By McKenna Wierman, NDG Special Contributor
As soon as I was done watching Cafe’ Society, the new Woody Allen, I went immediately to my parent’s house to have dinner. I came through the garage door and into the kitchen, sat down at the table with the rest of my family, and started eating. A few moment’s later, after exchanging a few pleasantries, my mother asked the big question: how did I like the movie?
Suddenly, it all hit me. It was like realizing my hair had caught fire after I’d walked out of the movie theater, but I was only just noticing there at the dinner table. Cafe’ Society elegantly and politely broke my heart to pieces. The movie was just so gosh-darn charming about, I hardly even noticed.
It starts out with the typical Woody Allen formula: quirky, skinny intellectual Bobby (Jesse Eisenberg) falls in love with the young and beautiful “not-like-other-girls” girl, Vonnie (Kristen Stewart) who- you guessed it, is having an affair with a much older man. The story follows Bobby as he moves from New York to Hollywood to New York to Hollywood, falling in and out of love, getting his poor little heart broken every which way and then piecing it back together again.
The beauty of Cafe’ Society, besides the phenomenal costumes, sets, and gorgeous cast, is that it’s a story about how a boy becomes a man when you get right down to it. Bobby is getting out on his own, with the world in the palm of his hand, and dealing with everything that life throws at him. But underneath the fashionable parties, the gangsters, the glitz and the glam, we see just how gilded life for Bobby is.
Eisenberg does a beautiful job as the goofy protagonist, and Stewart, who is criticized for not showing enough emotion, dazzles. Both actors, once considered awkward and stoic, play their characters so beautifully, they convey a million and one emotions in a single glance. It’s truly mesmerizing.
Cafe’ Society takes you out for a nice dinner; order’s the most expensive red on the list, and then after appetizers eats your heart out as the main course. And even though you’re powerless to stop it, you can’t help but admire just how beautiful it all is.
So how did I like the movie? It elated and disappointed me, broke my heart and made me fall in love all over again. It impossibly imitated life, and as much as I hated it, I absolutely loved it.
