Decidedly creaky and more than a little creepy, Woody Allen’s “Magic in the Moonlight” revisits a longtime favorite trope of the 78-year-old director — the younger woman smitten with a misanthropic older man.
In decades gone by, the older man would be Woody himself, and there was a time this actually worked brilliantly in what I’d consider his masterpiece, “Manhattan.” But that was then and this is now.
For all the Mr. Darcy-ish charm Woody’s latest surrogate, Oscar winner Colin Firth, can still summon up, it’s hard to believe Allen’s current muse, played by Emma Stone, would put up with his insults for 10 minutes.
Oh, Woody tries to trick us by setting his story on a beautifully realized vision of the 1920s French Riviera, where Firth is a famous magician (who performs in now-cringe-worthy “Oriental” drag) asked to expose Stone’s spiritualist.
She’s busy cleaning out a wealthy British widow (Oscar nominee Jacki Weaver) under the watchful of Stone’s mother (Oscar winner Marcia Gay Harden).
But don’t be fooled — this is essentially the same musty dynamic as Woody’s atrocious “Whatever Works” (2009) — where Evan Rachel Wood fell under the spell of, uh, Larry David — except with better actors.
Unfortunately, they’re saddled with such paper-thin characters that none of them are able to perform the miracle that Cate Blanchett performed last year when she turned Woody’s fantasy version of mental illness in “Blue Jasmine” into a Best Actress Oscar.
Stone is a formidable actress, but Allen has directed her to smile ethereally while being Firth’s punching bag, which of course endears her to the older fellow.
She can’t quite make this believable, even though the writer-director has provided her with a rich ukulele-strumming ninny of a fiancé to help make Firth look like a plausible alternative.
Prominently billed Harden and Weaver have shockingly little to do, but British acting legend Eileen Atkins does some mighty heavy lifting as an aunt whose function is to humanize Firth’s unpleasant character.
The closest “Magic in the Moonlight” comes to an actual romantic moment comes when Stone and Firth duck into an observatory to get out of the rain.
You’re instantly reminded that Woody handled this sort of scene so, so much better 34 years ago in “Manhattan.”