'Cassandra's Dream'

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BY JAN STUART | jan.stuart@newsday.com

January 18, 2008

When Woody Allen bounded into the 2005 Cannes Film Festival with his new British thriller, "Match Point," it was as if he had discovered the elixir of youth. He loved working in England so much, confided the New York filmmaker with good-neighbor vigor, that he had decided to do his next picture there as well.

Allen would follow "Match Point" with not one but two more thrillers set in and around London. Like the first, "Scoop" and "Cassandra's Dream" pivot on murder and retribution, a theme that Allen had tackled with disconcerting ambiguity in his 1989 film "Crimes and Misdemeanors." Is it any wonder that an artist as obsessed with questions of mortality as Allen should have found his new lease on life with movies about death?

The third and darkest of Allen's British crime trilogy, "Cassandra's Dream" abandons the upper-crust world of the first two films for a lower middle-class milieu. It still manages to invoke many of the same character types and plot tropes, however, remixing and matching elements from the first two films as if he were determined to get it just right. It's written with exacting attention to character, but the impression that lingers is that of an artist clutching fast to yesterday's inspirations.

Allen's protagonists are two tightly knit brothers with contrasting strategies for improving their humble lot. A fledgling wheeler-dealer, Ian (Ewan McGregor) endeavors to put together big real estate investment deals while trading up with his girlfriends, throwing over a waitress for a flirtatious, up-and-coming stage actress (Hayley Atwell). Terry (a weepy Colin Farrell), a body-shop repairman with a sweet, live-in girlfriend (Sally Hawkins) and compulsive attachment to dog-race gambling, loses small fortunes as rapidly as he makes them.

Recalling Willy Loman's sons, Biff and Happy, the brothers nurture their dreams with thoughts of a much-vaunted but mostly absent uncle Howard (Tom Wilkinson), an L.A.-based businessman whose prosperity is a running source of tension between their mother (the incomparable Clare Higgins) and struggling restaurateur father (John Benfield). While Ian ratchets up plans for a big real estate deal and Terry smarts from a devastating racetrack loss, the uncle appears on the scene like a white knight with very deep pockets. Uncle Howard is happy to come to their rescue, but not before they abandon all scruples to help bail him out of a jam.

Wilkinson's deft transition from benign role model to the devil incarnate is one of the few touches of high comedy in "Cassandra's Dream," whose ineluctably grim course is presaged by throwaway references to "Bonnie and Clyde" and Greek tragedy. Allen intends this to be his own contemporary spin on the familial Sturm und Drang of the Greeks; coming so closely on the heels of Sidney Lumet's bruising fraternal antics in "Before the Devil Knows You're Dead," however, "Cassandra's Dream" goes down like Sophocles Lite.

Allen's most persuasive character resides outside the family circle: the ambitious and narcissistic Angela. Atwell feels a tad lightweight in the part, which is a shame. As was the case with an earlier purveyor of suspense - Alfred Hitchcock - Woody Allen movies suffer without women of a certain size and afterglow at their center.

CASSANDRA'S DREAM (PG-13). Another intimate British thriller from Woody Allen, this one starring Ewan McGregor and Colin Farrell as a two hapless brothers who get mixed up in a family-inspired crime. Allen generates bona fide suspense from the nuanced, character-driven script, but the denouement seems so moralistically preordained that it ends up falling flat. 1:45 (thematic elements, some sexual material and brief violence). At area theaters. Coming soon to Huntington's Cinema Arts Centre.

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'Cassandra's Dream'

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