A Rainy Day In New York (2019)

Woody Allen's much troubled latest romantic comedy A Rainy Day in New York is finally available on bluray. The movie gained notoriety when its distributors Amazon refused to release the film in response to Allen being accused (once again) by his daughter of molest, an accusation that he was acquitted by the courts many years back. The movie was apparently never released in the USA and only overseas. Its main actor young up and rising star Timothee Chalamet even publicly disavow Allen by saying he would donate his salary from the movie to charity! Another example where the USA routinely practice the current new found freedom of persecuting people as guilty without trial.

I have always been a fan of Woody Allen movies even though some may say that he makes the same movie over and over again under different titles and with different stars. Sadly, Allen is clearly not in his usual form in A Rainy Day in New York. The film is tedious and his usual interesting characters are just plain boring here. Right at the start we hear a voice over by Timothee Chalamet rambling away his adolescent predicament in typical Woody Allen dialogue and sounding like a poorer version of Woody Allen in the process. He is joined shortly by his girl friend played by Ellen Fanning who rambles on in a similar fashion for much of the rest of the movie. Surely this is not how real people in America actually talk today!! The movie is supposed to be set in present times. This fundamental issue simply pulls the movie down. Not even the usual star power of supporting characters played by such actors like Jude Law, Liev Schreiber and Selena Gomez can help as their characters too come across as unbelievable caricature of some semblance of real people. The whole movie feels like a really bad imitation of what a Woody Allen movie is. I would say the main actors Timothee and Elle did not do the movie any justice and gave what I feel were their personal worst performance of their career here.

At the end of the day, the drama and scandal that plagued the movie was more interesting that the movie itself. My sympathies to Woody Allen as he has to deal with his child molest accusation again and again even though the matter was settled by the courts. Even more disheartening is the number of actors coming out to condemn him after they had acted in his films and raved about his talents and honour of being cast in one of his films. Only a few actors openly came to his defense demonstrating what true friendship is. It's a pity this film wasn't good. It would have otherwise been a nice form of refute to the nay sayers had this been anything like any of Allen's many masterpieces of the past. Dare we hope for more from Allen in the future?