By Armond White

Cassandra's Dream
Directed by Woody Allen


Too bad the Weinstein Company bumped Cassandra’s Dream’s opening to this week. It almost joined last year’s cavalcade of obnoxious films that roused most critics to proclaim the disappointing 2007 as a great movie year. So many grim, drab, hateful, anti-human movies were released (prompting the Times’ A.O. Scott and Manohla Dargis to giggle, “It was a great year to be an evil American”), that trendy critics were like pigs in slop. And Cassandra’s Dream is prime Woody Allen muck.

Allen continues his murder-ballad theme begun with 1989’s Crimes and Misdemeanors on through to Match Point and Scoop, this time casting Colin Farrell and Ewan McGregor as British brothers who fulfill their Americanized uncle’s (Tom Wilkinson) wish to kill a business competitor. Farrell needs to get out of gambling debt, McGregor wants to impress a vain, social-climbing young actress. These brothers are far from the brothas in First Sunday. Allen excuses their murderous capitulation, just as 2007 movies from Zodiac to Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead and Sweeney Todd, all glamorized killing as the modern way.

How did Allen go from an inspired modern comic to a pretend expert on homicide? Once again, Allen cobbles from A Place in the Sun, a great movie about the compulsions of desire and greed. But Allen ignores George Stevens’ heartfelt critique of capitalist habit and pretends that murder is basic to the human soul. He unjokingly makes a misanthropic valentine. Allen’s moral retardation suggests a culture-wide pathology. At one point he tries blaming the brothers’ crime on Bush. “The army [profits] men who are up to here in corruption,” McGregor says to Farrell. This is far from Chaplin’s ironic excuse for serial killing in Monsieur Verdoux. In Cassandra’s Dream (named after the rich man’s sloop Farrell and McGregor covet), Allen proposes “LIFE IS NOTHING IF NOT TOTALLY IRONIC.” He’s playing catch-up to David Fincher, P.T. Anderson and Neil LaBute. Or did those young Turks take their twisted cues from Allen?

It’s wearying to watch Allen’s murder obsession when he doesn’t know how to dramatize morality. The brothers and their women show little moral range. When Farrell affectingly portrays a man tormented by guilt, Allen quickly dispenses with his brotherly anguish. This punishment overlaps the dysfunctional family nihilism of movies like Savages and Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead (or The Devil Already Knows as a colleague quipped). “All you have in this life that you can count on is family and don’t you forget it,” barks the diabolical uncle. His degradation goes to why critics dismissed Wes Anderson’s trustful family feeling in The Darjeeling Limited. Allen specializes in killing without conscience. Cassandra’s Dream isn’t prophecy, it’s decadence.