Magician Stanley Crawford (Colin Firth) is seeking to debunk spiritual medium Sophie Baker (Emma Stone) in Woody Allen’s MAGIC IN THE MOONLIGHT
MAGIC IN THE MOONLIGHT (Woody Allen, 2014)
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For his follow-up to Blue Jasmine, his best film in years, Woody Allen has returned to his love of prestidigitation and the possibility of a spirit world in Magic in the Moonlight, topics he has tackled before, with varying degrees of success, in Scoop, Alice, A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy, the Broadway play The Floating Light Bulb, and the short story “Examining Psychic Phenonema,” in which he wrote, “There is no question that there is an unseen world. The problem is, how far is it from midtown, and how late is it open?” Unfortunately, there is nothing nearly as sharp in Magic in the Moonlight, an ultimately lackluster and disappointing foray into the mysterious realm of spirit mediums, despite a luminous performance by Emma Stone. Allen, who used to make films almost exclusively in New York City, now ventures to the French Riviera of the 1920s after journeys to Rome, Paris, London, and Barcelona in previous recent works. Stone stars as Sophie Baker, a beautiful young woman who claims to be able to read minds and contact the dead, which distresses Stanley Crawford (Colin Firth), who performs as the famous Asian magician Wei Ling Soo and is dedicated to unmasking frauds, believing that there is nothing beyond our earthbound realm. (The premise is loosely based on the psychic-busting career of magician Harry Houdini, who was desperate to find a real connection to the dead.) Stanley is invited by his longtime friend and colleague, magician Howard Burkan (Simon McBurney), to disprove the psychic abilities of Miss Baker, who has been impressing the wealthy Catledge family, including the widowed matriarch, Grace (Jacki Weaver), and her son, Brice (Hamish Linklater), the heir and scion absolutely smitten with Sophie. However, daughter Caroline (Erica Leerhsen) and her husband, George (Jeremy Shamos), don’t trust Sophie and her mother (Marcia Gay Harden) and want Stanley to debunk them before they get their hands on the family fortune. At first Stanley is sure that they are frauds only after money, but soon enough he starts changing his tune, wondering if everything he has believed in has been wrong.
Marcia Gay Harden, Hamish Linklater, Colin Firth, and Emma Stone fail to bring magic to MOONLIGHT
Magic in the Moonlight never feels fully formed, like a magic trick that doesn’t come together to completely take in the audience. While Stone, who is beautifully lit by Darius Khondji, is charming as the possible medium, Firth struggles to develop a tangible chemistry with her, and Brice’s ukulele-laden puppy-dog courtship of Sophie is just plain silly. The film looks great — Darius Khondji’s costumes are wonderful, as is Anne Seibel’s production design, and it’s always a pleasure to see Eileen Atkins, here portraying Stanley’s bohemian aunt — but the problem really begins and ends with Allen’s flat script, as funny jokes, one-liners, and any sense of mystery disappear quicker than the elephant in the opening scene and numerous twists border on the cringeworthy, a rarity for the Woodman, even in his lesser works, of which Magic in the Moonlight is certainly one.
At the beginning of Eric Merola’s Second Opinion: Laetrile at Sloan-Kettering, a 1970s news reporter says, “Dr. Robert Good, president of the Sloan Kettering Institute, one of the world’s biggest and richest cancer research centers, said Laetrile does not prevent cancer, nor cure cancer, nor stop cancer from spreading.” For the next seventy-five minutes, Ralph W. Moss, PhD, the public affairs science writer for the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center from 1974 to 1977, talks about what lay behind that statement and the furor that followed. He tells the captivating story of what went on behind the scenes as Laetrile, a form of amygdalin used in tumor treatment, was coveted by cancer patients but demonized by the medical establishment. The controversy over the drug, which was eventually banned in America, forced patients to go to Mexico in search of the palliative care medicine while the FDA, the National Cancer Institute, and several high-profile MSK doctors considered it to be quackery. MSK’s own top researcher, Dr. Kanematsu Sugiura, had exciting success treating mice with the drug, hopeful that the positive effects would be proven in humans as well. But when Dr. Good, MSK vice presidents Dr. Lloyd J. Old and Dr. Chester Stock, and MSKCC president Dr. Lewis Thomas decided that Laetrile was not the future of cancer treatment, despite what some of them had previously stated in public, Moss was confused and distressed. Others were as well; the documentary reveals that the political dimension of the debate eventually brought even the ultra-right-wing John Birch Society into the fray. Moss eventually became a whistleblower, writing numerous books on the subject, including The Cancer Industry, Cancer Therapy: The Independent Consumer’s Guide to Non-Toxic Treatment & Prevention, and the brand-new Doctored Results: The Suppression of Laetrile at Sloan-Kettering Institute for Cancer Research, which spurred the documentary.
Based on the novel by Alberto Moravia, Bernardo Bertolucci’s gorgeous masterpiece, The Conformist, is a political thriller about paranoia, pedophilia, and trying to find one’s place in a changing world, and you can now experience it in all its glory in a new digital restoration at Film Forum. Jean-Louis Trintignant (And God Created Woman, Z, My Night at Maud’s) stars as Marcello Clerici, a troubled man who suffered childhood traumas and is now attempting to join the fascist secret police. To prove his dedication to the movement, he is ordered to assassinate one of his former professors, the radical Luca Quadri (Enzo Tarascio), who is living in France. He falls for Quadri’s much younger wife, Anna (Dominique Sanda), who takes an intriguing liking to Clerici’s wife, Giulia (Stefania Sandrelli), while Manganiello (Gastone Moschin) keeps a close watch on him, making sure he will carry out his assignment. The Conformist, made just after The Spider’s Stragagem and followed by Last Tango in Paris, captures one man’s desperate need to belong, to become a part of Mussolini’s fascist society and feel normal at the expense of his real inner feelings and beliefs. An atheist, he goes to church to confess because Giulia demands it. A bureaucrat, he is not a cold-blooded killer, but he will murder a part of his past in order to be accepted by the fascists (as well as Bertolucci’s own past, as he makes a sly reference to his former mentor, Jean-Luc Godard, by using the French auteur’s phone number and address for Quadri’s). Production designer Ferdinando Scarfiotti and cinematographer Vittorio Storaro bathe the film in lush Art Deco colors as Bertolucci moves the story, told in flashbacks, through a series of set pieces that include an erotic dance by Anna and Giulia, a Kafkaesque visit to a government ministry, and a stunning use of black and white and light and shadow as Marcello and Giulia discuss their impending marriage. The Conformist is a multilayered psychological examination of a complex figure living in complex times, as much about the 1930s as the 1970s, as the youth of the Western world sought personal, political, and sexual freedom.
