Cafe Society

Review of Café Society

          His fans will no doubt rejoice at the annual Woody Allen movie, this one called Café Society, and not terribly different from his last dozen or two dozen mediocre efforts.  (One exception: Blue Jasmine, a very unusual work from Allen, and a very good movie).  Set in the 1930s and narrated by the writer-director, the film shows the career of a young man from Brooklyn, Bobby Dorfman (Jesse Eisenberg), who goes to Hollywood to make a life for himself; he hopes that his uncle, Phil Stern (Steve Carell), a successful movie agent, will help.

          Phil deputizes one of his secretaries, Vonnie (Kristen Stewart), to show his nephew around town, the Hollywood of a now romantic past.  After a number of pleasant excursions, the two young people reach a point of mutual affection, but as it turns out, Vonnie is involved in an affair with Uncle Phil.  That discovery drives Bobby back to New York, where he launches a successful career working for his gangster brother as the maître d’ in his posh night club.

          The movie’s occasionally comic moments revolve around the amusing Dorfman family, which bears some resemblance to the family in one of Allen’s better films, Radio Days.  Its emotional elements remain steadfastly on the surface, with the writer-director telling the audience pretty much what the two main characters feel about each other.  Since neither Jesse Eisenberg nor Kristen Stewart convey anything resembling genuine passion, they appear merely to be acting out Allen’s hardly credible lines.  Eisenberg pretty much owns the tiresome role of the naïve young guy, which he’s played far too often, and though Woody Allen, Jesse Eisenberg, and Steve Carell constantly proclaim her beauty, Stewart remains a quite ordinary and quite insipid personality.

          The movie looks carefully polished and authentic, with the cars and clothes and, especially, all the wonderful popular music of its time.  Oddly, nobody refers to the Great Depression that after all, defined the decade.  Café Society belongs with most of Woody Allen’s recent—actually over a couple of decades—works: it’s trivial, shallow, and utterly empty of anything resembling real emotion.