Review of You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger (2010) by Shiira — 28 Oct 2010

You will meet a grown-up Lloyd Dobler in Woody Allen's "Bullets Over Broadway". It's after hours, but David Shayne(John Cusack), the man, has an urgent question he needs to pose toward the woman he still loves.

Ellen, who had supported her bohemian lover through thick and thin, waiting patiently for him to pop the question, now lives with Sheldon, David's best friend, after the sham playwright left her for his leading lady, the legendary Helen Sinclair.

From outside their apartment, on the stage of real life, a deserted borough street, with the moonlight, a spotlight suffused with humility, shining down on him, he asks Ellen, after running all the way home from the theater, in the wake of his first Broadway success, if she loved him "as the artist or as the man?" The long-suffering girlfriend replies, "I could love a man if he's not a real artist, but I couldn't love an artist if he's not a real man.

" If that's the case, then David is her man; he's no artist, albeit a better man than the one we meet at the film's outset, who had seconded Sheldon's bombastic assertion, with all the hubris of an intellectual living amongst other intellectuals, sounding boards all, in Greenwich Village, insulated from the great unwashed: the philistines and the illiterate, whose lives, were one of them caught in a fire, wouldn't be assigned the same value as the original of a Shakespeare manuscript, and not worth saving, if it came down to either/or, in both men's estimations.

Presiding over a collection of writers, painters, and other assorted a**holes, Sheldon proclaims, "The artist creates his own moral universe." How has this manifesto changed over the years. "Bullets Over Broadway", when released in 1994, was still very much a fruitful period for this longtime writer/director, who followed-up the well-received drama "Husbands and Wives" with a black comedy that more than sustained his reputation as America's pre-eminent auteur.

Prolific then as he is now, but without the drawback of diminishing returns, the filmmaker, as a slightly-less older man, at a juncture in his career, brimming with confidence that his muse would never desert him, had the luxury of being magnanimous, and it trickled into his writing, as is the case, when David castigates Cheech, the mafia goon with a gift for dramaturgy, for killing Violet, the gun moll, who in the ghost writer's estimation, deserved to die because she was a terrible actress.

It's Cheech, not David, in the long-run, who, ironically enough, champions Sheldon's credo. Fifteen years later, after a string of lukewarm offerings, the beleaguered filmmaker, now 74, subconsciously addresses this enduring creative slump in "You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger", by revisiting the central theme from "Bullets Over Broadway", where Roy, a novelist with only one good story in him, plays like an inversion of Cusack's playwright.

Like David Shayne, Roy(Josh Brolin) discovers that an outsider, a regular at his weekly poker game, Henry Strangler, just happens to be a naive artist of the highest order, a genius. (Don't forget that Cheech liked to shoot crap.

) Strangler is a ghost writer too, literally, when Roy gets wind of his friend's involvement in a fatal car crash, therefore giving him the licence to create his own moral universe, and in this universe of compromised ethics, he steals the naive artist's masterpiece.

The novel-to-be, according to the people in Roy's publishing house, is a return-to-form, after the disappointment of his last manuscript(criticized for being so similar to another in-house book they were reading, just as overfamiliarity is a cavilling objection to this filmmaker's late-period body of work), an assessment which pleases the novelist.

The writer-director, under the microscope, even now, since the scandal broke around the time just before "Husbands and Wives" hit theaters nationwide, to some degree, must be at wit's end to deliver another "Annie Hall", or "Manhattan", films with the sort of insight into human nature that may be forevermore out of this once-heroic filmmaker's reach.

The lavish praise accorded to Roy's new novel is the sort of buzz that the three-time Academy Award-winner hasn't experienced in decades. The new novel is a metaphor, Roy's transgression is a metaphor, when both translated into filmic terms, plays like a black fantasy in the recess of the filmmaker's mind that covets the opportunity to shoot another zeitgeist movie, over anybody's dead body.

As it turns out, there was a mix-up. Strangler is alive, in a coma, and there's a good chance that he'll be alive and kicking, soon enough. When Roy leaves the hospital room, there's no telling what the artist with his own moral universe will do.

The title, which doubles as a prophecy, may be Strangler's prophecy, who may indeed meet a tall, dark stranger, and that stranger may be death.