Divorced-after-40-years Helena (Gemma Jones) deludes herself with the assurances of a psychic. Her ex-husband (Anthony Hopkins) deludes himself with a much-younger woman. (Lucy Punch, getting a good deal of the laughs here.) Their daughter (Naomi Watts) and son-in-law’s (Josh Brolin) marriage threatens to similarly fray as they each ponder taking up with someone else, she with her art-gallery boss (Antonio Banderas, he with a neighbor (Slumdog Millionaire’s Freida Pinto). Everyone’s looking for something better, even if it’s something that just looks better.
Woody Allen’s latest takes its title from the clichéd advice of a fortune teller, and though fortune tellers really can’t predict the future, that doesn’t keep his London-set ensemble film from being clichéd or predictable at times. But only a little. Both the comedy and the drama are light — this is neither as funny or dramatic as Vicky Cristina Barcelona, his most successful movie of the last decade. The ending isn’t much, and the narration is intrusive, like Woody couldn’t figure out a better way to move the story along. But the plotting seems more believable than in his last one, Whatever Works (which had an even less likely May-December romance). And what Allen almost always does well is create characters who are simply interesting, and gets excellent actors (Watts especially here) to play them. Brolin plays a writer who’s run out of ideas, but it seems Allen never will.
IMDB link
viewed at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 10/27/10
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