Woody Allen (2007)
Londoners Ian and Terry are brothers, both around thirty. They buy a sailing boat for a knock-down price. They call it ‘Cassandra’s Dream’, in honour of a greyhound of that name. Gambling-addicted Terry backed the dog and it came in at a price big enough to pay for the boat. The brothers’ parents, Brian and Dorothy, have run a restaurant in London for years. The place has kept going but only just. Ian helps out with the restaurant and his anxious, unassuming father assumes his elder son will spend the rest of his working life there. Dorothy is a more aggressive advocate of the importance of family but despises her husband’s lack of financial success. She thinks her sons’ role model should be Brian’s brother, Howard, a successful plastic surgeon and businessman, now based in the US – and Ian has big commercial ideas, to invest in hotels in Los Angeles. On the way back from a day’s sailing on Cassandra’s Dream, he meets and immediately falls for Angela Stark, a beautiful and ambitious young actress. He wants to impress Angela and shoots her a line that he’s in the LA hotel business: his dream suddenly needs to become reality. Terry, who works at a garage, loses disastrously at cards and desperately requires funds to pay his debts. When Uncle Howard pays a visit to London, his nephews think he’s the answer to their prayers. Howard reveals, however, that his shady business past is about to catch up with him – unless Martin Burns, the former colleague ready to incriminate him, can be got rid of. Howard agrees to give Ian and Terry the financial help they ask for, in exchange for their killing Burns. To cut a longer-than-usual-for-Woody-Allen story short, the brothers carry out the job; Terry is crazed by guilt; Ian plans to kill him to keep things quiet; Terry accidentally kills Ian then commits suicide.
The cast of Cassandra’s Dream are dealing with the verbal equivalent of the emperor’s new clothes. Since the dialogue is written by Woody Allen, they can’t believe they’re talking in secondhand melodramatic cliché but they usually are. As always happens when Allen sets his story in this country, the lines are lifeless and phony too. It may be arguable as to whether he gets English social nuances and it’s unarguable that he has no ear for English locutions. One of the smaller examples: at their first meeting, Angela gives Ian ‘two tickets for my latest show’ and he instantly replies, ‘Oh, you’re an actress’ It’s unlikely that someone with a part in the kind of play Angela’s appearing in would describe it, even if she were pretentious, as a ‘show’. It’s certain that someone like Ian wouldn’t assume from hearing the word ‘show’ that it was a play. (He’d probably ask ‘What sort of show?’) A third layer of unreality in the dialogue is created by the casting of Ewan McGregor (Ian) and Colin Farrell (Terry) in the two main parts. They struggle manfully to sustain their London accents and you’re very conscious of the effort. There’s the odd passage in Cassandra’s Dream that makes you feel it might work if the character speaking were American. This occurred to me especially during the lengthy monologue in which Uncle Howard, in tones of increasing anger and alarm, explains his predicament to Ian and Terry. Tom Wilkinson as Howard has reasonably opted for a mid-Atlantic accent but, as he delivers the speech, you can almost hear the force it might have had given, say, the Alec Baldwin treatment. When Ian speculates on the best way to kill Martin Burns, you register how different this would have sounded issuing from the mouth of the young Woody Allen. (His excited lack of familiarity with the potential weapons named – ‘a hammer, maybe – or a knife …!’ – would have made the lines funny.) For the most part, though, the dialogue in Cassandra’s Dream probably wouldn’t sound good as any kind of English. The words echo in your head all right – not because they’re resonant but because they’re hollow.
I used above the phrase ‘someone like Ian’. I mean by that – it could equally be ‘someone like Terry’ – someone who names his boat for a winning bet on the dogs and blithely ignorant of Cassandra the prophetess of doom. Someone unlike Woody Allen and the audience that he expects to get – and chuckle or grimace at – the reference. This sense of superiority to the characters in the film isn’t likeable. It’s also pretty rich when the occasional attempts to present Cassandra’s Dream as an updated Greek tragedy are so feeble. If Ian is meant to be a good man brought low by a tragic flaw, it’s hard to see what the flaw is. Both he and Terry initially reject Howard’s deal. Ian appears to change his mind, and forces Terry to join him in dispatching Martin Burns, for no better reason than one sleepless night, thinking about what the money would mean to them both. (It would make more sense if Terry were the prime mover: at least he needs to pay his gambling debts quickly to avoid getting his legs broken etc.) Is Dorothy’s enjoining her sons to remember the paramount importance of ‘family’ meant to be a crucial factor in propelling Ian and Terry to murder on behalf of their uncle? Probably – although the brothers are (understandably) bored when their mother comes out with this clearly oft-repeated spiel.
Ewan McGregor, who never gets below the nice guy in Ian, gives Woody Allen the weak performance he deserves for writing such a poorly-motivated character. (Even Ian’s jealousy, when other men look at Angela and she reciprocates, comes and goes.) Colin Farrell does rather better: it’s a sort of compliment to say that, when Farrell’s Cockney accent slips, it’s because he’s engaging with the character more strongly than McGregor (who holds the accent better) is able to do. Some of the cast who are either real Londoners or have regularly played Londoners manage to create a semblance of truthfulness: Sally Hawkins, as Terry’s girlfriend (at least until things get serious); Phil Davis, as the ill-fated Burns (his short stay in the film probably helps Davis); John Benfield, in his quieter moments as Brian. Clare Higgins is stridently and monotonously over the top as Dorothy. Hayley Atwell is Angela: in Brideshead Revisited, Atwell showed she was capable of much more than you’d ever imagine from her playing here. Philip Glass’s dynamic score merely exposes the weediness of what it’s accompanying. In the sense that it’s the story of hitmen rather than of the man who employed them, Cassandra’s Dream could be seen as a kind of debased companion piece to Crimes and Misdemeanors but, in the Woody Allen canon, it’s more strongly akin to Match Point. In spite of the chance-rules paraphernalia, the moral of Match Point seemed eventually to be that crime pays. Maybe that’s why the message of Cassandra’s Dream – crime doesn’t pay – is meant to strike you as original.
14 February 2016
