Café Society (Grevier Productions, Amazon Studios, Lionsgate, 2016)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night at 9, at the suggestion of my husband Charles – who said he’d already seen the film with his mother during one of his trips to see her – we watched an Amazon Prime stream of Woody Allen’s 2016 film Café Society, something of a throwback to the days when it was a badge of honor for a young actor to work on an Allen film before his career got caught up in the machinations of the #MeToo movement. The stories we’ve heard about him are certainly creepy – both the ones we know about (like the abrupt ending of his relationship with Mia Farrow when he started dating her adoptive daughter Soon-Yi Previn) and the ones we don’t know about for sure (notably the story that he molested his son Dylan). I had thought Allen would weather the #MeToo storms scathed but surviving in the long term – sort of like Charlie Chaplin, who weathered similar accusations (including a rape trial brought on by one of his teenage protégées, actress Joan Barry) – largely because both Chaplin and Allen had such intellectual world’s investments in them as bittersweet comic artists. I figured Bill Cosby would be the Fatty Arbuckle of #MeToo, largely forgotten and with his memory wiped from the history of professional comedy – and though I have no doubt of Cosby’s guilt, the fact that the first celebrity actually prosecuted under #MeToo was Black, which played into the racist stereotype of Black men as sexually insatiable maniacs always looking for the next hole they can stick their legendarily huge cocks into. (I’ve tricked witn enough Black men in my single days and I can testify from personal experience that some Black men have big dicks, some have small dicks and some have medium-sized dicks, just like us white people.)

I remember one Los Angeles Times op-ed in which a woman writer declared Woody Allen guilty as charged on the basis of a court deposition he gave in which Dylan Farrow declared that Allen had molested it and prefaced it with the words, “I have to do this.” Though I can’t say for sure it didn’t happen, I don’t regard that as proof positive it did because a) Mia Farrow was in the room when Dylan gave his testimony (it’s legally required that you can’t question or interrogate a minor unless a parent or guardian is present), and b) real pedophiles generally don’t say things like, “I have to do this.” What they usually say is that they’re sharing a “special love” that has to be kept secret between the two of them because the rest of the world would never understand it. Still, though I’ve long been convinced Woody Allen was the victim of a vengeful ex who was willing to say or do anything to destroy him – including getting their kids to lie about him abusing them – it gave me a creepy feeling to be watching Café Society. Charles figured I’d like the movie because it’s set in the late 1930’s (1936 and 1937, to be exact) and because it takes place in and around some of my favorite environments, Hollywood and New York, and both the movie business and the nightclub scene.

The plot deals with Bobby (Jesse Eisenberg), one of Allen’s typical nebbishy Jewish-American protagonists, who in the opening scenes goes to Hollywood to get a job with his uncle, high-powered agent Phil Stern (Steve Carell). After about three weeks of sheer persistence – and an embarrassing encounter with a Hollywood prostitute named Candy who turns out never to have turned a trick before (was Allen thinking Pretty Woman here?) and whom Bobby feels so sorry for he offers her the $20 he agreed to pay her if she’ll just leave (earlier she had got his address wrong and turned up at the home of one of his neighbors, embarrassing him completely) – Bobby finally gets a job with Phil Stern that involves being a glorified go-fer but gets him entrée into the world of movie stars. (Charles noted that though movie stars are talked about a lot in the dialogue, we never see an actor playing one and the only times we see the stars is in clips from their actual movies.) Bobby rises through the ranks of Phil’s agency and also falls in love with Phil Stern’s secretary, Vonnie (short for “Veronica”) (Kristen Stewart). She begs off his advances because she says she already has a boyfriend, a journalist who is out of town a lot, only it turns out – first we in the audience learn this, then Phil and finally Bobby – that Vonnie’s other boyfriend is Phil Stern.

Phil has been married for 25 years to Karen (Sheryl Lee), whose main function in his life appears to be to co-host the elaborate film-industry parties at his lavish mansion. But once he hired Vonnie he fell head over heels in love with her and the two started having an affair that includes dates in ont-of-the-way restaurants and bars because Phil is well-known enough he can’t risk being seen with another woman. Forced to choose between Bobby – who wants to marry her and move back to New York, where his gangster uncle Ben (Corey Stoll) has promised him an entrée into the nightclub business – and Phil, Vonnie chooses Phil once he divorces his wife and he’s at least legally free to marry her. Bobby has one of Woody Allen’s typical Jewish families, including brother Ben – a gangster who wantonly kills anyone who gets in his way and buries them under concrete pavement – and sister Rose (Jeannie Berlin, Elaine May’s daughter and a welcome sight in her own right 35 years after what should have been a star-making role as the jilted bride in her mom’s film The Heartbreak Kid), who’s married to Leonard (Stephen Kulken), who makes the mistake of complaining to his brother-in-law the gangster that they have a neighbor who plays boogie-woogie music on his radio too loudly.

Ben responds to the problem by eliminating him and burying him under the pavement – for some reason Woody Allen underscored all the scenes of Ben committing murder and other crimes to the Count Basie-Lester Young classic “Taxi War-Dance” (maybe he thought it was appropriate because the title was a reference to an often brutal war going on for control of New York’s taxi business; the titie is a three-way pun involving taxi wars, taxi dances – where the men paid a dime for a one-minute dance with a woman – and war dances) – and naturally the decent, bookish Leonard, who pratties on about how people should be able to settle their differences with reason instead of brute force, is appalled and guilt-ridden about what happened to their neighbor. Ben is ultimately caught by the police (to the same strains of “Taxi War-Dance” that accompanied his crimes), tried, convicted and executed, though before he dies he allows a chaplain at Sing Sing prison to convert him to Christianity because Christians believe in an afterlife and Jews don’t. (His mom seems at least as appalled by his conversion as his criminal career.) But Bobby finds a rich couple who agrees to buy the nightclub where he’s been working for Ben and so he can continue in his job. He also falls in love with a blonde woman named Veronica (Blake Lively) – the same name as his Hollywood girlfriend, though she goes by the full name and doesn’t call herself “Vonnie” for short – and marries her at the New York City Hall (where soe works) two months after getting her pregnant.

Phil Stern arrives in New York on a business trip and naturally looks up his nephew – and Phil, Vonnie and Bobby have a lunch date together at which Bobby is appalled at the way Vonnie gossips about the great stars of Hollywood after she had previously denounced that whole world as horrible, disgusting and not at all worth caring about. The film ends ambiguously, with Bobby more or less torn between the two women in his life. He dodges the flat-out question he gets from Veronica – “Have you ever cheated on me?” – and it’s clear Allen wants to keep that ambiguous from both the characters and the audience. Café Society is full of typical Woody Allen themes – including people falling in love with different members of the same family (which of course happened to him in real life as well!) – and it’s narrated by Allen himself, though since his voice has become old and gravelly I didn’t recognize it at first and wondered why Allen wasn’t narrating it himself. It’s the kind of bittersweet comedy Allen has always been good at, though Charles confessed that he had forgotten how dark a movie it is – especially in depicting Ben’s crimes, including one murder which I found myself wishing Allen would have depicted off-screen, Val Lewton-style, instead of having the character disappear and then a flashback showing Ben actually kill him (in a barbershop after the man has just got a shave, a possible homage to the very first all-talkie, Warner Bros.’ 1928 film The Lights of New York). I quite liked Café Society even though there’s still a rather icky feeling about watching a Woody Allen movie right now.