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Firth, Stone flirt in Woody Allen's 'Magic'

Colin Firth plays a Houdini-like magician trying to debunk a mystic in Woody Allen's new romcom "Magic in the Moonlight."

Colin Firth, Marcia Gay Harden, Hamish Linklater and Emma Stone in "Magic in the Moonlight"
A romantic comedy about an Englishman brought in to help unmask a possible swindle. Personal and professional complications ensue.
Colin Firth, Marcia Gay Harden, Hamish Linklater and Emma Stone in "Magic in the Moonlight" A romantic comedy about an Englishman brought in to help unmask a possible swindle. Personal and professional complications ensue.Read more

WHEN LAST HE visited the subject of mystics, Woody Allen gave us the curdled "You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger."

In that movie, magical thinking was for the small-minded, and happiness itself was for the desperate and delusional.

"Magic in the Moonlight" has caught Allen in an improved "Midnight in Paris" mood, and he's made a better movie, or at least one that gives us a less cynical take on the possibility of earthly contentment.

There's hope, he suggests, even for misanthropes and skeptics. Here, the skeptic in question is Stanley (Colin Firth), a Roaring Twenties, Houdini-like magician in the Houdini-like business of debunking mystics.

A fellow magician (Simon McBurney) calls Firth to the South of France to study Sophie (Emma Stone), a young woman with the purported gift of contacting the dead. Suspicious fact: She exclusively contacts the dead relatives of rich people, off whom she sponges.

Stanley investigates, and immediately notices two things. She's very good, and very beautiful. He can detect no fraud, which he attributes not to mysticism but to her huckster's skill, which he admires in spite of himself. In fact, he admires everything about her.

They flirt, and their scripted banter advances the romance as it serves for a proxy discussion of the movie's themes, science versus the supernatural. In time, Firth comes to wonder whether romance is magic enough for his disillusioned world.

This is generous for Allen, who can be a bit of a sourpuss. But it probably worked better on the page. Stone and Firth have a strange lack of chemistry, and the movie itself has a staged feel. It's set in the 1920s, and sometimes feels as though it were filmed in the 1920s. You often get a single vantage point, actors stroll in front of the lens in long, talky takes, very little cutting.

It's interesting that Allen (a former magician) makes the link here between craft and illusion - the filmmaker's art. He has one good sight gag here, and it gets the movie biggest laugh, deservedly so. He needs to practice his visual sleight of hand.

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