Couch Potato Review: Vicky Cristina Barcelona

Here in BackseatDirectorLand, I like to keep an open mind. I understand films will not always have ideas and themes that I will openly embrace. Woody Allen as a writer and director has often written about the complications and disappointments of love. (See: pretty much any film of his. No, really. Annie Hall is his best example.) However, to make a film about the disappointments of love in general, in its many potential forms, one really should pursue some sort of point. And the punctuationally-challenged title Vicky Cristina Barcelona is not that film.

Vicky (a lovely Rebecca Hall, a Brit I'd love to see more of), and Cristina (Scarlett Johansson) are polar opposites in how they perceive love: Vicky is very traditional big-house-in-the burbs, has a stable fiancee, whereas Cristina is constantly searching for, as she vaguely puts it "something different," which leads her to a more open and atypical lifestyle. The best friends go to Barcelona for two months while Vicky works on her Master's thesis. Both meet, and become entangled with free-thinking, free-loving artist Juan Antonio (Javier Bardem, no longer creepy as he was in No Country for Old Men) and his unstable ex-wife Maria Elena (Penelope Cruz, who won an Oscar; she was good, but I don't see it).

All I can say is, I don't get it. It is a worthy subject, to try to explore the confinements and potential dissatisfaction of a traditional life and what would be considered an alternative life-style (think plural relationship). But this film just sort of drifts without coming to a consensus on either. And I don't think Allen wants us to decide one is superior to the other. An audience or viewer will come in with their own conception of that. But the film is oddly empty, and dissatisfying. And I'm attracted to films that present problems without easy answers. Sadly, this fairness to both sides leads to an emptiness, a lack of emotional involvement which kills the film. Allen doesn't try to change your mind or persuade you, but again, that leaves the film with a sense of dead weight and pointlessness that is difficult to shake, despite a very promising subject. I wished he had more closely pursued the volatile, passionate relationship between Bardem and Cruz's characters; a best of both worlds approach, if you will, because their relationship cannot work in a traditional mode, but it also has difficulties in a nontraditional mode. Now that would be worth exploring. Unfortunately, with the way the story is set up, the characters come off as neurotic, pretentious, and often downright annoying, and I found I was wondering when the film was going to end. The one real highlight of this film for me was the beautiful Spanish setting, that really is shot like a love-letter to Spain.

Final word: Skip it. Catch some earlier Allen instead.

(Rated PG-13 for mature thematic material involving sexuality, and smoking. Also some mild language, but in Spanish.)