Originally published in December 2017.

Since Midnight in Paris, Woody Allen has ridden a different wave from any other working filmmaker, bridging the wide gap between Hollywood prestige and vulgar auteurism to fascinating effect. With some exceptions, his narratives sound like typical awards fare—a young romance set in 1930s Los Angeles, a professor’s budding friendship with an intelligent coed, a woman simultaneously going through a divorce and mental breakdown—but their friendliness to Oscar & Co. tends to be frustrated by exaggerated performances, rushed pacing in scenes that a Morten Tyldum type would linger in, skeptical takes on magical realism, and a metered but hefty use of his own brand of screwball logic. These seven films have typically explored the nature of fiction creation by paradoxically layering clear artificiality (a practical uncanny valley of performance and set design) with an emotional honesty that ranges from the casually plaintive to the violently desperate.

I hesitate to refer to Wonder Wheel as an amalgam of Allen’s prior several films, as that might detract from its own originality and the uniqueness of the ideas that it explores, but something from each of them can be found in the latest, ranging from the Ninotchka-esque cinematographic flourishes in Café Society to To Rome with Love’s brilliant use of a diegetic character as semi-omniscient narrator. Justin Timberlake’s Mickey Rubin, an aspiring playwright, introduces the film to the audience in the opening moments as a melodrama, warning us to expect exaggerated characters. Perhaps Allen’s idea of a wry inside joke, Mickey proves to be right once we meet the rest of the primary dramatis personae: Ginny Rannell (Kate Winslet), an aspiring human being stuck in a prison of a marriage; her husband Humpty (Jim Belushi), a blue-collar recovered alcoholic whose kindness is always far more sincere than it seems; her stepdaughter Carolina (Juno Temple), a moll on the run looking to get back on track with an ordinary course of life; and her son Richie (Jack Gore), a preteen whose compulsive pyromania is a major source of both comedy and anxiety throughout the film. That each of these characters is essentially a walking trope with only circumstantial details setting them apart from other mid-century, mid-Atlantic families in films ranging from West Side Story to Jersey Boys is all part of the Allenian course: Wonder Wheel is less concerned with the specifics of these characters’ lives and passions than with how a fictional feature film can earn emotional veracity in the first place. Much in the film feels familiar, allowing for the machinations to be more easily exposed.

To an extent, this is aided by Mickey’s frequent narrational interludes that link Wonder Wheel to an oral storytelling tradition. Once immersed in a narrative world, the viewer is reminded—explicitly almost as often as implicitly—to never lose sight of the fiction of the thing, and to treat the film’s characters and events as manufactured phenomena within a manufactured universe. Ginny and the others in her circle lose their humanity before they are even introduced. Where To Rome with Love let most of its various tales play out before reminding the viewer of their inherent fakeness through association with cautionary fables (some nearly Aesopian) or the introduction of fourth wall-breaking tools, Wonder Wheel ensures that we do not get caught up in any inferences regarding the onscreen images’ veracity.

This is not to say that the viewer is prohibited from being emotionally affected by Ginny’s story: one much-appreciated side effect of these exaggerated performances is that the characters’ emotional states are of prime importance. Their lack of naturalism might irritate some, but it is apparent that we are supposed to care about the film’s events insofar as they impact the characters and their psyches (Ginny especially, by virtue of her role as the protagonist, though Belushi, Temple, and Timberlake do great work with their characters as well—more on Gore’s Richie to come). Recall the pained, melodramatic expression and slow movement of Winslet’s hand hanging up the phone as she decides to not warn another character of impending doom. Where a more Pialat-Rohmerian performer might use subtler facial tics or casual glances to impart the same idea, Winslet’s hyperbolic gestures demonstrate that even if she is not a real person, she still has a real person’s thoughts, and our reading of the scene’s gravitas is intricately linked with our grasp of the internal conflict at hand. The artificiality lays bare the narrative’s morals and truths while reminding us just how these ideas are transmitted. Special mention may be given to Vittorio Storaro’s photography work on this point, the variation of lighting and color—ostensibly caused by the amusement park at which most of the film takes place—clearly timed to match the flow of some of the more important conversations. There is something inelegant and, frankly, awkward about the way that sudden changes from warm reds to cold blues are choreographed with changes in Winslet’s demeanor or a conversation’s turn, but as a means to demonstrate the cogs that provide the framework for filmmaking in general, the device further reveals Wonder Wheel’s dedication to imparting an understanding of how fiction (movie magic) can impart fact (the truths that the best movies reveal).

What then of Richie, whose relative emotionlessness and kinetic variability (he is usually introduced standing still before abruptly taking flight) mark him as separate from the other characters, and whose narrative course is almost a wholly segregated subplot? He might be Allen’s attempt at providing the film with another trope character, the harmless nuisance played for comic relief—think Nick in Kiss Me Deadly or Arthur in A Serious Man—but I prefer to think of him as a genuine cry, a manifestation of a fascination with disorder that leads to self-destructive tendencies. More importantly, Richie’s evident fear (he never seems to enjoy the fires that he creates) reveals his lack of understanding with why he feels the way that he does, as understandable an emotion among pubescent boys as any. If Wonder Wheel’s only true human, the only character whose expressions we take at face value rather than as they relate to his fictionality, is the confused arsonist, then see it as a clever cosmic joke.