Here’s the thing You can certainly watch Woody Allen’s “A Rainy Day in New York” trying to divorce the film itself from the controversy that surrounds Allen himself. When actors Timothee Chalamet and Elle fanning show up onscreen swaddled in tweed and smelling of mothball.
Despite featuring some of the best actors of their respective generations, “A Rainy Day in New York” feels like a film born of profound creative exhaustion. It is a retread of territory Allen has extensively covered before, but while the same can be said about almost all of his late-career works.
The romantic lead is playing by the charming Timothee Chalamet, who needs every ounce of his casually quizzical, floppy-haired sensitivity to convince us he is not constantly being thrown through upper-floor windows when people discover his character’s name is Hatsby Welles.
Out the surface, A Rainy Day in New York is a pleasant lark, but It’s possessed of dark, neurotic underpinnings. For one, the name Roland Pollard uncomfortably recalls Roman Polanski, who like Allen, has been unofficially excommunicated from Hollywood.
Eventually, it becomes quite infuriating that fanning, especially can be so lovely and so game and so thoughtlessly abandoned, given no consistent notes to play and sent down the undignified dead-ends of a storyline that has no place to go and nothing to do when it gets there.
