★★★★☆
Four Stars
Woody Allen’s sheer capacity for work puts most film directors to shame. He has written and directed a feature length film almost every year since the early 1970s, taking lead acting roles in many. 2013’s effort was Blue Jasmine, a rework of Tennessee William’s A Streetcar Named Desire so good it earned its lead actress this year’s Academy Award. For 2014, we have Magic in the Moonlight.
Set in the 1920s, the film opens with a magic show performed by ‘master magician’ Stanley (played by a typically superb Colin Firth). After the show, he is approached backstage by an old friend, also a magician, who requests his help in exposing as a fraud a purported psychic medium. This invitation Stanley accepts enthusiastically, and in doing so travels to the south of France.
Here he meets Sophie, the supposed psychic, played by Emma Stone. Sophie is beautiful, likeable and disarming. She is also without wealth or status. Encouraged by her mother, she has been using her ‘gift’ to win the affections of a wealthy aristocratic English family with whom she has taken residence. One of the young men in this family – a future inheritor of its estate – has blindly fallen for Sophie, and after inflicting upon her a dreadful self-sung serenade, makes a marriage proposal.
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Stanley is a child of late Victorian England. He is avowedly and eloquently committed to the power of science and reason. He elevates rationality as the highest human ideal, and abhors sentiment and emotion. He espouses a Hobbesian view of humanity, seeing life as nasty, brutish and short. He quotes Nietzsche approvingly, and is a firm atheist. His intellectual dynamism enables him to successfully manipulate audiences into believing his magician’s act, and his proficiency as a magician he fully expects will equip him to expose Sophie as a fraud.
Events turn out quite the contrary. Sophie’s abilities seem to defy reason. She has personal knowledge of Stanley and his aunt despite never having met them. Unable to formulate a rational explanation for Sophie’s ‘abilities’, Stanley becomes spellbound by her. He abandons his earthly rationality, and with it his Hobbesian views. He begins to appreciate beauty, art and nature. His entire life changes.
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All of Allen’s films are at least in part confessionals. Perhaps twenty years ago Stanley would have been played by Allen himself. Magic in the Moonlight continues a long-running Allen theme – man’s power of reason eluding him, confounded by love. Stanley’s pessimistic view of the world is symptomatic of the absence of genuine romantic love in his life. When he finds this in Sophie, all of his beliefs crumble and he finds himself questioning the very nature of existence. Of what worth is rationality if it proves so frail?
The critical press has been near unanimous in its verdict – this is not Allen’s finest effort. That assessment is fair but ultimately misguided. This is a delicate, clever and humorous exploration of male frailty. While not quite on par with Manhattan or Everyone Says I Love You for sheer enjoyment, like all Allen films, this is essential viewing.
