'Cassandra's Dream': Woody Allen's nightmare of a film

By Chris Kaltenbach | Sun reporter

January 18, 2008

(C-) Of Woody Allen's recent films, both Anything Else (2003) and Match Point (2005) showed welcome signs of life, hints of virtuosity and resources yet untapped. So let's assume those, not the tired and resolutely uninvolving Cassandra's Dream, represent Allen at the dawn of the 21st century.

Allen's latest, his 42nd effort as a director, is the work of an artist devoid of ideas and energy. Perfunctorily staged and lazily written, it comes to life in only the briefest of spurts, usually when the ever-reliable Tom Wilkinson is on-screen.

Ewan McGregor and Colin Farrell are British brothers Ian and Terry, dreamers forever thinking big but settling for small. As the film opens, they're overpaying for a secondhand sailboat that they refurbish and christen Cassandra's Dream. Unlike the mythical Cassandra, however, the brothers can't see into the future. In fact, they can barely see past the present, which is how they end up desperate for 200,000 pounds. Terry has run up huge gambling debts, while Ian wants to move to California with his shallow actress girlfriend (Hayley Atwell) and invest in a surefire hotel deal (as if California needs more hotels).

Turns out they're not the only members of the family in need. A plastic surgeon with a thriving L.A. practice, their rich uncle (Wilkinson) comes calling, and it turns out that he, too, is facing a crisis. And so he suggests a bargain to the boys: They take care of his problem - a business partner set to testify against him - and he'll take care of theirs.

What emerges from Cassandra's Dream is a cross between a lecture on family values and a rumination on what happens when people turn off their moral compasses. It's territory Allen has visited before, in movies with far more exciting results (Hannah and Her Sisters explored what happens when families lean on each other too heavily).

Worse, for long stretches of Cassandra's Dream, nothing happens; the movie is about 80 percent setup, 20 percent waiting for the other shoe to drop. And it's hard to think of an Allen film with so few memorable characters - as in none. Allenophiles will get a kick out of the writer-director's conflicted take on California, presented as both a fertile land of dreams and a bleak landscape of hollow promise. But even they are going to be hard-pressed to find much intrigue beyond that.

Doubtless, Allen has some good pictures left in him. The sooner he, and we, move beyond Cassandra's Dream, the better.

>>>Cassandra's Dream (The Weinstein Co.) Starring Ewan McGregor, Colin Farrell. Directed by Woody Allen. Rated PG-13. Time 108 minutes.

chris.kaltenbach@baltsun.com