Magic In The Moonlight

Film (2014)

With Colin Firth (Stanley), Emma Stone (Sophie), Simon McBurney (Howard Burkan), Eileen Atkins (Aunt Vanessa)

Stanley (Colin Firth), an Englishman, earns his living and reputation as Wei Ling Soo, a stage magician in Chinese garb. His friend, Howard Burkan (Simon McBurney), calls upon him to travel to Southern France to show up Sophie (Emma Stone), who has taken in a group of friends and relatives with her presumed capacities as a spirit medium. Stanley makes his way there, and is not only caught up in the medium’s seeming magic, but also in the magic of the medium’s other charms.

This Woody Allen period piece comes close upon the heels of his very successful and charming Midnight in Paris (2011). Somehow that film had a chemistry that worked remarkably well. The combination of all the Parisian artistes of the era with the ploy of time travel and the addition of Owen Wilson as the Woody Allen stand-in had a great cumulative effect.

Magic in the Moonlight, though having certain charms, is less magical. There is a deliberateness to its thesis which it works out dutifully enough. Though it makes an interesting point in the end about Eros as the great daimon, the genuine magic of life, it almost derives it rather than arriving at it dramatically. In that sense, the film is a kind of treatise, a deliberate statement, rather than a discovery, which makes it feel less artful than declarative.

Allen’s Annie Hall (1977) has that kind of magic, and its way of arriving at it isn’t forced. When, in that film, Annie and Alvy chase lobsters around the kitchen, there is a beautiful captivating illogic to their affiliation; when Allen contrasts that with a relationship that has no such magic, there’s a funny realization without a clinically self-conscious edge.

In Magic in the Moonlight, the revelation of the coda is welcome, but not terribly surprising. The plot twists are interesting, but provide only a little catch in the stomach as the ride goes on; frankly, I saw the hills coming way in advance. And, though, along the way, the characters declare they are so attracted to one another, one is hard put to find that spark in their actual engagements, which do not seem so very magical.

Through their commendable talents, Colin Firth and Emma Stone lend a cautious grace that gives their romance subtlety – but perhaps a touch too subtle. The welcome contributions of Simon McBurney (Howard) and Eileen Atkins (Aunt Vanessa) help embellish the tone with a nice balance of British eccentric hauteur.

Whatever one feels about controversies that surround Woody Allen’s personal life, one must commend him, as a filmmaker, for keeping at it in such a determined and creative way. His efforts, like this one, are not always spectacular successes; but there is something significant in the overall trajectory of the corpus that mark places like this one in the overall comedic-dramatic vision.

Some of the same conceptual and artistic terrain in Magic In The Moonlight was covered by Plato twenty-five hundred years ago in his Symposium, among other dialogues, where he demonstrates, through a discursive-dramatic scheme, the complex relationship between illusion, rationality and Eros, arriving at a result that is compelling and evocative, conveyinga sense of the magically divine madness that deep and true love entails.

Magic In The Moonlight seeks to convey that divine madness, but tends more to declare it and report on it. But this is only Woody Allen’s 49th film as director, 72rd as writer and he is not yet eighty. Surely, there is more real magic to come.

– BADMan