Café Society, Woody Allen’s latest comedy, is a bi-coastal period piece. As the title suggests, it’s partly set amidst the lush life of 1930s Manhattan. But it also plays out in Hollywood during that same era. The protagonist, Bobby Dorfman (Jesse Eisenberg), speaks for the writer-director when he derides Hollywood as a “boring, nasty, dog eat dog industry.” And yet, like so many characters from Allen’s previous films, Bobby and girlfriend Vonnie (Kristen Stewart) gush over the sort of movies programmed nowadays by TCM.
The confused romance between Bobby and Vonnie provides a spindly framework that barely holds together Café Society’s sequence of incidents. As in real life, there are scenes that seem to lead nowhere. Bobby, the son of a poor Bronx jeweler, comes to Hollywood seeking the help of his uncle, high-powered agent Phil Stern (an amusingly glib, fast-talking turn by Steve Carell). Ensconced in a palatial Art Deco office, Phil gives the nephew he barely knows odd jobs and tasks his secretary, Vonnie, with showing him L.A. Bobby doesn’t know, as he begins to fall for Vonnie, that her mysterious boyfriend is his uncle, who has committed himself to the affair despite an enduring admiration for his wife of 25 years. The human heart continually violates the laws of economics and reason, as conceded even by Bobby’s brother-in-law, dedicated to the dialectical materialism of Marxism.
Bobby’s brother Ben (Corey Stoll), however, is a dedicated capitalist, a gangster who invested his ill-gotten proceeds in a grand Manhattan nightclub where women in gowns and men in black ties sip highballs and trade gossip. After Vonnie choses Phil, Bobby returns to New York to manage his brother’s club. Baby-faced Eisenberg is fine as the innocent abroad, the Bronx kid still awkward in his own skin, but is unconvincing as the mobbed-up man of the world.
Café Society’s thin plot serves as a platform for Allen’s enduring preoccupations with Jews as the eternal Other in Western Civilization; the comical dynamics of the sort of New York Jewish family in which he was reared; and the problem of finding meaning in a universe he suspects is meaningless. The communist brother-in-law is depicted as living with his own set of illusions, but sums up Allen’s philosophy when he says: “The unexamined life is not worth living but the examined one is no bargain.”
Although periodically directing masterpieces and occasionally producing flops, Allen usually helms movies such as Café Society, whose moments of mirth and reflection are unable to lift their stories above the level of competence. While his films are almost inevitably more enjoyable than the usual products of “boring, nasty” Hollywood, one wishes sometimes that Allen would take a year off and wait for inspiration.
Café Society
Jesse Eisenberg
Kristen Stewart
Directed by Woody Allen
Rated PG-13
