Woody Allen has directed about 53 films, averaging one a year for the past 50 years, and about 1 out of 5 are very good or excellent, 30 bearable to watch and the rest are pretty bad, to which he can add “Wonder Wheel”. It is as if he didn’t give Justin Timberlake any direction and just told Kate Winslet to be Cate Blanchett in “Blue Jasmine”, who was a rip-off of Blanche Dubois in “A Streetcar Named Desire”, and it is the first time I can remember feeling she was just doing a bad acting job or was, at least, in a different movie. Seeing either of them on screen, saying trite sentences, was painful except for some beautiful lit headshots of her. Who sabotages her most is Woody Allen, the writer, with some of the tritest sentences ever uttered on screen with poor imitations of Williams, Eugene O’Neill and others.
Jim Belushi seemed to be a combination of Stanley, without the body but the attitude, and Mitch in “Streetcar”, while Juno Temple starts off as an uninteresting part of the film but develops her character nicely as the film comes towards the finish.
Now if I could only figure out why Jack Gore, as a child from Winslet’s first husband, is a pyromaniac and why he is even in the movie.
Without getting into the whole Woody Allen-Mia Farrow-Dylan Farrow-Soon-Yi Previn aspects which is reflected in today’s news this is definitely one of Allen’s worst pictures as a director and writer and, for the first time, I felt Allen even got the music track wrong, completely annoying.
The stars of “Wonder Wheel” are not Allen but cinematographer Vittoria Storaro and Santo Loquasto the production designer.
Movie Trailer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VFM0UqX9MJ8