Café Society (2016)
Film Overview
A young Bronx man travels to 1930s Hollywood hoping to reinvent himself and falls in love with his uncle’s secretary, beginning a romantic triangle whose consequences follow him back to New York.
Jesse Eisenberg plays Bobby Dorfman, dissatisfied with working in the family jewellery business and determined to try his luck in Hollywood.
His uncle Phil Stern, played by Steve Carell, is one of the film industry’s most powerful agents. Phil eventually gives Bobby a minor job and asks his secretary Vonnie, played by Kristen Stewart, to show him around Los Angeles.
Bobby falls in love with Vonnie, unaware that the unavailable boyfriend she mentions is actually Phil himself.
When the relationship fails to develop as Bobby hopes, he returns to New York and becomes involved in the nightclub run by his gangster brother Ben, played by Corey Stoll. Success gives Bobby the confidence and social position he lacked in Hollywood.
Blake Lively plays Veronica, whose relationship with Bobby appears to establish a new future until Vonnie re-enters his life. Vittorio Storaro photographs both coasts in rich colour, while Vince Giordano and the Nighthawks give the film a swing-era soundtrack perfectly matched to its 1930s setting.
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My Review
The life you choose and the life that keeps occurring to you
Café Society looks like one of Woody Allen’s most glamorous films, but underneath the beautiful photography and 1930s music is a surprisingly melancholy story about timing.
Bobby and Vonnie meet at exactly the wrong moment.
He is young, uncertain and almost completely without status in Hollywood. She is already emotionally involved with Phil, a powerful married man who keeps promising her that his circumstances will change.
By the time the circumstances do change, Bobby has begun changing too.
Bobby and Vonnie spend the film repeatedly discovering that the right person can still arrive at the wrong point in your life.
Jesse Eisenberg makes Bobby more than a straightforward younger substitute for Allen. He has the nervous intelligence, but also an ambition that gradually hardens.
Hollywood initially makes him feel small. Everybody has an appointment, a star to mention or somewhere more important to be.
Vonnie is attractive partly because she seems less impressed by the machinery of fame. Kristen Stewart gives her an understated calm that sits beautifully against the larger personalities surrounding Phil.
Bobby mistakes that simplicity for availability.
Steve Carell’s Phil is especially interesting because he is not presented as a cartoon studio predator. He genuinely loves Vonnie and genuinely fears the consequences of leaving his marriage.
That does not make his treatment of her fair. It makes the delay believable.
Phil has more power than anybody else in the triangle, which means his indecision controls everybody else’s calendar.
Vonnie waits. Bobby waits for Vonnie. Only Phil has the luxury of deciding when the waiting should end.
Phil’s great privilege is not simply money or influence. It is the ability to make two younger people organise their lives around his hesitation.
The move back to New York is where Bobby becomes genuinely interesting. Working with Ben transforms him from uncertain outsider into somebody capable of running one of the city’s fashionable nightclubs.
The new Bobby understands rooms, introductions and status. Ironically, he becomes much more like the Hollywood people who once made him feel inconsequential.
Corey Stoll’s Ben gives the success a darker foundation. The nightclub’s glamour exists beside organised crime, suggesting that respectable society has always been happy to ignore certain details when the drinks and music are good enough.
Bobby benefits from that arrangement without becoming Ben.
Blake Lively’s Veronica offers Bobby a life that is not second best in any obvious sense. She is beautiful, warm and capable of giving him the stable future he once thought he wanted with Vonnie.
That is what makes the later reunion painful. Nostalgia is not proof that the present relationship is wrong.
Bobby and Vonnie have both made choices that work. Seeing one another again simply reactivates the life that did not happen.
The film is mature enough not to pretend this means they should destroy the lives they have built.
The unfinished romance survives partly because it never had enough ordinary time to become disappointing.
Storaro’s cinematography is a huge part of the pleasure. This was his first film with Allen, and the shift is immediately visible.
Hollywood glows with a golden, almost remembered warmth. New York becomes richer and darker, filled with nightclubs and evening interiors.
The two cities are not simply locations. They represent different versions of Bobby.
Los Angeles is where he wants to become somebody. New York is where he actually does.
Vince Giordano and the Nighthawks provide exactly the musical world the film needs. The Lady Is a Tramp, Jeepers Creepers, Manhattan, My Romance and There’s a Small Hotel create a continuous 1930s atmosphere.
Benny Goodman and Count Basie provide genuine period recordings beside the newly recorded material.
The music gives the nightclub scenes credibility while also creating the romantic memory in which Bobby and Vonnie’s story eventually seems to live.
By the final scenes, it almost sounds like music from a life they remember rather than one they are still living.
The music makes the past sound so good that it becomes easy to understand why Bobby and Vonnie keep confusing memory with possibility.
The film’s final emotional movement is wonderfully restrained. Nobody makes a grand declaration.
Bobby and Vonnie return to separate lives carrying knowledge of the alternative one.
The title becomes important here. Café society is built around appearances, people moving through glamorous rooms while private dissatisfaction remains largely invisible.
Bobby has become extremely good at living inside that world.
For me, Café Society is one of the most visually beautiful films of Allen’s later period, but its emotional strength comes from refusing the easy romantic ending.
Eisenberg and Stewart create a relationship that feels unfinished rather than tragically destroyed.
Carell gives Phil enough humanity to complicate the triangle, and Stoll provides a dark comic counterpoint to the glamorous surfaces.
Everybody gets a life. The sadness comes from knowing there was another one available at almost exactly the wrong time.
Café Society ends with two people surrounded by everything they chose and thinking briefly about what they did not.
Cast and Characters
Jesse Eisenberg
A young Bronx man who travels to Hollywood hoping to find a career and eventually reinvents himself as a New York nightclub figure.
Kristen Stewart
Phil’s secretary, whose apparently straightforward manner conceals an emotionally complicated relationship with her employer.
Steve Carell
A powerful Hollywood agent and Bobby’s uncle whose affair with Vonnie creates the central romantic triangle.
Blake Lively
The woman Bobby meets after returning to New York and with whom he builds a successful adult life.
Corey Stoll
Bobby’s gangster brother, whose nightclub business becomes the foundation of Bobby’s New York success.
Jeannie Berlin
Bobby’s mother, one of the defining voices of the argumentative Bronx family he initially believes he needs to leave behind.
Swing music makes the 1930s feel permanently alive
Vince Giordano and the Nighthawks lead a soundtrack built from Rodgers and Hart, Harry Warren, Benny Goodman, Count Basie and other defining voices of the era.
The Lady Is a Tramp
Rodgers and Hart’s standard opens the soundtrack album in a new performance by Vince Giordano and the Nighthawks, immediately placing the film inside the sophisticated popular music of the 1930s.
The soundtrack supplies the glamour the characters spend their lives chasing
Benny Goodman, Count Basie and contemporary period specialists sit comfortably beside one another.
The result allows Allen’s fictional nightclub and Hollywood social world to sound convincingly part of the same era.
Jeepers Creepers
Harry Warren and Johnny Mercer’s standard adds another bright swing-era voice.
I Didn’t Know What Time It Was
The Rodgers and Hart song could almost have been chosen specifically for Bobby and Vonnie’s problems with romantic timing.
Taxi War Dance
Basie’s orchestra brings authentic period swing into the film’s carefully reconstructed world.
Manhattan
Rodgers and Hart provide the perfect musical bridge as Bobby’s life moves decisively back towards New York.
Locations
The film moves between two dream factories: 1930s Hollywood and the glamorous New York nightclub world Bobby eventually makes his own.
Grauman’s Chinese Theatre
Bobby visits the famous Hollywood landmark as he begins discovering the movie world he has travelled west to join.
Hotel Constance
The building provides the exterior of Phil Stern’s powerful Hollywood agency.
Castle Green
The historic apartment complex supplies one of the principal Hollywood residential locations.
Brooklyn Public Library
Parts of the library were transformed into the interior of Phil’s Hollywood office.
Bow Bridge
Central Park’s famous bridge becomes part of Bobby’s later New York romantic life.
Le Tropique
Bobby and Ben’s fashionable nightclub was created for the production as the centre of Bobby’s transformed New York identity.
Awards and Recognition
Opening Film
Café Society opened the 2016 Cannes Film Festival.
Out of Competition
The film was presented outside the main competition.
First Film with Vittorio Storaro
The film began Allen’s major late-career collaboration with the three-time Academy Award-winning cinematographer.
Allen Moves to Digital
The production marked Allen’s move into digital cinematography after decades of shooting feature films on celluloid.
Los Angeles and New York
The elaborate production recreated the 1930s across both coasts and became one of Allen’s larger later-period shoots.
Hollywood Remembered
The film combines Allen’s affection for 1930s popular culture with a melancholy romantic story about the lives people nearly had.