If you usually like a certain short, wry artist, than you might enjoy “You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger.” Seventy-five-year-old director-writer Woody Allen is a creature of habit, even now, into retirement age. For four decades, he’s been making roughly one new movie a year, mostly ensemble comedies with terrific actors. Often, he conjures distinctive works of satiric genius. But sometimes, he seems to be doing it as much to keep busy and to amuse himself as to amuse the audience.
His latest fits into the later category: engaging while it lasts, but easily forgotten. Nevertheless, even middling Allen movies boast sophisticated repartee and droll observations about those twin obsessions that underlie all human behavior in his world of urban intellectuals: sex and death.
Set in a stylish London, shot with the same reverence that the filmmaker has had for his beloved Manhattan, today’s romantic roundelay pokes fun at an extended family of adults who get burned for exploring new love. Alfie (Anthony Hopkins), a wealthy old patriarch in very late midlife crisis, has dumped his longtime spouse, the adorable airhead Helena (Gemma Jones). Meanwhile, Cupid has their daughter Sally (Naomi Watts), a brittle art gallery assistant, flailing too. Both she and her struggling writer husband, Roy (a disheveled Josh Brolin), harbor secret crushes to take their minds off their marital, financial and professional problems.
Since Allen stays behind the camera this time, he uses a still frisky Hopkins to express subliminal panic about dying. Why else would a septuagenarian chuck his loving soulmate for a cheap, greedy hooker (hilariously played by “Dinner for Schmucks’ ” Lucy Punch)? Actually, both main male characters attempt to salve their existential fears and marriage ennui by pursuing sexy hotties too young for them: Roy spies on and soon fixates on his stunning, scantily-clad neighbor (“Slumdog Millionaire’s” Freida Pinto).
Their wives aren’t much better off. The lonely Helena relies on a nutty psychic (Pauline Collins) to find her some happiness while Sally tries to work up the nerve to hit on her hunky but already married boss (Antonio Banderas).
The light-as-air story takes an unexpectedly sinister turn when Roy does something really immoral to further his career. It makes all the lusting and cheating seem harmless by comparison. And it doesn’t fit well with the other story lines, too few of which get properly resolved in Allen’s loosey-goosey script for a nicely acted “Stranger.”
