It sounds unkind if not cruel to say this, but the invisible subtitle of Woody Allen‘s Wonder Wheel, which I saw this morning, is “I got nothin’ left to say, but I’m gonna say it anyway.”
It’s not a substandard or dismissable film, but it’s not grade-A either. It’s basically a thrown-together stew of familiar Allen-esque elements and influences — a little Chekhov-Seagull action, a little re-frying of Blue Jasmine desperation mixed with A Streetcar Named Desire, a dash of Mary Beth Hurt‘s “Joey” character in Interiors, some gangster seasoning from Bullets over Broadway plus some onions, garlic, celery and sauteed peppers and a little Crimes and Misdemeanors.
But it has some magnificent cinematography by the great Vittorio Storaro. It’s totally worth seeing for this alone.
Wonder Wheel is basically a gloomy stage play — don’t trust any reviewer who calls it a “dramedy” — about a love triangle that ends in doom and despair. For my money it felt too stagey, too “written”, too theatrical. Every doomed character seems to be saying lines, and I just didn’t believe it. I never stopped saying to myself “the writing hasn’t been sufficiently finessed.”
Wonder Wheel‘s tragic figure is poor Ginny (Kate Winslet), a 39 year-old might-have-been actress on her second marriage, living in a Santo Loquasto-designed Coney Island apartment with a pot-bellied lunkhead named Humpty (Jim Belushi), miserable as fuck with a waitress gig at a local clam house and coping with a strange pyromaniac son whom I didn’t care for and wanted to see drowned.
There are two wild cards — a Trigorin-like would-be playwright/lifeguard named Mickey Rubin (Justin Timberlake), and Carolina (Juno Temple), Humpty’s unstable daughter who shows up in scene #1, looking to hide out after yapping to the FBI about her gangster ex-husband and concerned that friends of her ex might want to hurt her.
Early on Ginny falls for Mickey and vice versa to a certain extent. The problem is that Ginny starts to imagine that Mickey can somehow help her escape from her miserable life. But Mickey is just looking for writerly experience and not interested in being anyone’s savior, except perhaps his own.
The second problem is that soon after meeting Carolina Mickey starts to think about easing out of his affair with Ginny and maybe….no, he doesn’t want to be a two-timing shit so he puts it out of his mind, but you know what they say about Mr. Happy. He wants what he wants.
Wonder Wheel is a lament for life’s unhappy losers — for those marginally talented people who never quite made it artistically, or who made one or two big mistakes and never recovered, and who are stuck in a dead-end job or marriage that is making them more and more miserable. It starts out saying “these people are not only unhappy, but nothing they can do can free them from the mud of misery.” It ends up saying “you thought these folks couldn’t be less happy? Well, we figured a way!”