Magic in the Moonlight

Magic in the Moonlight may be a minor Allen but it’s a superbly accomplished work. It revisits the themes especially of A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy. As Stanley, Colin Firth supplants Jose Ferrer as the hidebound believer in only the material reality. This Stanley is an upper class version of the Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire (which Allen drew upon for his previous Blue Jasmine [see separate blogs]). As Sophie Emma Stone plays the Mia Farrow waif who evokes the magic of a higher reality and love. 

The film opens in 1928 Berlin, the heady cabaret days that will soon metastasize into the Nazi conflagration. The formally suited audience for Stanley’s faux-Orientalist magic show and the glittery ball later in France exemplify the flippant pleasures that distract us from our mortality — and in this case the imminent war. Since Annie Hall Allen has reminded us that everything we do is a reaction to our sense of our mortality. There the cited text was Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death; here it’s Nietszche. Hence the songs "I'll Get By" and "I'm Always Chasing Rainbows."

Stanley is an ironic exercise of Firth’s persona as a stuffy, egotistical Englishman (Mr Darcy, Bridget Jones’ boss) who needs a sparky young gal (Emma, Bridget) to wake him to the pleasures and sense in life. Allen emphasizes Firth’s advancing age, his sagging jowls, and even greater priggishness and temper, which make his ultimate realization of his love and need for Sophie all the more dramatic. 

Critics have complained that Firth and Stone have no chemistry, but I’m sure that’s Allen’s intention. They meet as false fronts, she faking spiritual communication with the dead, he disguising his intention to expose her. Though they spar in the usual Ro Com way (ever since Benedick and Beatrice) they still seem an unlikely couple. He’s too committed to the rational and to exposing the fake to recognize any attraction to her until he’s told about it. She is too dependent on the commercial success of her fakery and has far more to gain by wedding her besotted moneybags. But there's the song: "You call it madness, I call it love."  In the end both choose vulnerability over the delusion of security. Death makes all security delusional. Both also choose honesty. If she were to marry the lad she deceived, her life would be based on a lie. If Stanley rejects her he would deny his need for the emotional connection he has averted all his shallow life. Each discovers in the other a truth about themselves. The arrogant priggishness in his first proposal to her -- indeed, to anyone -- where he recites her needs for him, masks his urgent needs for her -- and expresses his pathetic inability to face his vulnerability.

Allen has long balanced the certain limits on life with the hopes for some fantasy or illusion that will transcend it. As he reiterates here, we need illusions to get us through life, to make our ineluctable mortality bearable. So Stanley makes a career out of being a magician, providing showbiz illusions, and the alliterative parallel Sophie makes her living — with sumptuous prospects now — out of bolstering her gulls with assuring lies from the dead. Stanley’s fakery is on stage, Sophie’s in life, but both are in the same business, selling illusions. 

Stanley exposes fraudulent spiritualists because he wants to assure himself there is no spiritual reality beyond our physical world — and to maintain his monopoly on illusionism. Paradoxically, in the last scene when the exposed Sophie reappears in order to give the film its happy romantic ending, her very appearance — in the face of his flat statement that his proposal “offer is off the table” — shows the kind of intuition and understanding that goes beyond the apparent — what she has been professionally faking. She uses the under the table seance knocks to announce her presence.

In the face of death we grab what small pleasures we can find. We attach meaning and importance to things that may not in themselves mean much.  Whatever gets us through the night. Stanley realizes his love for Sophie by warmly remembering her smile. In Manhattan Isaac counts young Tracy’s smile as one of the beauties that make life worth living. Allen replays the planetarium scene as a reminder of the vastness which shrinks our lives into specks — and grows our every fugitive pleasure monumental. Sure Allen replays the same themes, scenes, imagery, Dixieland and period pop, but every recombination rings fresh and true — and pleasurable. In fact, Beethoven used the same notes over and over again too and who complains?

In quiet observant ways each scene rings true. Stanley rather brusquely converts to believing in Sophie because for all his arch rationalism he has craved a more ethereal beyond, some magic of which his illusionism is a smug parody. He earnestly tries to pray for his aunt’s recovery — but can’t maintain the pretence. Perhaps the film’s most brilliant scene is Stanley’s conversation with his marvellous Aunt Vanessa (Eileen Atkins). Every line each speaks reaffirms his fiancee Olivia as his ideal mate, yet the conclusion is the reverse, his need for Sophie. Like the material world the words go one way, but like the spiritual life the meaning and the effect work the other.

     The illusionist Stanley is the Allen figure. As a filmmaker Allen fabricates illusory dramas, making characters and events appear as Stanley makes an elephant disappear and himself reappear. In the melding of reality and illusion Stanley’s car trip with Sophie retraces the Grant-Kelly drive in Hitchcock's To Catch a Thief. For the world of illusions has its own continuity, like the material world, but with more flex.  Obviously the age gap between Stanley and Sophie evokes Allen’s controversial gap with his wife (and Mia Farrow’s with her first two husbands, Frank Sinatra and Andre Previn), but the heart will have its way. And given that we’re all dying, why shouldn’t we let it?