Movie review: 'Cassandra's Dream'

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2 stars (out of four)

Wherever it came from, the visual leitmotif in Woody Allen’s 2005 drama “Match Point”—the tennis ball hitting the tippy-top of the net in slow motion, echoed by a similar shot of the incriminating ring hitting a stone wall—revealed a filmmaker paying attention to something new. The shots really did seem freshly conceived, and in an unusually elegant way they crystallized Allen’s themes of chance and fortune.

Now: Close your eyes and tell me if you remember anything Allen and his cinematographer did with the camera in “Scoop,” which came out last year. Anything to take your mind off the general torpor. Nothing, really.

It’s the same with Allen’s newest, “Cassandra’s Dream,” which exists in a chilly story realm similar to that of “Match Point.” Despite some artfully cool lighting by Vilmos Zsigmond and English location work following on the British heels of “Match Point” and “Scoop,” Allen’s tale of two brothers and their unfortunate ambitions brings a visual lethargy to a pre-exhausted script. Allen never has trouble lining up fine actors to work with him, and it’s always a pleasure to watch Tom Wilkinson (the loose cannon in “Michael Clayton”) put the squeeze on somebody. But Allen needs some new ideas to feed to the performers.

Two London brothers, a gambler and mechanic named Terry (Colin Farrell) and would-be entrepreneur Ian (Ewan McGregor), yearn for a little slip of a pleasure boat to call their own. Glamorous, menacing Uncle Howard (Wilkinson), a plastic surgeon by training, provides the lads with a Faustian bargain they cannot refuse. One dead body later ...

As we know by now, Allen is obsessed with the notion of getting away with murder, mulling over which personalities can shoulder the psychological burden of killing without remorse, while others crumble under the pressure. The problem is, you don’t feel the human sweat and strain in “Cassandra’s Dream,” despite game work from Farrell and McGregor. There are plenty of ideas and themes and no people of distinctive interest to enliven them. The narrative plods along, and when Ian falls for a callow young actress (Hayley Atwell), you can’t help but think: Haven’t we been down this path just two Woody Allen films ago?

mjphillips@tribune.com

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