Then he meets Sophie (Emma Stone), who seems capable of reading his mind and calling on spirits, and his certainty falters. So when his old friend Howard (Simon McBurney) invites him to a fine home on the French Riviera to check out a successful new medium, Stanley welcomes the chance to expose another faker.
Stanley’s a smug, self-satisfied gimmick artist with no belief in magic or the supernatural in an era besotted with spiritualism and séances, he enjoys uncovering the frauds who are taking financial advantage of gullible victims. Magic In The Moonlight opens in 1928, when stage magician Stanley Crawford (Colin Firth, sounding uncannily like John Cleese at his most expansive) is taking advantage of the Orientalism craze by performing as Chinese master Wei Ling Soo, in Mandarin robes, a Fu Manchu mustache, and exaggerated makeup. Then the narrative direction becomes clear, the possibilities narrow, and the film shuts down along with them.
MOVIE MAGIC IN THE MOONLIGHT MOVIE
For a while, the movie is similarly open-ended: Early on, it feels like it might become one of Allen’s best. The film is at its strongest when this uncertainty prevails, and anything is possible. Allen’s history suggests he could be working toward exposing the spirit world as a fraud, or having his characters stroll directly into the afterlife together.
MOVIE MAGIC IN THE MOONLIGHT SERIES
When two characters face off over the existence of the supernatural, in a debate with much larger implications than whether a series of possible parlor tricks are actually psychic phenomena, there’s no obvious right answer. That’s the primary reason his latest, Magic In The Moonlight, has a chance at keeping audience members guessing. He presents his plot devices without comment, then digs into the stories they enable.
And they don’t treat real-world magic much differently from the way they treat these daydreams: When the ghost of an investigative reporter turns up to push a young journalism student into solving his murder in Scoop, or a stage magician hypnotizes volunteers into committing crimes for him in The Curse Of The Jade Scorpion, the protagonists don’t waste much time on “This isn’t possible!” Allen’s approach is usually too light for serious investigation into the supernatural. Characters in Allen films readily fall into acknowledged fantasies where they listen to a Greek chorus describe their lives, or pull Marshall McLuhan out of nowhere to chide a loud blowhard publicly holding forth about McLuhan’s work. The shape-changing in Zelig, the movie character stepping off the screen in The Purple Rose Of Cairo to romance Mia Farrow’s Cecilia, the love potion and invisibility herbs in Alice, the time travel in Midnight In Paris: They’re all accomplished without any flash, pomp, or drama. Woody Allen’s movies treat magic pragmatically.
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