Cassandra's Dream

Rating PG13 Genre thriller Starring Colin Farrell, Ewan McGregor, Tom Wilkinson, Hayley Atwell, Sally Hawkins Directed by Woody Allen Publisher The Weinstein Company External Links Official Cassandra's Dream Website

What is it about London that brings out the beast in Woody Allen?

If his latest London-set drama, Cassandra's Dream —about down-on-their-luck brothers who agree to kill a stranger—doesn't seem quite as amoral and nihilistic as his last London-set drama, Match Point, it's because Allen allowed his Match Point protagonist to literally get away with murder.

In Cassandra's Dream, Allen introduces the brothers: Terry (Colin Farrell), a gambler and a drinker, ekes out a meager living in a car repair shop, while Ian (Ewan MacGregor) works at their father's restaurant with dreams of big-money schemes. The pair reaches the end of its rope after Terry loses all his savings—and then some—at a card game one night.

The brothers' working-class background is shown by their mother (Clare Higgins) constantly sniping at their father (John Benfield) because he never became as successful as her brother, Uncle Howard (Tom Wilkinson). One day, Howard returns home to visit; when Terry and Ian ask him to help them out of their dire financial straits, he returns the favor by asking them to "take care" of someone whose testimony may ruin his career.

As in Match Point, Allen's dramatic tipping point is an alluring femme fatale: it's when Ian meets the beautiful actress Angela Stark (Hayley Atwell)–whose fiery eroticism makes him dream even bigger dreams of moving to California to jumpstart her career–that the seed is planted for the brothers' ultimately fateful decision.

Reminiscent of his previous British murder movie, Allen shot and edited Cassandra's Dream straightforwardly, with scenes unfolding casually, even undramatically. I can see where some people might find it lacking a certain substance or gravitas, although I personally felt that Match Point overplayed its hand: the pivotal image of a ring flying through the air in slow-motion like a tennis ball hitting the net was Woody's Metaphor For Life writ large.

Conversely, the characters in Cassandra's Dream keep discussing their dreams to the point where you may recoil and say, "Enough!" But these are people mired in a dreary reality, and their literal and figurative dreams make for mighty tantalizing conversation. Of course, the boat which the brothers buy (but can't really afford) is named "Cassandra's Dream" after Terry mentions that a dog he bet on at the racetrack was called that. And the denouement—the brothers' expected comeuppance arrives in a most unlikely fashion—seems an earnest attempt to pointedly not out-do the twist that ended Match Point.

The low-key way Allen unfolds his story is part of its dramatic strength—if these characters were speaking another language, this monomaniacal exploration of how otherwise "normal" people can be fatally corrupted would be raved about as a profound indictment of contemporary society. I thought of the films of Michael Haneke at times; but Woody only seems to be getting shrugs in response–could that be why he is making his next film in Spain with Spanish actors?

Allen's filmmaking chops are on impressive display throughout Cassandra's Dream. The London locations are chosen with a far more discerning eye than they were in Match Point, with nary a tourist trap in sight. Again, it's as if Allen refused to repeat the obvious effects that garnered Match Point his best reviews, box office and even award recognition since his '70s and '80s heyday.

As mentioned earlier, scene after scene has a narrow focus, and once its lone point is made, along comes the next. Such a technique of chopping off extraneous material is a welcome diversion, generating a kind of suspense where otherwise there's none. It's only in the pivotal killing sequence that Allen gets visually "fancy": the camera pans away from the deed in progress, as the brothers go through with what they've been so ambivalent about.

Farrell and MacGregor, both with uncanny lower-class accents (and sounding vaguely Liverpudlian to these ears), are perfect brotherly foils for each other's continuing debasement. As their uncle, Wilkinson—as he was in Match Point—is the film's liveliest character, providing frenzied drama during his bizarrely effective rainstorm conversation with the brothers. Newcomer Atwell, a stunning find, plays a thoroughly sexual creature far more persuasively than Scarlett Johansson did in Match Point..

Vilmos Zsigmond's intentionally unassuming photography perfectly mirrors the commonplace nature of the film's drama, characters and locations. What's unfortunate is Philip Glass's music, whose quickly wearying repetitions and mindless rhythmic surges are at odds with the clean, clear elegance of Allen's filmmaking. For a director who has used music by Schubert, Weill, Bach and especially Prokofiev (in Love and Death) to often devastating comic and dramatic effect, this intrusion of Glass on the soundtrack is a major miscalculation—happily, the lone flaw of Cassandra's Dream.