Soldier boy, I kept my conscience clean.
Woody Allen’s Vicky Cristina Barcelona is not nearly his worst film, and I wouldn’t even call it a bad film. It’s definitely a long step down from his top-tier work, though — an airy travelogue, a often charming but schematic wafer of a film whose use of simple dichotomy as a crutch becomes grating. (That and Woody’s long-standing disgust with shallow social climbers, which gets a thorough and thoroughly annoying airing-out in the one-note character of Doug, Vicky’s vapid fiancee.) That said, I might have liked it better had I caught it in a theater last summer, since it’s a perfect summer-style entertainment — light, fizzy stuff that makes a play for the Under the Tuscan Sun crowd without losing its innate Woodyness. Despite the outward cheer, you can sense his presence all over the place, from the upscale neurotic intellectualism that is the default mode of conversation to the carefully ironic voiceover to the perfectly Allenesque last scene, which puts me in mind of the old joke about the two elderly women in the Catskills. Also, I cannot fully dislike any film that posits Scarlett Johannson as an agent of chaos, turning everything she touches to shit and misery.
