DecoyMusic.com

Ah, another Woody Allen movie.  In You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, the plot is centralized around a pair of couples struggling with their relationships.  Couple #1: Sally (Naomi Watts), an art gallery assistant, dreams of having her own art gallery, but spends her time supporting her flash in the pan writer of a husband, Roy (Josh Brolin), while he writes and rewrites his second novel.  Spending more and more time at the gallery with her suave boss, Greg (Antonia Banderas), has Sally starting to wonder about her life with her current hubby.  Meanwhile, Roy spends most of his time watching his gorgeous window neighbor across the street, Dia (Freida Pinto).  Couple #2: Sally's parents, Alfie (Anthony Hopkins) and Helena (Gemma Jones), are divorced and now going their own ways.  Alfie is living an active lifestyle to try to feel young again and has taken this idea to an extreme by deciding to marry a prostitute (Lucy Punch) half his age who he has been hiring.  Since the divorce, Helena has sunk into deep depression and has turned to an unknowingly phony psychic to help guide her in her path to happiness.

Each of these characters start the film wanting something new in terms of a romantic relationship, and end the film either having gotten it and regretting it, or realizing what they wanted in the first place was anything but.  Allen makes it blatantly obvious that his characters' have the grass is always greener mentality by having them all be precarious while also having the narrator (Zak Orth) point this fact out.  On top of this, they are all constantly drinking out of anxiety or depression, almost in every scene.

Despite their sketchy activities, all of the main characters are likable to some degree, minus Helena, whom I wished would be strangled by Roy, who seemed to have the same sentiment.  Allen's signature quick paced dialogue kept me on my toes.  Though some of the chatter doesn't seem to carry much weight at times, it moves fast enough that it doesn't weigh the film down.  What did bother me was the use of a voiced over narrator .  Instead of leaving the audience to ponder what the meaning of all of this talk is about, it is dropped in our lap with just a few lines.  Not only this, but unfortunately Orth's voice was grating to my ears after about a quarter of the way through the film.  Maybe if someone else had narrated the film, I would have felt differently.

Allen's latest film has some funny moments and some interesting relationship dynamics.  Like most of Allen's work, You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger has a star studded and seasoned cast who perform dutifully.  Unfortunately, it suffers from a few annoying story telling decisions.  Allen wants us to consider that our dreams might not be all that we think they are cracked up to be and sometimes I think he is right to do so.

---Jordan Smith