Wonder Wheel

seen on 4 February 2018

Woody Allen directs Jim Belushi (Humpty), Kate Winslett (Ginny), Juno Temple (Carolina) and Justin Timberlake (Mickey) in a film set in Coney Island in the early 1950s. The period is lovingly re-created - Allen is as always excellent at evoking New York life in earlier decades - and beautifully shot by Vittorio Storaro.

The story is narrated by Mickey, a handsome young man putting himself through college after war service in the Pacific and taking a summer job as a lifeguard. He introduces Carolina, a young woman returning unexpectedly to her father's and stepmother's home behind the Coney Island fairground as she is in hiding from the Mob after turning State's evidence against her husband. Humpty, her father, is initially furious but he takes her in and she begins working at the same clam restaurant as Ginny. The household has to withstand several resentments - Carolina has had to swallow some pride, Ginny is protective of her own young son from her first marriage (a boy with a worrying propensity to set fires), and Humty is trying to stay on the wagon and failing to cope with his stepson.

Mickey then drops the surprise revelation that he is having an affair with Ginny; when he meets Carolina and there is a spark between them the situation inevitably becomes fraught, and Ginny's jealousy leads to a crisis.

It's potentially a melodramatic plot, and all sorts of movie stereotypes are glanced at - threats from gangsters, unequal attachments between older and younger lovers, misbehaving youngsters, superficial gigolos - and yet the overblown emotions of such tropes are almost entirely ignored in favour of a disarming matter-of-factness. These are just ordinary people struggling with their lives, by turns angry with one another and contrite, bored with their prospects but not really soured by them. The narrative developments are often discussed in dramatic terms through Mickey's straight-to-camera ruminations on dramatic irony - he has literary and theatrical aspirations, while Ginny was once a 'summer stock' actress before and during her first marriage - but this too is fairly plausible and carries only muted echoes of the overly self-aware voiceovers and monologues that Allen himself used to deliver in his early movies. 

The acting is uniformly excellent, unfussy, restrained, unglamorous, but therefore able to invest these characters with a simple humanity that renders them sympathetic even as they make mistakes and misunderstand one another. Jim Belushi gives a fine portrayal of a man anxious to do his best for a wayward child, and a husband dependent on but somewhat mystified by his moody wife. Kate Winslett's Ginny is a great study of a woman under pressure, buckling under the sense that her life is not what she wanted and that her big decisions can prove to be costly mistakes. Even Mickey, who might be seen as the most opportunistic, has a redeeming charm and some moral sense in the hands of Justin Timberlake who manages both the audience asides and the character's involvement in the story with assured skill.