A Rainy Day in New York (2020)

 Score: 0.5 / 5

Woody Allen's latest flick (well, the most recently released to mass audiences) is, for me, among his most disappointing. He rarely wins me over completely, and I tend to scorn the most beloved entries in his filmography. But A Rainy Day in New York is unbearably vapid, the sort of mindless and joyless bilge he prolifically churns out once every two or three years for no discernible reason other than slapping his name on something.

The story is the same as any other bloodless rom-com: a young college couple go to New York City to spend a weekend together. One has an interview booked with a famous filmmaker, the other is tagging along hoping to make the weekend especially romantic. Through misadventures and miscommunication, the two drift apart and have to come to terms with their burgeoning incompatibility. There's nothing new or special about it, and though Allen has handled trashy material like this before, here he seems completely incapable of finding or doing anything interesting with it.

Timothée Chalamet appears to do his best Woody Allen impression -- as all Allen leading men do (or are forced to do) when the director himself stays off screen -- stammering through his uppity turns of phrase as a character named, no joke, Gatsby Welles. If his affected acting doesn't bother you, the privileged and directionless character he plays will. Gatsby wants to charm his girlfriend and plans drinks and museum trips with the money he won playing poker; her unexpectedly busy schedule unhappily gives him some free time, which he uses to meet his awful brother and his fiancee, and Selena Gomez (playing some girl, but really it's just Selena) who is the younger sister of a former girlfriend and with whom he has harbored a mutual crush. Grossed out yet? Hang on to something, because by the "climax" of the flick, he feels inspired to crash his domineering socialite mother (Cherry Jones) while accompanied by a sex worker.

His girlfriend Ashleigh, played by the usually winning Elle Fanning, is a daring but dewy-eyed flake of a person, ditsy when she should be in control. Meeting the morose filmmaker (Liev Schrieber) and his collaborator (Jude Law), she makes an impression on them that feels creepier than it should be, in light of the #MeToo controversies surrounding its production and distribution. By the time she meets a famous actor (Diego Luna), we're keenly aware her future with Gatsby is in jeopardy, and for good reasons. But having so many attractive men fawn over her only makes her more incomprehensible. Then again, the end of the film ends more happily for Gatsby than Ashleigh, arguably, and so whatever might have empowered her character is utterly stripped from her by Allen, who by this point is revealed to be the self-servicing worm we suspected at the start of the movie.

The only decent things about this movie are as follows: Diego Luna is really pretty, Cherry Jones is always a pleasure to watch work (and she is given one pretty solid scene to shine through), and Vittorio Storaro's cinematography is quite lovely to experience. He makes the movie feel dreamlike and romantic in the way classic Hollywood romances were. Too bad Allen had to ruin it all with terrible direction and a musty waste of a screenplay.