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.