Movie Review - Cafe Society

Café Society ** (out of 5) (PG-13) (Partial spoiler alert)

Dear Woody - After more than 50 years of fandom, dating back to your standup and print work before you’d even picked up a camera, I hope you’ll grant me this level of informality. Like many of your longtime admirers, I cherish your early comedies above most of the later works, and still wish you hadn’t veered into that tedious Ingmar Bergman phase of your somewhat legendary career. I even stood in line at Elaine’s during a rare trip to New York in the late 1970s just to see you play clarinet.

Each year, we enter theaters with high hopes as the minimalist white-on-black titles roll over a mellow jazz instrumental. We appreciate the self-awareness of your becoming too old for romantic comedy leads - even those with bittersweet dramatic motifs in the package- and finding younger neurotic Jewish avatars for your trademark persona, like Jason Schwartzman or, as here, Jesse Eisenberg.

As a writer and director, you can still mix comedy with the rest of the emotional spectrum, and reign at creating nostalgia with period settings, soft lighting, costumes and all the trimmings of places that increasingly haven’t been New York, or even on the left side of the Atlantic. This time, it’s 1930's Hollywood that you lovingly and mockingly deliver in fine style.

But once you set up a love triangle between your young protagonist, his big-shot Hollywood agent uncle (an ingeniously-cast Steve Carell) and his secretary (the charisma-impaired Kristen Stewart), you’re creating a problem. Most of us try to forget about your tabloid familial events when we watch your movies. That became impossible, and unduly distracting, during this otherwise satisfactory production. That’s territory I hope you’ll avoid in whatever you do next, since, as always, I’ll be there with optimism unabated.

Still loyal after all these years.

(7/29/16)