"Cassandra's Dream" has the merit of a beginning, a middle-section, a climax and a moral conclusion. But given the usual standards of Woody Allen, this one doesn't rank very high in his filmography and is so lackluster I wanted to forget it as soon as it finished. Before I start, don't expect any comment about the accents, I'm a non-native English speaker so that rarely affects my judgment.
It starts with Ian and Terry Blaine, two brothers, sons of a restaurant owner (John Benfield) buying a boat, they name it "Cassandra's Dream" and invite two girls to take part to the maiden voyage. Ian got his girl easily, a waitress smoking during her break time, the kind who wouldn't differentiate a cockleshell from a yacht. Ewan McGregor is Ian, he is determined to climb the social ladder and live a life of luxury with a fortune earned from hotel investments. In the meantime, he knows how to use his good looks and luxurious cars borrowed from his brother's garage to his benefit. One day, he meets a beautiful actress (Hayley Atwell) who thinks it's his own Jaguar, we understand the waitress is history. Colin Farrell is Terry, the mechanic and the one whose blue-collar upbringing is more obvious, he wants to make it big and buys a house where he can live with his girlfriend, a naïve next-door girl played by Sally Hawkins, and he does it through gambling, he doesn't just want to make it big, but like his brother, he wants to make it quick.
Which leads me to the first problem of the story: we understand the brothers' motives a little more than the whole emergency. Sure Ian needs money to keep up appearances with his girlfriend -obviously infatuated with rich, confident and wealthy men- but Atwell's character is a rather thankless role whose merit is to have propelled a career to better offerings, Atwell does her best with what the script gives her, but her shallowness doesn't exactly enhance our empathy toward Ian, had she had the magnetism of Scarlett Johansen or a little more likability, we could have understood Ian a little more.
The emergency for Terry is shown in the same half-baked way: he wins a big sum of money, and since the plot requires him to be broke or in debt, it never comes at a shock when it happens. And it comes so soon after the first win that no matter how much sincerity Farrell tries to pull, it's hard not to feel angry rather than sorry, he had it coming, Woody Allen didn't bother shooting a poker scene because he felt that was accessory to the plot but I think he was misguided by laziness, which leads me the second problem. And before I develop, let me say that Allen is one hell of a screenwriter and no one is in position to lecture him about the arts and rules of writing. But if the "show, don't tell" principle can be rather hackneyed, for God's sake, it's almost a school-case of on-the-nose dialogue to avoid.
Farrell keeps talking about the way he feels when he plays, the whole adrenaline-rush and so on, but watching him winning first and losing after would have deepened the character and given Farrell a real acting canvas not just tormented blabbering. But Allen wants us to take everything at face value and it's hard to make us root for any of the two. In "Match Point", every emotional step had a scene clearly devoted to it, here it feels like Allen was overeager to wrap the whole project. Same with the parents, the father is perhaps the most poignant character; he keeps blaming his sons for not taking the appropriate roads but is left in the pitiful position of one who underwent life and not as a strong model. And the mother (Clare Higgins) seems only to exist for praising the success of her brother. Sure Uncle Howard is such a pivotal character he needs a little buildup but the way she comes close to an expositional character confines to amateurish writing you wouldn't expect that from Allen.
Finally, there's the whole murder-plot, the third after "Match point" and "Scoop", this is the time where the film must take off, as Howard, Tom Wilkinson asks his nephews to help him get rid of a nuisance (Phil Davis) who can destroy him financially. And that was the hit-or-miss moment , it's interesting in the way it reveals the depths going within the brothers, that the more socially adequate of the two -and the more balanced- handles crimes without any remorses while it's Terry who's devoured by guilt. After the murder, we understand where Allen's coming from, he wants a moral answer to the more cynical "Match Point" but that was better done with "Irrational Man" many years later. Here, Allen offers us character whose reasons to commit an atrocious act are cloudy and shady and abominably selfish to begin with, but while the evolution of the characters was interesting, and so was the way they confronted their actions and questioned morality, the treatment wasn't as well-polished and captivating. And when you make a film about amoral protagonists, you better keep the audiences interested, since their empathy isn't granted.
The film closes on the two girlfriends buying clothes, but who cares? They were rather cardboards characters, then we have a close-up on the boat they bought earlier in their film and whose name inspired the title, a sort of "Ta-da" moment to tell us that was inevitable. But maybe giving us a little subtext would have suited the film better. And I don't know whether Allen was aware of his pretentiousness or if he knew he wasn't making his best and he was just bull**** ing us with an ending that wasn't as dramatic as Phil Glass' annoyingly ominous score suggested.
It starts with Ian and Terry Blaine, two brothers, sons of a restaurant owner (John Benfield) buying a boat, they name it "Cassandra's Dream" and invite two girls to take part to the maiden voyage. Ian got his girl easily, a waitress smoking during her break time, the kind who wouldn't differentiate a cockleshell from a yacht. Ewan McGregor is Ian, he is determined to climb the social ladder and live a life of luxury with a fortune earned from hotel investments. In the meantime, he knows how to use his good looks and luxurious cars borrowed from his brother's garage to his benefit. One day, he meets a beautiful actress (Hayley Atwell) who thinks it's his own Jaguar, we understand the waitress is history. Colin Farrell is Terry, the mechanic and the one whose blue-collar upbringing is more obvious, he wants to make it big and buys a house where he can live with his girlfriend, a naïve next-door girl played by Sally Hawkins, and he does it through gambling, he doesn't just want to make it big, but like his brother, he wants to make it quick.
Which leads me to the first problem of the story: we understand the brothers' motives a little more than the whole emergency. Sure Ian needs money to keep up appearances with his girlfriend -obviously infatuated with rich, confident and wealthy men- but Atwell's character is a rather thankless role whose merit is to have propelled a career to better offerings, Atwell does her best with what the script gives her, but her shallowness doesn't exactly enhance our empathy toward Ian, had she had the magnetism of Scarlett Johansen or a little more likability, we could have understood Ian a little more.
The emergency for Terry is shown in the same half-baked way: he wins a big sum of money, and since the plot requires him to be broke or in debt, it never comes at a shock when it happens. And it comes so soon after the first win that no matter how much sincerity Farrell tries to pull, it's hard not to feel angry rather than sorry, he had it coming, Woody Allen didn't bother shooting a poker scene because he felt that was accessory to the plot but I think he was misguided by laziness, which leads me the second problem. And before I develop, let me say that Allen is one hell of a screenwriter and no one is in position to lecture him about the arts and rules of writing. But if the "show, don't tell" principle can be rather hackneyed, for God's sake, it's almost a school-case of on-the-nose dialogue to avoid.
Farrell keeps talking about the way he feels when he plays, the whole adrenaline-rush and so on, but watching him winning first and losing after would have deepened the character and given Farrell a real acting canvas not just tormented blabbering. But Allen wants us to take everything at face value and it's hard to make us root for any of the two. In "Match Point", every emotional step had a scene clearly devoted to it, here it feels like Allen was overeager to wrap the whole project. Same with the parents, the father is perhaps the most poignant character; he keeps blaming his sons for not taking the appropriate roads but is left in the pitiful position of one who underwent life and not as a strong model. And the mother (Clare Higgins) seems only to exist for praising the success of her brother. Sure Uncle Howard is such a pivotal character he needs a little buildup but the way she comes close to an expositional character confines to amateurish writing you wouldn't expect that from Allen.
Finally, there's the whole murder-plot, the third after "Match point" and "Scoop", this is the time where the film must take off, as Howard, Tom Wilkinson asks his nephews to help him get rid of a nuisance (Phil Davis) who can destroy him financially. And that was the hit-or-miss moment , it's interesting in the way it reveals the depths going within the brothers, that the more socially adequate of the two -and the more balanced- handles crimes without any remorses while it's Terry who's devoured by guilt. After the murder, we understand where Allen's coming from, he wants a moral answer to the more cynical "Match Point" but that was better done with "Irrational Man" many years later. Here, Allen offers us character whose reasons to commit an atrocious act are cloudy and shady and abominably selfish to begin with, but while the evolution of the characters was interesting, and so was the way they confronted their actions and questioned morality, the treatment wasn't as well-polished and captivating. And when you make a film about amoral protagonists, you better keep the audiences interested, since their empathy isn't granted.
The film closes on the two girlfriends buying clothes, but who cares? They were rather cardboards characters, then we have a close-up on the boat they bought earlier in their film and whose name inspired the title, a sort of "Ta-da" moment to tell us that was inevitable. But maybe giving us a little subtext would have suited the film better. And I don't know whether Allen was aware of his pretentiousness or if he knew he wasn't making his best and he was just bull**** ing us with an ending that wasn't as dramatic as Phil Glass' annoyingly ominous score suggested.