Reseña de Wonder Wheel - El hilo Coney Island de Woody Allen evita toda la diversión de la feria

Set in 1950s Coney Island and starring Kate Winslet and Justin Timberlake, Allen’s tragi-melodrama is beautifully shot but joyless

Woody Allen’s latest film – his productivity actually renders that critical phrase obsolete, even as it is typed out – is a brittle, strained and verbose tragi-melodrama set in New York’s decaying Coney Island resort in the 1950s, or an eerily exact clone of that place on another planet. It appears to pastiche an O’Neill play or a production-line studio picture from Hollywood’s golden age. There is lots of expository dialogue and characters saying lines like: “I’ve become consumed with jealousy!”

In Allen’s heyday, its premise might have functioned as the subplot or showcase for a much fizzier central comedy situation, though even here there are flashes of fun, as we repeatedly cut away to a small pyromaniac boy whose hobby periodically jolts the movie out of its somnolent seriousness, and finally tints the action with mysterious dread.