Woody Allen’s recent films fall into 2 camps: painfully neurotic or charmingly old-fashioned, usually dependent upon the actors playing the leads. Magic in the Moonlight falls mostly in the latter category. Charming the pants of the audience are Emma Stone and Colin Firth, who radiate good vibrations no matter how conceited either of them are. Frankly, all you have to do is put them in opulent formal wear and hats and the audience will usually pay the price of admission.
In the 1920s, Englishman Stanley (Firth) is the star magician of the age, playing a man from the Orient. One night, a magician friend Howard (Simon McBurney) comes to Stanley with a proposition. Apparently a woman on the French Coast named Sophie Baker (Emma Stone) is revealing personal secrets to an elderly dowry-rich widow named Grace (Jacki Weaver) and her young son (Hamish Linklater) who is determined to marry her. Howard couldn’t find out her secret, so he asks Stanley and his eye for frauds to help him out.
The better tools of Woody Allen are mostly on display in Magic in the Moonlight. The director uses his setting (the French Coast) and weather very well. Emma Stone repeatedly finds her way behind beams of sunlight in subtle ways, emphasizing her blazing red hair. The writing in the most emotionally resonant scenes is vintage Allen writing: subverting the emotion while maintaining character giving the scene a fresh spin. The quirky characters all fall on the correct side of cute, without turning grating. Allen even gets to reuse an observatory as a meet cute. It seems that Allen at his best writes his scenes with his actors in mind, and the carefree joy and poetic waxing of Firth and Stone imbibe Magic in the Moonlight with equal parts pathos and levity; it is Allen at his best.
But then the rest of his personality starts to interfere in the story, which is actually ok until the end. The story takes too long to get going, bordering on immediately off-putting Firth to the audience with over-the-top narcissism. Worst of all, a romantic angle is introduced between Stone and Firth, which sort of makes sense in the story, but it needlessly parallels Firth’s character to Allen. The main story is about Firth believing in a little magic in the universe and the mystery surrounding Stone’s gift. Those stories are compelling and have some surprising depth, easily leading to the best discussions in the film. The romantic angle is Allen’s kryptonite, as if he needs to justify to the world how it is possible to fall in love with someone much younger than you with his screenplay. When referenced, the romance sucks the magic out of the moonlight until we usually quickly get back to the main story.
That is because Colin Firth and Emma Stone are audience favorites: a delightful pairing for the young and old. Firth is dashing as ever: underneath the suit, tie, and elegiac prose lies some sort of human weakness that Firth implants in Stanley. Firth nails the films best scene involving a car crash because of the build up and nuance Firth effortlessly adds to the magician. Emma Stone plays Sophie as energy incarnate. However, Stone retains her razor-sharp snark which she unleashes in doses to prove Firth’s equal: not an easy task. She also does look quite seemly. Eileen Atkins is great as Firth’s aunt, gamely playing drier than Firth’s dry wit. It is one part smirk, one part indifferent. Hamish Linklater, Marcia Gay Harden, Jacki Weaver, and Simon McBurney are not given much do and wisely just defer to the leads.
Woody Allen has been trying to make amends for his, uh, poorly regarded taste in women on & off in his films. At some point the women topic got too heated so he tried using other old actors with younger women to presumably explain his point of view. If you don’t know who Woody Allen is, Magic in the Moonlight is an engaging, charming romp. If you know how pervy the director can get, there is a weird undercurrent the movie can’t get rid of. I suggest not searching “Woody Allen Mia Farrow” in Google until after you watch Magic in the Moonlight, and just admire how cool Colin Firth and Emma Stone can be.