Monday, April 16, 2012

Cassandra's Dream

Two brothers (Scottish Ewan McGregor and Irish Colin Farrell, both playing Englishmen) buy a boat together. Terry is a compulsive gambler with a very sweet wife and a job in a car repair shop. Ian works at his father's restaurant but is constantly trying to go into business ventures and goes around pretending to be a bigger shot than he is, which gets him an aspiring actress girlfriend. Together, they are an unstoppable financial woe duo.
To get out of a jam they ask their rich uncle for help, and he agrees as long as they get him out of his own little jam. By using murder!
I get the feeling if I had taken Cassandra's Dream the remotest bit seriously, I would have really hated it. It was marketed as a thriller, and it may even have been Woody Allen's intention for people to not find it hilarious. For whatever reason, though, I couldn't take it seriously and it ended up being incredibly funny. My friend said he laughed more at this movie than he has at a lot of Woody Allen's comedies. I'm inclined to agree.
I don't know, maybe the setup and foreshadowing in the movie make the conclusion so foregone that nothing that happened seemed particularly serious (at one point Matan made a comment as a joke and the next scene was essentially the joke he had just made. For a drama, there's no recovering from that). Maybe Colin Farrell whinging like a little girl about everything was just really funny. Maybe a third thing. Who knows? Who even cares?
Cassandra's Dream was possibly the funniest movie of whatever year it came out. (Probably not, but it did make me laugh a lot.)

End of line.
-Sally

No comments: