“Rifkin’s Festival” – Nothing to celebrate [MOVIE REVIEW]
Wallace Shawn as Mort Rifkin and Gina Gershon as Sue Rifkin in “Rifkin’s Festival.” Photo courtesy of Gravier Productions and Mediapro Studio.
Dipping back into the “oh woe is me” dramedy of relationship disintegration that he loves so much, writer-director Woody Allen has found a new victim to be his alter ego. Allen has made his fortune, starting when he was a standup comic, mining the schtick of the hapless man reaching above his pay grade for what is usually the equivalent of the shiksa goddess, inevitably losing her because his insecurities are too much to bear rather than because she wants a handsomer, smarter, smoother leading man. Now in his dotage, we should be glad he has, for the most part, stopped taking this role himself in his recent films. But because he’s not done mining this familiar field, he has relied on others to play that role. Until now, the most annoying actor to take on the Allen persona was Jesse Eisenberg in “To Rome with Love” (2012). But Allen has outdone himself with his new emotional doppelganger, Wallace Shawn. Shawn plays Mort Rifkin in Allen’s latest foray into emotional angst, superficiality, and pseudo-intellectualism, “Rifkin’s Festival.”
Mort Rifkin, a professor of film studies and would-be novelist, that is if he ever wrote said novel, has accompanied his beautiful publicist wife Sue to the San Sebastian film festival in Spain. Sue’s major client, Philippe, is a director being lauded at the festival and she is nothing if not diligent in her attention to the handsome Philippe. Mort, critical of everyone and everything, is not a fan of Philippe, whose work he considers banal and isn’t ashamed to pronounce his opinions far and wide, especially in front of Philippe. Initially, Sue’s only sin seems to be vigilantly attending to the needs of her client at the expense of her overly demanding and whiney husband. We’ll leave this at one mention of “whiney” because throughout the film, that’s all Mort does.
Something of a hypochondriac, Mort sees a doctor in town, the beautiful Dr. Jo Rojas and is instantly smitten. She, for god knows what reason, seems equally attracted and they bond. Jo is in an abusive marriage. Her chronically unfaithful husband Paco is an artist but she won’t leave him because, and I’m not kidding here, “You can’t judge an artist by Bourgeois standards.”
Tail between his legs, Mort retreats to his hotel where he is greeted by Sue who suggests they get a divorce. The marriage has been fraying for quite some time and yes, she’s slept with Philippe. When they return to New York she’ll move out. She doesn’t want anything but her clothes, her books, the Rauschenberg painting and the Andy Warhol silk screen. Who needs a couch when you have two extraordinarily expensive pieces of art, no doubt the only things of value in the apartment. It is with this scene that Allen attempts to rehabilitate his whiney (sorry but there was no other word) protagonist who has just been turned down by the woman of his dreams (or maybe it’s the woman he dreams of) by making Sue entirely selfish and superficial, something she had not been. Using the standard set-up punchline, she admits to having slept with Philippe once… well then there was that other time…and a third if you’re counting the time when (fill in the blank). This particular exchange was not earned; it seemed to be an afterthought that would show the hapless Mort in a more sympathetic light. But then most of the exchanges in the film weren’t earned.
Wallace Shawn as Mort Rifkin and Elena Anaya as Jo in “Rifkin’s Festival.” Photo courtesy of Gravier Productions and Mediapro Studio.
Because the film takes place in Spain, much of the cast is Spanish. And therein lies the rub. With one exception, the foreign actors all have trouble with the dialogue. Their lack of fluency in English makes them sound as though they were awkwardly reading the script rather than acting and feeling it. This is especially evident with Elena Anaya who plays Jo. In Spain she is a revered actress with the awards to prove it but here she often stumbles over the rhythm of the lines which has a tendency to slow things considerably. It’s not just her. Louis Garrel, the actor portraying the very dreamy Philippe, has a similar problem with English. It is unreasonable to expect non-English speakers to have native fluency but the words they are speaking are not organic to what they can express or should be feeling. Even Christophe Waltz stumbles before he finds the right cadence. There is one exception and it is notable. Sergi Lopez (“Pan’s Labyrinth,” “Dirty Pretty Things,” “A Friend Like Harry”) who plays Paco, the artist husband of Jo, is marvelous. He is a triple threat, having appeared in award-winning films in English, Spanish, and French. His grasp of the rapaciousness and egocentricity of his character allows him to get away with over-the-top behavior that injects some of the only true humor in the film. By true, I mean that it comes from the character rather than the setup punchline jokes that line the dialogue of the leads.
And let us not forget the forced homages that Allen pays to film makers of the past by injecting Mort or his wife into dream sequences straight out of the famous films that made up his film course, starting with black and white footage of the childhood Mort holding a sled labeled Rose Budnick. If you’re keeping track, besides Orson Welles, he will create scenes out of Fellini, Buñuel, Bergman (twice), Truffaut, Goddard, and himself (with a sly reference to “Radio Days.”). Too clever by half. Actually there was one amusing sequence where Christoph Waltz appears as Death from Bergman’s “The Seventh Seal.” He sets up a chessboard to play with Mort and advises him that he needs to prepare for the end, just not yet. If he changes his diet and exercises they won’t meet for quite some time.
That Gina Gershon as Sue and Steve Gutenberg as Mort’s brother are the best actors in the film is damning with faint praise. That is rather unfair because Gershon finds depth and believability in her character until Allen unceremoniously writes it out in her last scene.
The elephant in the room is Wallace Shawn as Mort Rifkin. On a good day I find Shawn annoying as an actor. His whiney (I know, there’s that word again), nasal voice is like fingernails on a chalkboard. But here, sounding like he’s reading a teleprompter, he’s even more irritating than Woody Allen playing another version of what people assume is himself. By Allen’s own admission, he’s not nearly as nice as the insufferable characters he plays (and continues to write).
It’s been a long time since Woody Allen has written and directed a film of substance, humorous or otherwise. If this movie is any indication, the drought continues.
Opening Friday January 28 at the Landmark on Pico.