A Rainy Day in New York

I've enjoyed so many Woody Allen movies that I keep going to see the new ones, even though I know that his output is mixed. I very much enjoyed *Midnight in Paris*, for example - and tonight felt that I was watching outtakes from it that were rejected with good reason. Basically, there is nothing new here. It seemed like a patchwork of previous WA movies, but never came close to reaching the heights of the best ones. The main characters seemed to be too young to be spouting lines the likes of which we are used to hearing from characters decades older. I felt downright sorry for Ms. Fanning. She was made to play an airhead, which she did well, but do we really want to see that in 2019? I should think many women would find her offensive. The male lead wasn't much better. He seemed very shallow. They were like pale copies - very pale copies - of the engaged couple in *Midnight in Paris*, but without an interesting third party such as that earlier movie had. The usual talk about the arts seemed very superficial, as if the characters were just reciting lines they had memorized but didn't understand. There were scenes that were fun to watch for the scenery. But the dialogue was too often uninteresting, and the plot, to the extent that it had one, of no interest to me.

It is really sad such a great cast got wasted on this film. I've seen both Elle Fanning and Timothée Chalamet play characters with immense depth, and yet these roles striped them of all that with poor dialogue and such a soulless story. It was really disappointing to say the least, I was excited to see this cast work together, but a story really does matter.

A milquetoast Holden Caufield is uncomfortably out of place in this rehash of masterpiece "Manhattan". The characters play purposefully phony. Piano plays, mild witticisms are traded, rain falls. Oscar Wilde turns in his grave. This doddery film suffers from the 84 year old director's male gaze. There is no place for it. No charm, cinematography uneven. Selena Gomez stands out.

In the age of super hero films I'm glad that there is still someone who is making films with witty dialog. Woody Allen should be praised for that. But in this film neither the dialog nor the story works. "Hannah and Her Sisters" works so well because Woody Allen understood these characters--how they talk and behave. He knew how to write for them. That was 1986. Now it's 2019. 21-year-olds in 2019 don't say "I need a drink, a cigarette and a Berlin ballad." No matter what their background that's not how they would talk. "A Rainy Day in New York" is filled with references that no one born in the late 1990s would have. Songs by Gershwin, Porter, Berlin. Films from the 1930s and 40s. And the name of the lead character, Gatsby Welles, is just a little too cute. All of these are Woody Allen references. The problem is trying to force these references on these characters. It doesn't work. Maybe this film is meant to be a fantasy. It's not how 21-year-olds talk and behave in the modern world. It's how Woody Allen wishes they talked and behaved. No one wants to see a film about people staring into their phones but the truth is that the two leading characters would have been texting each other every few minutes and wouldn't have gotten so completely separated from each other. I think it's clear that Woody Allen hates cell phones because they get in the way of his stories. I would have suggested two important changes to the film. Have it take place 25 years earlier--1994 instead of 2019, before everyone had their own phone--and make the characters in their mid-30s instead of their early 20s. With those two changes I think this would be remembered as one of Woody Allen's better films. As it stands he's created characters he doesn't know or understand and, unfortunately, it shows.