Movie Review: Wonder Wheel

PHILADELPHIA (CBS) - Woody Allen's track record as a prolific and gifted writer-director has long since established itself and been acknowledged.

And it's a good thing.

Because his latest outing, Wonder Wheel – not a comedy but a drama – is shockingly bad, a seeming example of what happens when Allen's characteristically high aesthetic standards at least temporarily desert him.

Put another way, he reliably turns out one film a year, but this year he should have skipped.

When, late in the film, someone says, "Oh, God, spare me the drama," we can't help but concur.

Wonder Wheel  is set on Brooklyn's Coney Island in the 1950s, when Kate Winslet's Ginny, a 40-year-old failed actress and a waitress at a seafood restaurant, lives, unhappily married to Humpty (?), her second husband and the operator of the boardwalk carousel, played by James Belushi.

They live in an absurdly noisy boardwalk apartment behind the ferris wheel.

He drinks a lot, he shouts a lot, he threatens her a lot, he hits her some.

She frets a lot, she complains a lot, she berates a lot, she drinks some.

Then his estranged daughter from his first marriage, Carolina, played by Juno Temple, who's being pursued by her mobster ex-husband, shows up to stay with them and their pyromanic son.

All of this is being related to us by the narrator, an NYU grad student moonlighting as a lifeguard, played by Justin Timberlake, who is having an affair with Ginny but then meets and falls for Carolina, the discovery of which by Ginny makes her livid with jealousy.

And it's this romantic triangle that comprises the spine of the shaky, arbitrary narrative in a script that reads like an abandoned first draft.

Allen seems to have left his otherwise talented cast unattended.  The result: while Timberlake and Temple get by, Winslet and Belushi stumble amateurishly, offering volume instead of suspense, and contributing one-dimensional portraits of insufferable, self-pitying participants in a competition for Most Overwrought and Annoying.

Call it a tie.

As for echoes of Allen's off-screen travails, let's leave it at this: it's as if he's inviting our perception that he's both accusing and confessing in ways that can't help but put us in mind of the details of his controversial personal life.

Regardless, nothing works here: not the acting, not the dialogue, not the plot, not even the iconic location, which hardly makes an appearance.

Characters are forever clumsily describing exactly how they feel.

About all that kick in and provide a respite from our discomfort or disappointment are the few moments that remind us of similar exchanges in earlier, better Woody Allen films, such as Annie Hall or Radio Days or Purple Rose of Cairo.

Oh, there's wonder, all right.  We wonder, for example, why the auteur believed this would pass muster.

It doesn't.

So we'll ride 1-1/2 stars out of 4 for one of Woody's worst, the jaw-droppingly overwritten and overacted Wonder Wheel, a feeble four-hander that takes a bored walk on the Boardwalk.