VICKY CRISTINA BARCELONA

Just the relief I needed. I’ve never seen a Woody Allen movie that didn’t have something worth watching in it, for me. His failures are still more original than most moviemakers’ triumphs. And watching his best leaves me as satisfied as a film experience can.

VICKY CRISTINA BARCELONA is one of his better films. As soon as it began I was grinning, knowing here comes that Woody-Allen combination of familiar and unfamiliar movie fantasy, along with story lines and character interactions rooted in complex realities that few movies ever address.

It’s always compelling to watch, at least for me, wondering—where is this thing going? And even when I’m pretty sure I know, I’m never certain how it will get there.

As someone who made my living for several years writing screenplays in Hollywood, or doctoring them, I have a pretty good notion where most movies are heading as soon as the first few scenes have gone by. But Woody keeps me guessing in ways that made all the French New Wave movies of the ‘60s—and the American independent movies they influenced or vice versa—as fun and surprising as any cultural or social event of the time.

That rush of, oh yeah, this is what movies can do that gives me so much pleasure and satisfaction and delight. That’s what this flick did for me.

As usual for an Allen film, the acting is impeccable, mostly because of the usual brilliant casting but also the Woodman’s way with film actors.

There’s the known and expected—Scarlett Johansson and Patricia Clarkson—and the not-so-known but recognizable and equally expected—Chris Messina and Kevin Dunn.

And then there’s the almost unexpected—Javier Bardim as the charming and disarming but conflicted and confusing artist around which the film swirls, and the cause and consequences of his complex motivations and actions, Penelope Cruz, as the female version only more so.

But the most unexpected, the usual new card in what is always an evolving group of familiar faces in Allen’s movies, is Rebecca Hall, whose screen presence is both familiar and refreshingly new (at times she evokes the less glamorous more natural beauties of the movies of my childhood—Theresa Wright, Gene Tierney et. al.—at others a new kind of leading lady, more real, more complicated, and sometimes more neurotic—like she’s channeling Woody, which actors working with him for the first time often seem to do).

I’ve always been taken with Johansson, and now equally by Hall, part of Allen’s genius at discovering new(er) talent or discovering new ways to use that talent. (I know there are those who can’t get past his marrying a person who was practically his step-adopted-daughter, and therefore see ulterior motives in his casting of younger female actors or even of his story lines that ruins what is exuberant about his films, but I’m not one of them, at least not for long, meaning the thoughts do occur to me but are wiped away by his artistry and his movies’ much deeper complexity than simple reflections of his foibles and experiences.)

What I’m trying to convey, and doing a poor job of it after the exhaustion of my emersion in the political action of the past few weeks in politics, is that seeing this movie in a movie theater felt like why I went to movies as a kid, and later as a more culturally and socially aware and experienced young adult. It made me remember how great, and even just good movies—and maybe all art—inspires the idea of “the infinite possibilities of life”—both “good” and “bad”—as my friend Selby used to say.

I came away feeling happy, fulfilled, and deeply accepting of life’s surprises, whether they come as unexpected rewards or unexpected disappointments, or the usual combination of both.