Review: Magic in the Moonlight

City Paper grade: C+

Woody Allen’s movies come along with the inevitability of allergy season: Some years there’s a beautiful bouquet, and others you’re left bleary-eyed and fuzzy-headed. Magic in the Moonlight isn’t Woody Allen’s worst movie — not by a long shot. But it’s one of his least necessary, the kind that could be wiped from the world’s hard drives with-out anyone raising much of a stink. Disappearing, as it turns out, is a speciality of Stanley (Colin Firth), a magician who beguiles audiences in between-the-wars Europe with his tricks under the guise of the “Oriental” conjurer Wei Ling Soo. Despite the deception inherent in his profession, Stanley is obsessed with unmasking the deceptions of others, especially spiritualists like the American Sophie (Emma Stone), who’s entranced a British dowager (Jacki Weaver) by conveying messages from her late husband. Despite half-hearted attempts to keep his identity secret, Stanley is openly contemptuous of Sophie’s purported abilities, so much so that Allen practically forces us to take her side. Sophie may be a con artist — the movie only briefly holds out the possibility that she isn’t — but she brings people joy, whereas Stanley is a perpetual sourpuss.

At some point, it becomes clear that Magic in the Moonlight is meant to be a romance, despite the evident lack of chemistry between its stars and the fact that Stanley’s behavior merits nothing so much as a swift kick in the balls. Firth finds the character’s sympathetic corners, especially when Allen suggests that his antipathy to those who claim a connection to the unseen world is rooted in a deep desire to believe — he’s like the Fox Mulder of faux-Asian stage magicians. But at its core, the movie seems to believe that a man treating a woman with cruelty and disdain is reason enough to fall for him, which would be revolting if it were put forth with any conviction.