Colin Firth plays Stanley, a frenetic, highfaluting Houdini-like magician who performs in Chinese makeup and relishes debunking spiritual mediums in his spare time. In Woody Allen’s Magic In The Moonlight, his 44th film, Stanley poses as an “import-export” businessman and goes after young spiritualist Sophie Baker (Emma Stone). Stanley, according to his fellow magician sidekick, possess “all the warmth of a typhoid epidemic.” We first encounter the steel-eyed, unflinching Wei Ling Su berating his employees after a magic show. Stanley provides us with a witty ride behind a swank 1920s French Riviera backdrop. He quickly attempts to unravel Sophie but before long the tables are turned and his armor of rationality loosens up–first gradually, then in a sudden epiphany.
Allen maintains his usual rhythmic finesse, perfectly balancing the metaphysical musings with his idiosyncratic counterpoint wisecracks. At first. As the film proceeds, however, the screenplays tightness gradually goes somewhat flaccid. One of the final scenes, an extended drawing room interplay between Firth and his aunt (a very good Eileen Atkins) goes on about twice as long as it might have. Firth and Stone also get caught in a rainstorm and need to take refuge in a curiously unoccupied, yet wide-open observatory (a blatant reprise from a similar scene in Manhattan.)
Allen’s bag of tricks, however, even when they skittishly drift into the formulaic (he’s been doing a lot of the same themes for 45 years) still deliver. Magic In The Moonlight, while hardly top-shelf Allen, is far from a dud. Stone, recently cast as a lead in Allen’s next film project, doesn’t miss a beat in picking up the Woody rhythms. Highly capable of non-verbal expressiveness, she entertainingly brings to life a unique character. Sophie is exotic not just because of her chosen trade, but also by virtue of being a working class American amidst a backdrop of monied Americans and Brits in Europe. The family who hosts her ooze wealth through their pores. The matriarch in the family happily anticipates Sophie’s seance conjuring up the spirit of her dead husband, while her son serenades Sophie with a ukulele and proposes marriage to her barely after meeting her.
Even when Allen gets a little stuck, plenty of transporting, intelligently sardonic observations sneak through. Serious spiritual themes (rationality versus spirituality) are allowed freer rein here than in previous Allen works, and it’s still fun to watch such a pro in action. And while the film’s ending may, to some observers, seem intellectually dishonest, or even a puerile form of consoling, it can also be viewed as ironically charming. Amidst the plethora of crap summer comedies so far, you could do a whole lot worse than this.