Kristen Stewart is only 26, but she feels as though she could’ve been in Woody Allen’s movies since the ‘70s. The camera loves her face, her hair, and the way she dresses. Stewart was one of the biggest movie stars on the planet following “Twilight,” and in “Café Society,” a movie that’s all about how culture and class changes and effects people, Allen sees her as authentic.
Stewart plays Vonnie (short for Veronica), the center of a love triangle between her fun and care free boyfriend Bobby (Jesse Eisenberg) and her wealthy and married lover Phil (Steve Carell) nearly twice her age. Set in the 1940s in the heyday of Old Hollywood, Bobby has just moved to Los Angeles to get away from New York and try and make it by doing work at his uncle Phil’s agency. Of course, this is a Woody Allen movie, and Bobby can’t resist saying how much different and better New York is than LA at every turn. In fact Allen probably couldn’t have tolerated LA in any other period than the ‘40s, using it as an excuse to talk about jazz, so here we are.
However, it’s the first time in a while that the ‘40s setting has allowed Allen to play around aesthetically. “Café Society” has a remarkably classical and old fashioned sheen, with gorgeously artificial mood lighting adorning the more romantic moments. In one scene, when the lights flicker in Bobby’s apartment, Allen concocts an excuse to say that there’s a brief power outage, if only to give the scene a perfect, unnatural amber hue.
Vonnie has to choose between marrying Phil and remaining in wealth and luxury in Hollywood, or returning to New York with Bobby as the wife of a man running a nightclub for his gangster brother (Corey Stoll). It’s a small, quaint film about how the glamour, gossip and glitter of a “café society” lifestyle gets in the way of more modest living. “I think I’d be happier living life size,” Vonnie says to Bobby on their first date.
Except Allen doesn’t really make clear what either can offer the other beyond affection. His Comedy of Errors feels awfully light in place of some of Bobby’s more nebbish behavior. One of the film’s more comedic set pieces involves Bobby inviting over a call girl, only for him to aggressively try and turn her away when she’s late, doing this for the first time, and Jewish. It’s awkward Jewish humor in a way Allen has been doing for years but does little in support of the love story.
A side plot involving Bobby’s mobster brother Ben also feels like an after thought. Stoll, who was excellent in Allen’s “Midnight in Paris” as Ernest Hemingway, gives a great performance in what should probably belong in a different movie. And while the camera seems to love Stewart, she herself may not be as into it, delivering a fairly muted and one-note register.
“Life is a comedy written by a sadistic comedy writer,” Bobby says near the end of “Café Society.” Like life, this film too may take some peculiar and amusing twists and turns, and it may even be memorable, but at times it can feel awfully insignificant.
2 ½ stars