If the last few years have taught us anything about the
current state of Woody Allen’s creative process, it’s that he stopped
caring about his actors a long time ago. Once meticulously cast
ensembles comprised of otherwise neglected talents, Allen’s actors have
now largely become a means to an end: marquee-lit lightweights eager to
exchange their names (and, presumably, the financial backing that goes
along with them) for the chance to pad out their resumes with a Woody
Allen picture. It doesn’t really matter how shitty their performances
are—as long as Woody gets to bankroll his new picture,
everybody’s happy. Well, not everybody.
With Cassandra’s Dream, Woody’s growing indifference is
beginning to wear pretty thin: Colin Farrell and Ewan McGregor
(cha-ching!) star (rather dubiously) as brothers Terry and Ian,
respectively—two dreamers stifled by their financial
predicaments, and eager for a way out. When their beloved and wealthy
uncle (Tom Wilkinson) finds himself in a bit of a legal jam, he
approaches the boys with a mutually beneficial proposition: one that
requires his nephews to do away with the witness who could potentially
send him to jail.
Though with diminished returns, Allen’s narrative mines much of the
same Dostoevskian cynicism of his recently acclaimed Match
Point. Also like Match Point, this lesser story more or less
works, in spite of its deeply flawed surface: McGregor and Farrell, via
much-maligned My Fair Lady-style cockney accents, play the two
lower-class, rough and tumble Londoners as simpering Woody Allen New
Yorkers—a distracting disparity that’s nearly impossible to
ignore throughout the film. (Strangely, there’s nothing “English” about
Cassandra’s Dream—and no reason it couldn’t have worked
much better on Allen’s more familiar soil). It’s as if acting has
become entirely inconsequential to Woody Allen’s craft as a
filmmaker—a necessary evil he’s forced to endure in order to tell
his story (a theory recently echoed in an interview with Colin Farrell,
who suggested that he did as many takes for one scene of Miami
Vice as he did for the whole of Cassandra’s Dream).
At its best moments, Cassandra’s Dream is as achingly tense
and compelling as its older sister, Match Point. At its
worst—particularly when it’s testing Farrell and McGregor’s
chops—it can be pretty embarrassing.