The Slow, Sad Decline of Woody Allen

I used to say that a mediocre Woody Allen movie was better than most of the other stuff you would find at the theaters.  But I don't know how to position any upside to a really bad Woody Allen movie.   And "Rifkin's Festival" is really bad.

This is Allen's 49th feature and, for the most part, he has entertained us with a new film once a year.   Some are phenomenal.   Others are fair.   And a few are...see above...mediocre.   Nevertheless, he kept up that annual schedule even when he was the headline scandal of a few years.   You could always find at least one admirable thing in his films.

Until "Rifkin's Festival."  With this one, you can see second-hand the director aging.   I mean, he's in his mid 80s.   But the creative verve is clearly what is slowing down.   Hollywood has noticed this for years.   This movie, like several other recent ones, could not get funded in the US.  Had it not been for European finances, we would have seen the last of Woody Allen perhaps a decade earlier.

Maybe that would have been a good thing.  "Rifkin's Festival" is pointless and weak on so many levels.  The first and most prevalent issue is with the lead who is essentially playing Woody Allen.   The star is Wallace Shawn and his acting is usually only tolerated in the smallest of doses.  Well, in this one, Shawn plays a nebbish film historian attending a Cannes-like film festival with his press agent wife played by Gina Gershon.   Please note that there's at least twenty years difference in age between those two and it makes their pairing inexplicable.

Gershon is having an affair with a young hot shot French director.   Shawn...well, Rifkin...senses this and then conjures up everything from chest pains to ringing of the ears so that he can visit a cute local doctor who herself is in a bad marriage.   

The four of them meander around these mis-matches for about 90 minutes.   The action is interrupted several times by Rifkin's dreams where he puts his problems in the context of classic movies like "Citizen Kane," "Breathless," and Ingmar Bergman's "The Seventh Seal' with a cameo from Christoph Waltz as Death!

If you think this all sounds incredibly dreary, you win the kewpie doll at the county fair.  There is an innate sadness realizing that we are the end of Woody Allen's career.  But, I guess the good news is that we got to enjoy his career for much longer than we deserved.

LEN'S RATING:  One star.

Dinner last night:  Pork tenderloin sandwich.