Film

Maybe, like many Woody Allen fans, you’d been feeling let down by his increasingly spotty output over the years. Then came Match Point, and the combination of Scarlett Johansson and the London air seemed to rejuvenate the director’s creative faculties. (A theory that Match Point’s follow-up, Scoop, killed stone-cold.) And perhaps that Point brought you back to 1989’s Crimes and Misdemeanors, a spiritual twin that proved all those hours Allen spent mulling over Russian novels and Bergman flicks weren’t in vain. An idea began to take hold: What if his talents really are best served by po-faced drama? Good-bye, comic nebbishism. Hello, philosophical hand-wringing and a second heyday.

It takes mere minutes of Cassandra’s Dream to realize that suspenseful seriousness isn’t going to save you from a sense of diminishing returns. The plot, about two brothers (McGregor, Farrell) who commit murder in order to continue basking in bourgeois pleasures, indulges in high-art notions of fate and favor, guilt and conscience, crime and punishment. But not even a commissioned Philip Glass score, aspiring for Bernard Herrmann–esque gravity, can stave off a stilted quality to the whole endeavor. The leads both speak with a somnambulistic staginess, the dialogue feels translated from English into a foreign language, then back to English, and the denouement aims for Greek tragedy and misses. Yes, it’s admittedly better than some of Allen’s DOA comedies of the past decade. To think that his weak attempt at a morality play represents some return to form, however, is a pipe dream.