How much has the world changed in the three years between the making of Woody Allen’s new film, A Rainy Day in New York, and its belated release? Let us count the ways.
To start, when the movie was shot in New York City in the fall of 2017, it was still possible to shoot a movie — to assemble large groups of people for crowd scenes and to oversee intimate scenes between actors without the administration of medical tests beforehand.
On top of everything, Allen went from being merely unpopular to being a sort of filmmaker non grata thanks to the #MeToo movement, which inspired the revival of abuse charges leveled against him by his adopted daughter, Dylan Farrow. Allen’s persuasive and unwavering denial of the charges has done little to comfort movie studio bosses, who have, until now, refused to release A Rainy Day in New York in the United States.
Perhaps realizing that audiences weary of the pandemic might have an appetite for a sparkling comedy, MPI Media Group will finally make A Rainy Day in New York available on Oct. 9 in theaters and later on Blu-ray and DVD.
Viewing Allen’s film today serves as a striking reminder of another casualty of our confused and chaotic times — aesthetics. That a new film by the man who made masterpieces on the order of Annie Hall (1977), Stardust Memories (1980), and Hannah and Her Sisters (1986) could have remained indefinitely unreleased in his home country would be startling were it not for the emergence of cancel culture, which holds that the actual qualities of a work are less important than its political correctness (or lack thereof).
There is the temptation, then, to promote A Rainy Day in New York as an act of anti-wokeness — to inflate the film’s virtues as a way to take a stand for art for art’s sake. Luckily, no such intellectual contortions are necessary. The film is Allen’s most robust all-around effort in some time: brightly written, charmingly acted, and imaginatively directed.
Timothee Chalamet and Elle Fanning star as Gatsby and Ashleigh, a couple whose unlikely rhyming names underscore their shared status as dyed-in-the-wool romantics. They are undergraduates at Yardley College in upstate New York, but they seem less engaged by their studies than by their ideas of what it might be like to be a grown-up: using cigarette-holders and taking carriage rides through Central Park.
After wannabe reporter Ashleigh wins an assignment to profile big-name director Roland Pollard (Liev Schreiber) for the student newspaper, the pair connives a weekend sojourn to Manhattan. Touchingly, Gatsby enumerates all the things they will do and the places they will go: view an exhibit of Weegee photographs at the Museum of Modern Art, see a performance of Hamilton, rendezvous at the Carlyle. Even more touching is when Ashleigh, a debutante from Tucson, Arizona, takes in the view of Central Park from the suite Gatsby has secured at the Pierre Hotel with a sigh: “Central Park. Exciting.”
Allen is not sending up these two starry-eyed dreamers, whose enthusiasms he largely shares. Chalamet may be delivering the lines as Gatsby, but we know whose opinions he is sharing when he ruminates on the seedy appeal of high-stakes poker games or drops appreciative references to classic films. By the same token, Ashleigh’s ingenuousness is surely comic fodder, but Allen treats her character sympathetically, and Fanning returns the favor with top-notch delivery of his dialogue. “It’s neither hither nor yon,” Ashleigh tells Roland, not making much sense. “It’s probably more yon than hither.”
But Ashleigh’s desire to make it big is later linked with the aspirational striving in the family history of Gatsby, who, like his namesake from The Great Gatsby, outwardly appears to be a product of high society but is really as anxious to belong as his girlfriend. Throughout the film, Allen remains a keen-eyed observer of class distinctions, as when Ashleigh denies being a Republican one-percenter: “We’re just totally Episcopalians who happen to be rich.”
The plot takes off after Roland becomes the first of three men — screenwriter Ted Davidoff (Jude Law) and movie star Francisco Vega (Diego Luna) are the others — to find themselves smitten with Ashleigh, who, notebook and pen in hand, leaves Gatsby to go on a solitary adventure. One of the film’s best-staged scenes finds Ted confronting his adulterous wife, Connie (Rebecca Hall), while Ashleigh, scribbling, stands between them.
Gatsby, in time-killing mode, strays onto a student film set and, convinced that Ashleigh has forsaken him, pays an escort to impersonate her so he can make a good impression at his mother’s swanky party, an antic twist that suggests Peter Bogdanovich’s brilliant comedy about an escort-turned-actress, She’s Funny That Way (2013), as well as Allen’s own screenwriting debut, What’s New Pussycat (1965).
More than the story’s twists and turns, what’s memorable about A Rainy Day in New York is the rain: There’s a lot of it, and as photographed by the great Italian cinematographer Vittorio Storaro, it’s much more than window dressing. The weather not only propels the plot, maneuvering Gatsby and Ashleigh in and out of buildings, but it gives texture to the characters’ romantic wanderings. In a particularly ravishing shot, Gatsby sits in a car with an acquaintance named Chan (Selena Gomez) as the light shifts from golden to gray. Umbrellas have not been photographed as often, or as well, since Jacques Demy’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964).
Perhaps this suggests that A Rainy Day in New York is simply the rainstorm scene in Manhattan (1979), when Allen and Diane Keaton dash into a planetarium to avoid getting felled by lightening, expanded to feature-length, but the film is unique. It’s touched by a kind of magic realism that hits home in the final scene when Gatsby, romantically bruised and weather-beaten, stops to contemplate the carousel and chimes of Central Park’s Delacorte Clock. Some viewers may be struck by a palpable nostalgia: for our pre-coronavirus lives, certainly, but also for a time when films this fine were admired without apology or reservation.
Peter Tonguette writes for many publications, including the Wall Street Journal, National Review, and Humanities.
