Magic in the Moonlight (2014)

The marvellous thing about Woody Allen is how variously he can replay the same central core of themes and values for fresh pleasure — and how much serious thought can freight his comedy. 

In terms of themes and issues Woody makes the same movie over and over again. That’s what directors do, as Jean Renoir observed: The director makes one movie across his lifetime. But each replay is fresh, different, rewarding, a pleasure to enjoy and to contemplate. 

      As a case in point, here’s a joke in Magic in the Moonlight (2014). Stanley playfully rejects the charge he doesn't believe in the unseen world: “On the contrary, I always thought the unseen world was a good place to open a restaurant…. The spirits have to eat somewhere.” 

  Go back 40(!) years to Love and Death (1975), where a pattern of food/eating jokes undercuts the characters’ airy philosophizing with a bathetic, hardheaded reminder of the most basic human appetite: food. Boris returns to the philosophizing Sonia from the dead to describe death — It’s worse than the chicken at Tresky’s restaurant. 

The main theme of Moonlight is that hardy Allen perennial: “Depressing as the facts of existence are, they are the facts. There is no metaphysical world. What you see out there is what you get. I think Mr. Nietzsche has disposed of the God matter rather convincingly.”

The question is how we will deal with the fact that “Happiness is not the natural human condition.” As Allen continually dramatizes, life is so miserable we need illusions to get through it. 

Stanley’s long, intense conversation with Aunt Vanessa is a brilliant dance in dialogue. (I doubt there’s a livelier scene of such focused and ironic dialogue in any other 2014 film). Vanessa seems to support Stanley’s ever-weakening assertions even as she leads the stuffy skeptic to acknowledge his irrational desire for Sophie. Her minimal verbalism is a parallel to the sleight of hand by which the the magician manoeuvers his audience into an alternative perception. As Stanley discovers he loves the woman he just exposed as a fraud, Vanessa concludes, “the world may or may not be without purpose, but it's not totally without some kind of magic.“ 

Stanley is a magician who fakes a supernatural power. He also takes pride in exposing pretenders to engagement with a higher reality. But he is converted from absolute rationalism — twice. First he’s conned by his magician friend and the fake seer Sophie. But even after that Stanley discovers that fakery and reasserts his doubt, he still/again falls in love and accepts its irrationality. So much for his original conviction: “When the heart rules the head, disaster follows.” In his films (and life) Allen advances the saving grace of irrational love in an unsympathetic universe. Sophie shows the same refusal to be sensiblen when she dumps her millionaire fiance to marry the surly magician.

The film’s central focus on man’s reason — and its necessary limits — makes this a counterpoint to The Irrational Man. Both heroes are lumbered with learning, especially Nietzsche. Where the earlier film focused on the issue of moral responsibility, this one takes a breezier attitude towards finding through love the consolations available in our brief, doomed lives. The film is an unmitigated pleasure for the mind as for the jokes. 

One more point. The 1928 setting allows for a rich recreation of the glamour, beauty, romanticism of the period, in the characters’ rich lives and in the soundtrack. Allen's rare return to wide-screen shooting amplifies the opulence. But here’s the point: the horrors of the Depression and WW II are looming in the wings.