Monday, March 19, 2018

Wonder Wheel Review



It’s hard to know if this colourful, stagey melodrama is meant as a tribute to or pastiche of Eugene O’Neill’s hard-scrabble plays. Perhaps it’s both. Justin Timberlake’s callow Mickey, a part-time lifeguard and full time pseudo-intellectual, starts an affair with the unhappy Ginny (Winslet). A former actress, she’s married to alcoholic Humpty (Belushi) and adjusting badly to life as a waitress. But Mickey’s eye soon strays from Ginny to her step-daughter Carolina (Temple), with predictably messy results.

There’s a thick vein of misanthropy here that’s barely leavened by its glowing artificiality, as Ginny’s life threatens to fly apart at the seams and take her family with it, but it’s a cynicism that feels typical of late-period Woody Allen. Winslet is on extraordinary form as a woman who’s all too conscious that the male attention she has always relied upon is disappearing, but she’s significantly better and more engaging than the film around her.


Four peoples' lives intertwine amid the hustle and bustle of the Coney Island amusement park in the 1950s: Ginny, an emotionally volatile former actress now working as a waitress in a clam house; Humpty, Ginny's rough-hewn carousel operator husband; Mickey, a handsome young lifeguard who dreams of b… MOR
Initial release: December 1, 2017 (USA)
Director: Woody Allen
Box office: 14.9 million USD
Cinematography: Vittorio Storaro
Budget: 25 million USD

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