Magic in the Moonlight

Settle in to watch Magic in the Moonlight, Woody Allen's forty-forth feature film, and it would seem that you're in for yet another of the aging writer/director's mildly amusing but frustratingly sloppy late-career pictures. There are the usual fourteen exposition scenes where two would have sufficed, the characters who overtly and clumsily articulate the film's major themes through overwrought dialogue, and an embarrassment of sumptuous yet oddly uninspiring footage of a magnificent European city. But if you are hoping that Allan's now-standard slipshod first act will be followed by one of his startling plot turns that can transform a banal movie into an engaging and even magical film (as was the case in his recent Midnight in Paris and Vicky Cristina Barcelona), this hope will go unfulfilled. Magic in the Moonlight is a woefully insubstantial picture.

The events take place in the 1920s. Colin Firth plays a British illusionist internationally renowned for an Oriental magic act of the type depicted in so many of Allen's previous movies, including Scoop, The Curse of the Jade Scorpion, and Oedipus Wrecks. (The director clearly has a strong affinity for this specific kind of antiquated theatrical performer.) Firth's character is also a famous skeptic who debunks con artists passing themselves off as mediums or psychics. A fellow magician (Simon McBurney), with whom he shares a friendly rivalry, enlists his services in exposing a young American woman (Emma Stone) who claims to be a mystic. You can guess the last two beats of this synopsis with 100 percent accuracy, so I won't bother writing it out. I don't think Woody bothered to write more than a synopsis himself because nothing happens in this picture. There is no action, no subplot, and no supporting characters who show up late in the game to liven up the proceedings. The lack of development of any kind cannot be overstated; we sit and wait as scene after scene crawls from point A to point A to point A to point A. There are only two turns in the story, and both are utterly predictable. Magic in the Moonlight is so inconsequential that it doesn't even merit being one of the lightweight stories in To Rome with Love, Allen's maligned anthology film from 2012. At least a third of Rome was charming, surprising, and whimsically funny; Magic doesn't even approach that middling ratio of success. Most of the picture's 97 minutes are repetitive filler. All of this stagnant screen time would be more tolerable if Allen peppered it with laughs, but the movie doesn't land a single joke, and any situations that are supposed to be humorous or charming just aren't.

Firth and Stone are both attractive and enjoyable on screen, as is the period photography by the always-impressive cameraman Darius Khondji, who also shot Allen's To Rome with Love, Midnight in Paris, and Anything Else, as well as David Fincher's Se7en and Panic Room, Jeunet & Caro's Delicatessen and The City of Lost Children, and Roman Polanski's The Ninth Gate. Magic in the Moonlight is a good-looking movie in which nothing particularly disagreeable happens, which makes it a not-altogether unpleasant waste of time. It's less dull than Allen's similarly themed You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger and not as frustrating as his feebleminded Whatever Works, Melinda and Melinda, and Anything Else. Still, this movie by no means constitutes one of the director's near misses or interesting failures; it's simply an empty cinematic experience.