A Rainy Day in New York (Gravier Product6ons, Perdido Productions, Signature Entertainment, 2018, released 2019)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Afterwards I had planned to run Monogram’s last Wong film, Phantom of Chinatown, which I’ve long had an affection for if only because Charlie Chan’s former Number One Son, Keye Luke, played the role (what a concept – a Chinese detective actually played by a Chinese actor!), but my husband Charles had other ideas. He opened a page from Amazon.com to search for videos on their Prime service and found one in A Rainy Day in New York, written and directed by Woody Allen in 2018 but not released until 2019 because Allen got caught up in the #MeToo witchhunt (which, to its credit, did turn up a few bad people, notably Harvey Weinstein and Bill Cosby). Personally, I don’t believe the accusations against Woody Allen – I think they’re the fallout of his bitter breakup with Mia Farrow and his subsequent entry into a romantic relationship with Farrow’s adopted daughter,Soon-Yi Previn (which sounds sick enough on its own without Mia Farrow and her son Ronan gilding the lily with allegations of child sexual abuse against him).

A Rainy Day in New York is a charming little film featuring college students Gatsby Wells (Timothée Chalamet, whom Charles and I had never been particularly impressed with before but turned in a quite splendid performance under Allen’s direction) and Ashleigh Enfield (Elle Fanning). They met at Yardley University and formed a relationship. Ashleigh is a fiercely ambitious journalism student who lands a job on the college newspaper and gets an assignment to interview famous movie director Roland Pollard (Liev Schreiber). Gatsby isn’t very ambitious about anything and is sort of breezing his way through college without any clear idea of what he wants to do with his education. About the only thing he appears to be any good at is gambling; as the film opens he’s just won a lot of money in a high-stakes poker game and he decides to use ot to treat himself and Ashleigh to a romantic weekend in New York, where she’s supposed to interview Pollard. Only when she actually meets the famous director, he invites her to watch a screening of his latest film,which he’s more or less completed but is acutely dissatisfied with and wants to retire from filmmaking after it’s released.

Pollard goes off on a drunken tear after the screening and Ashleigh hooks up with the film’s writer, Ted Davidoff (Jude Law, older and definitely the worse for wear). Ted spots his wife walking into their building with his best friend, Lipschitz, and immediately concludes – correctly – that the two are having an affair. Later Ashleigh hooks up with superstar actor Francisco Vega (Diego Luna), whom Gatsby derisively refers to as “James Dean without the acting chops,” and ends up in a rendezvous with him that gets short-circuited in the best French farce manner when his girlfriend, an actress, comes home unexpectedly after her own film wraps two days earlier than scheduled. Ashleigh is forced to flee in her underwear and a stolen overcoat from Vega’s closet, with nothing between them. Meanwhile, Gatsby is walking through New York City in the rain delivering a Woody Allen-esque narration of how beautiful it all is. He connects with an old friend of his who is directing a student film and wants Gatsby to play a small part in it, which Gatsby agrees to do as long as he didn’t have to speak any dialogue. His role consists of passionately kissing Chan (Selena Gomez), who by a typically Woody Allen coincidence is the younger sister of Gatsby’s former girlfriend and who always had a crush on him. When Gatsby returns to his hotel room he sees a TV news report showing Ashleigh getting out of Vega’s sports car amid TV-tabloid speculation over who the new woman in Vega’s life is.

Disconsolately, Gatsby walks through the streets of New York, occasionally dropping into piano bars (it’s been established that he’s a fan of cocktail-lounge music and the film is scored throughout with light jazz versions of standards, divided between old records by the great Erroll Garner and new ones by Conal Fowkes) and ending up in an even higher-stakes poker game whose organizers had invited his brother Hunter (Will Rogers, apparently no relation). Gatsby shows up to the poker game in a morose funk over the news reports about Ashleigh’s date with Vega, and he seems to be headed for the fate of most on-screen gamblers – losing all his money and ending up broke – only instead of taking us there, Allen makes him a $15,000 winner. Gatsby uses $5,000 of his poker winnings to hire a hooker to pretend to be the missing Ashleigh to show up at the big gala party being given by his parents (Jonathan Hogan and Cherry Jones), only [spoiler alert!] Gatsby’s mom immediately recognizes the woman as a prostitute because she used to be one herself and that’s how she met Gatsby’s dad. (This suggests that Pretty Woman could have been a far more interesting film if Allen had directed it.)

In the end Ashleigh and Gatsby reconnect and take a carriage ride together in Central Park, only instead of the two of them getting back together – which is what I was expecting and hoping for – Gatsby tells Ashleigh that whine she can go back to Yardley, he’s dropping out and staying in New York, and in the end Gatsby hooks up with Chan instead (reflecting Allen’s long-term interest, both in previous films and in his own life, for having relationships with different members of the same family). I disliked the ending, especially since Ashleigh had walked out on three powerful men who wanted to make her their lover to stay with Gatsby and I thought her dedication deserved to be rewarded, but overall A Rainy Day in New York is a first-rate Woody Allen comedy-drama whose only real failing is the strong sense of dèja vu. Time and time again Allen seems to be going for situations that have worked for him in the past, often to better effect (can you say Annie Hall? Manhattan? Hannah and Her Sisters?), and much of A Rainy Day in New York seems to be like a Woody Allen greatest-hits collection with little or nothing new to offer. But then again it would be surprising if someone of Allen’s age and notoriety (both good and bad) was going to break new ground in the autumnal years of his career.