Grim Work
Woody Allen's 'Cassandra's Dream' has more crime, less humor
By Andy Klein
In roughly 38 years as a director, Woody Allen has made roughly 37 1/3 films – averaging almost exactly one a year. Explanation of the “roughly”: Does one count What’s Up, Tiger Lily?, where Allen merely dubbed a goofy soundtrack onto the Japanese thriller Kagi no kagi? Should his contribution to New York Stories count as 1/3? Or not at all?
Whatever. Even if it only adds up to 36 films, 36 is a pretty high number by modern standards. Not counting documentaries, Martin Scorsese has made about 20 features in a similar span; Steven Spielberg and Brian De Palma about 25 each.
Allen has the advantage of working on a less expansive – which translates to less expensive – canvas. He just keeps chugging along, stretches of good, solid work interspersed with patches of genius or relative failures. His latest, Cassandra’s Dream, is part of his current stretch of good, solid work, of a piece with its two predecessors, Match Point (2005) and Scoop (2006).
Maybe too much of a piece: Besides the obvious connection – all three are set in London – the plot of Cassandra’s Dream is very similar to that of Match Point, and both share a number of elements with Scoop. I don’t recall murder showing up in his “early funny films,” or even in the golden period from Annie Hall (1977) to New York Stories (1989) – which made its appearance in Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989) all the more effective.
He’s revisited the subject several times since, but Cassandra’s Dream makes three in a row. Ewan McGregor and Colin Farrell play Ian and Terry, two working-class brothers with different compulsions. Auto mechanic Terry is more of a regular joe, with a common set of failings: He’s a compulsive gambler, and he has a tendency to abuse alcohol and prescription drugs.
Ian has a less obviously self-destructive obsession: He’s ambitious, grasping at any way to climb out of his relatively deprived background. He’s currently helping manage his dad’s failing restaurant, but he yearns to be an entrepreneur; and he might be smart enough to pull it off.
His ambition might seem wholly admirable, but when he falls for a dazzling actress named Angela (Hayley Atwell), he tries to impress her by exaggerating his current status. That takes money, and Terry, having a big winning streak at the dog races and the poker table, is glad to oblige.
But everything goes into the crapper when Terry – as we have anticipated from the gitgo – pushes his luck too far and suddenly finds himself deeply in debt to some very scary people. Luckily, even as the two are trying to figure a way out of this mess, who should arrive but Uncle Howard (Tom Wilkinson)? Howard is the quintessential rich relative: A man of the world, he shows up every couple of years, with gifts and favors for all.
The boys present their plans to Howard: Ian needs a stake to buy his way into a hotel chain in California; Terry has the notion of opening a sporting-goods store.
Howard seems jovially amenable to helping them out but needs a little favor in return. It seems that his fabulous success may have involved some less-than-legal behavior, and he is facing a major prison term unless a certain bookkeeper (Phil Davis) runs into a fatal accident before testifying.
If the boys choose not to help, Howard will spend the rest of his life in jail; Terry will get his legs (or worse) broken by loan sharks; and Ian will lose the love of his life. The brothers balk at taking another life, but, from their angle, they don’t really have a choice. And it’s telling that Ian – the more likable and charming of the two – has the less dire motivation, yet seems to embrace the inevitable decision more readily.
Allen may have conceived of Cassandra’s Dream as an answer to critics who were put off by the cold, conscience-free protagonist of Match Point. Neither Ian nor Terry is that sort of obvious, monstrous sociopath, especially the fragile Terry, whose feelings are all closer to the surface.
The basic setup is familiar from a million old crime dramas and has its roots way further back than that. There is a specific mention of Greek tragedy at one point, and the film’s title invokes the Homeric prophetess of doom. (It’s made clear that the brothers’ education didn’t include the classics, and, when Terry flamboyantly buys a boat and names it Cassandra’s Dream – after the dog to whom he owes his good fortune – he has little notion how ominous it sounds.)
The plot is also familiar from Crimes and Misdemeanors and even more from Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead. There are striking similarities to that current Sidney Lumet film – down to details like the nervous, gambling-addicted younger brother, who threatens to blow the whole deal through either ineptitude or conscience. Given the production and release dates, neither filmmaker could have seen the other’s work, so we have to assume that New York-based alter kockers increasingly lean toward The Big Moral Issues with the years.
Like Match Point, Cassandra’s Dream seems very sharp and focused; for better or worse, it lacks the tangents that both lightened up and diffused the tone in Scoop. That also means that there’s not a moment of humor in it. (A few reviews have suggested that the film doesn’t know whether it’s a thriller or a dark comedy; I didn’t detect even the slightest trace of the latter.)
More than all the titles cited so far, however, Cassandra’s Dream follows the dramatic arc of Sam Raimi’s 1998 A Simple Plan, still the most emotionally wrenching and effective modern telling of this old story. Even though McGregor is very good and Farrell does his most impressive work to date, we never feel the level of involvement Bill Paxton and Billy Bob Thornton generated in Raimi’s film.
One of the surprises is the presence of an original score by Philip Glass. Since the mid-’70s, Allen has almost always used preexisting music on his soundtracks, occasionally supplemented with incidental music from longtime collaborator Dick Hyman; he has never used a composed, orchestral score before. Glass’s work is creepy and ominous from the beginning; it helps keep the tension up through the film’s first third.
After that opening, Allen manages some genuine suspense, even coming up with something I never expected to see in an Allen film – a sort of jump-out-of-your-seat moment almost exactly halfway in.
Cassandra’s Dream. Written and directed by Woody Allen. With Ewan McGregor, Colin Farrell, Tom Wilkinson, Hayley Atwell, and Sally Hawkins. Opens Fri. at selected theaters.
Published: 01/16/2008
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