Gatsby Welles. The protagonist in Woody Allen’s new movie, “A Rainy Day in New York,” is named Gatsby Welles, though calling “A Rainy Day in New York” “new” is a tad generous; after production wrapped in 2018, Amazon Studios snapped it up for distribution and then unceremoniously dropped it after Allen stumbled on a microscope slide for contemporary scrutiny under the lens of #MeToo. The picture did the rounds across Europe in the summer of 2019 before landing in American theaters this October, and now finds a permanent home on Blu-ray where audiences can watch it with guaranteed safety from contracting COVID-19.
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Grant that watching bad movies is vastly preferable to suffering the unpredictable rigors of this novel coronavirus. Grant, also, that “A Rainy Day in New York” is in fact a very, very bad movie, one of 2020’s worst, one of 2019’s worst, and handily one of Allen’s worst. Whether this stuffy, bafflingly callow, and frustratingly gorgeous splatter of oatmeal reads as self-parody, actual parody, or a pinch director’s superficial Allen facsimile will depend on where you’re sitting. The evident glamor is disarming. But a movie shot by Vittorio Storaro, dressed by Santo Loquasto, and cast with alluring actors both young and middle-aged—Timothée Chalamet, Elle Fanning, Selena Gomez, Diego Luna, Jude Law, and Liev Schreiber—should at the very least look pleasing to the eye. “A Rainy Day in New York” has nothing going for it underneath that lovely, textured surface.
And again: The protagonist’s name is Gatsby Welles, an immediate blazing red flag signaling viewers that Allen’s worst tendencies as a filmmaker have him held hostage. Gatsby (Chalamet) goes to school at liberal arts proxy Yardley College in upstate New York, where he apparently does little but gamble and actively sabotage his potential as a brainiac-cum-sion of high society New York “culture vultures”; Allen writes him with no interior life while Chalemet plays him as a slack-jawed tangle of pretense and neuroses, channeling his auteur as Allen’s screen surrogates typically do. When his journalism major girlfriend, Ashleigh (Fanning), scores an assignment to interview revered independent American filmmaker Roland Pollard (Schreiber) in Manhattan, Gatsby sees an opportunity to make a weekend of schmoozing and tourism out of her hard work.
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Why not? Gatsby’s flush, having recently won twenty large playing cards. He plans an itinerary of standard-issue NYC destination spots. He books a hotel with a view of Central Park. He can’t bother dressing in anything other than a fucking tweed jacket. If Gatsby and Ashleigh looked like they belonged together at all none of this would matter, but Chalamet has chemistry with Fanning the way oil is hydrophilic. They clang against one another, equally bad but in completely different ways. Chalamet looks like a lost puppy, as if dizzy from reading the script in between takes; Fanning puts on her ditz hat and boy, she wears it, though to her credit she’s playing Ashleigh according to how Allen writes her.
He builds Ashleigh out of misogyny that assumes only young ladies in film journalism get hot, bothered, and nervous around the talent. In the absence of any other defining qualities other than her transplant status (Ashleigh is from Arizona, which is just low-hanging fruit for cheap punchlines), Fanning leans in. Technically, she’s “good”; she’s giving Allen the performance he’s expecting. But Chalamet and Fanning’s badness—her’s especially—bears out the awfulness of Allen’s screenplay. The extent of his writing burdens his leads with the Sisyphean task of making “something” out of “nothing.”
Frankly, the closest “A Rainy Day in New York” gets to spinning flesh and blood human beings out of words on pages is Chan (Gomez), Gatsby’s ex’s sister. She’s younger, to the surprise of nobody. As Ashleigh finds herself increasingly in the company of older men, from Roland to Roland’s career collaborator Ted (Law), who can’t help showering her with praising fondness, so does Gatsby find himself infatuated by a girl his junior by an unspecified number of years. There’s a thread here, one Allen doesn’t follow, about men growing more exhausting to handle as they age compared to women; Ashleigh’s a flake but she has drive, while Gomez casually commands Chan’s smirking, jaded cool. Gatsby’s simply intolerable, Roland and Ted are compelling only by dint of Schreiber and Law, and so the thread frays.
There’s no “there” there — with Gatsby, with Ashleigh, with their relationship, or with anything else Allen summons for “A Rainy Day in New York’s” story of young love and metropolitan misadventure. The film is dated, more so than most latter-day Allen works, and torturously unfunny; he can’t even make fun of his own terrible jokes because the ripostes he writes for Gatsby’s many foils are never more amusing than the jokes are bad. Gatsby, utterly nauseated at the idea of forcibly attending the soiree his parents are throwing that very night, describes them and their ilk as “a farrago of WASP plutocrats.” “A farrago of WASP plutocrats?” Chan retorts. “That sounds like something on the menu at a fusion restaurant.” Allen’s aiming for “Borscht Belt Alter Kocker” but only rises as high as “has-been who’s run out of gags.”
“A Rainy Day in New York” is in so many ways typical of Allen’s work: Cynicism and dollops of narcissism smeared over moral self-satisfaction. But the best Allen, or even merely “good” Allen, is convincing. It has a backbone. “A Rainy Day in New York” has a pretty, nostalgic sheen that at least does his audience the favor of making the movie nice to look at, but the aesthetic is window dressing and the second-rate material is insulting, and this is all aside from how individual viewers feel about art versus artist. Any Allen picture is a live grenade tossed in the midst of The Discourse. But “A Rainy Day in New York” isn’t interesting enough to argue about. It’s just a dud. [F]
“A Rainy Day In New York” is available now.
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