Woody Allen has outdone himself at age 80. Not only has he kept up his blistering pace of pushing out a movie a year, but this time he's really delivered two films, only loosely connected by jangling neurosis.
Cafe Society, starring Jesse Eisenberg as the sweet but awkward Allen stand-in, is a meandering look at lost love that is split between the highball-sipping, fur-wearing elite nightclubs of Manhattan and Hollywood in the 1930s.
We never spend enough time in either location to really care about anyone there and so the film comes off disjointed and unconnected.
Allen seems both intrigued and repulsed by all the glamour and never keeps a consistent tone, just as his leading man stumbles trying to achieve coherence, alternating in every other scene from stuttering clown to passive-aggressive bully to suave sophisticate.
There are a few gems in the script (including the line: "Life is a comedy written by a sadistic comedy writer") but the screenwriter is conflicted over whether he's writing a noir, a satire or a romantic comedy.