On the bright side, the new Woody Allen film Wonder Wheel has the finest cinematography, in the form of Vittorio Storaro’s gorgeously lurid display of Kate Winslet as a woman on fire. Hair dyed to the scarlet side of strawberry blonde, Winslet’s Ginny basks in the mercury-colored neon glow of the Coney Island attractions. She lives there in a wooden shack, spitting distance from the Ferris wheel.
In the mid-1950s, the 40-ish Ginny is stuck in a marriage of convenience with her dullard husband Humpty (James Belushi). It’s all about seafood around those parts. Ginny waitresses in a clam parlor, and, when Humpty isn’t tending the merry-go-round, he’s more interested in fishing than spending time with his wife. (Ginny has the same problem Diane Keaton had as the herring merchant’s wife in Love and Death.) Ginny wanted to be an actress, but she dropped her career after a crackup.
On the beach, she meets a theater-loving lifeguard named Mickey Rubin (Justin Timberlake) who goes to NYU. An affair begins, but it’s ruptured by the surprise arrival of Humpty’s estranged daughter Carolina (Juno Temple), on the run from her gangster husband. The thug wants her dead for blabbing his secrets to the FBI.
The settings have familiar ironythe broken promise of happiness in a tawdry, fading seaside resort is grist for dramatists on both sides of the Atlantic. But Allen decided it needed further distancing, through a direct-to-the-camera address by Mickey. The way Mickey explains life, and himself, we’re unsure if he is meant to be as callow as he seems. Allen’s script dithers, using anachronistic terms like “input” and “body language.” He repeats plot points as often as he repeats a Mills Brothers tune on the soundtrack.
Without believing in this movie, one believes in Winslet. She already excelled as an Emma Bovary of today in Little Children, and she’s as humid a Technicolor anti-heroine as ever seethed in a slip, lit through storm clouds of cigarette smoke. And the open ending is so brave that it makes Three Billboards… look over-determined.
Wonder Wheel
PG-13, 131 Mins.
Valleywide
