garner recording after another (a vastly superior selection to the Garner tunes Allen chose for Melinda & Melinda) – I can scarcely fathom why such a beautiful film would meet with hatred and hostility. I’m hesitant to use “beautiful” – it’s so trite – yet Rainy Day pleases the eye, the ear, the soul. Every frame of it, every note, every sound bathes our senses in the writer-director’s love of life, in his generosity of spirit.
Scarcely fathom. Several years ago, a professor of comparative literature whom I greatly admire gave me a copy of Gogol’s Petersburg Tales. Some of the short stories in it are laugh-out-loud funny, other are terrifying. Among the latter: “The Portrait,” a saga of a vindictive mediocrity of a painter who, among other things, collects the canvases of his more talented contemporaries so that he can get his sadistic kicks, glee, whatever from vandalizing and destroying them. I remembered that as I scrolled through page after page of Internet vitriol heaped upon A Rainy Day in New York, whilst in search of some sensible commentary on the film.
So, it would seem that the… the what, exactly? …of the Farrows has achieved its tawdry, reprehensible goals. Having lived in Seattle for many years, I wasn’t surprised by the nanny-state inanity of Amazon holding the movie hostage; the company’s poor decision fits the city’s illiberal posturing only too well. What’s more surprising – and horrifying – has been the Invasion of the Body Snatchers-like thoroughness with which Dylan Farrow’s false witness has taken hold. Unlike The New Yorker‘s Richard Brody, I don’t believe Dylan Farrow. I consider her to be a liar who has been micro-managed by her stage mother Mia Farrow into forming a singularly dishonest conduit for her mother’s rage. (In one of his more ludicrous essays, Brody cited as his notion of proof re the “sexually sordid” nature of Allen’s films innocuous moments from Crimes and Misdemeanors involving Allen and an actress named Jenny Nichols, who played Woody’s niece in the movie. I watched Crimes and Misdemeanors again, and when these particular exchanges rolled around, I searched for what Brody claimed to see. There was no “there” there – beyond Brody’s projection. And how does the New Yorker critic assess Mia Farrow’s appropriation of Dory Previn lyrics in concocting the family’s far-fetched attic fiction? He doesn’t.) If a bloviating provocateur from an overpriced publication, whose glory days were long gone even when Renata Adler wrote the definitive autopsy on that subject more than two decades ago, were the only victim of the Farrows’ machinations – that would be one thing. Yet countless actors, even some who ought to know better, have succumbed to the intimidation of the Farrows’ gangbuster tactics and long-ago disproved lies. The family took advantage of the justifiable anger against Harvey Weinstein and corrupted it for their own agenda. How else does one explain attempts at coerced apologies from performers for appearing in Allen films – it’s so obviously a pro-Nazi kind of move. Is that really what Ronan Farrow, an alleged journalist, wants to align himself with? The ageism and anti-Semitism implicit in these attacks on Woody Allen – why aren’t such pitchfork-toting mob hysterics as Gerwig, Sorvino, and Ellen/Elliott commenting on that? What kind of stand did any of these armchair activists ever take against the real menace of Trump, of Trumpism, of dangerous toadies a la Lindsey Graham? None whatsoever. It’s easy to attack an elderly Jewish man whose interests differ from yours, to spread malicious lies, to guilt-trip minor celebrities who can’t think for themselves – which may account for why the trendy A.O. Scott caved in with his own repellent contribution to anti-Woody sentiment. An interest in the facts of the case doesn’t seem to arrive on the radar of the arrivistes. Like the racists they are, the white Protestant detractors of Woody Allen haven’t listened to, haven’t read, in all likelihood haven’t heard of Moses Farrow and his testimonies to the contrary of what Dylan, Ronan, and Mamma Mia spew, and have no awareness whatsoever of the infinitely more plausible accusations of abuse by Mia Farrow toward her Asian adopted children. One wishes such posturing Hollywood hipsters would get an education; their callous inhumanity and easy duplicity (they are useful idiots) injures the spirit. Will the arc of this particular universe ever bend toward justice?
February 18, 2021