Magic in the Moonlight (2014)
Film Overview
A celebrated English stage magician and committed sceptic travels to the French Riviera to expose a young American medium, only to discover that disproving her apparent powers may be considerably harder than expected.
Colin Firth plays Stanley Crawford, an internationally successful illusionist who performs in disguise as the Chinese magician Wei Ling Soo. Offstage, Stanley regards spiritualism, religion and supernatural claims with open contempt.
Simon McBurney plays fellow magician Howard Burkan, who persuades Stanley to visit the wealthy Catledge family in the south of France. Their guest Sophie Baker, played by Emma Stone, appears capable of revealing information she could not possibly know.
Stanley approaches the challenge with complete confidence that Sophie must be a fraud. As his attempts to expose her repeatedly fail, scepticism begins giving way to the possibility that his understanding of the world may be incomplete.
Eileen Atkins plays Stanley’s Aunt Vanessa, whose intelligence and affection make her one of the few people capable of challenging him without provoking immediate dismissal. Jacki Weaver, Hamish Linklater and Marcia Gay Harden complete the principal ensemble.
Set in the late 1920s and filmed across the Côte d’Azur, the film combines Darius Khondji’s warm photography with jazz-age recordings, elegant villas and a romantic argument about whether certainty is necessarily the same thing as wisdom.
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My Review
A man who knows every trick except the one being played on himself
Magic in the Moonlight begins with a man completely certain that the universe contains no mysteries he cannot explain and then sends him to the French Riviera to discover that certainty may be his biggest weakness.
Stanley Crawford makes his living creating illusions. That is precisely why he has so little patience with anybody claiming the impossible is real.
A stage magician knows where the hidden mechanism must be. The audience may believe they have seen magic, but Stanley knows somebody rehearsed the effect, built the apparatus and learned where to put their hands.
Sophie becomes irritating to him because he cannot find the hands.
Stanley has devoted his life to proving magic is technique. Sophie’s real trick is making him wonder whether technique explains everything he values.
Colin Firth is beautifully cast because Stanley’s arrogance is inseparable from his intelligence. He really is exceptionally good at exposing deception.
The danger is that competence has expanded into a philosophy. Because Stanley can identify fraudulent mediums, he assumes almost every form of faith or wonder must be intellectually inferior.
Emma Stone’s Sophie does not meet his aggression with an equally rigid argument. She smiles, observes and allows Stanley to become increasingly disturbed by his inability to explain her.
Stone’s lightness is important. Sophie does not need to defeat him in debate. She only has to remain unexplained.
The séance material works because Stanley desperately wants to catch something being faked. Every successful demonstration becomes another personal insult.
Then belief begins producing an unexpected emotional effect. If Sophie really can communicate with something beyond the material world, mortality becomes less final and Stanley’s carefully defended pessimism begins losing its foundation.
For a short period, possibility makes him happier.
That is the film’s more interesting idea: even if belief is intellectually unjustified, the emotional consequences of belief may still be powerful.
The prospect of being wrong about the supernatural terrifies Stanley until he discovers how pleasant a less certain universe might actually feel.
Aunt Vanessa brings the argument down to earth. Eileen Atkins gives her a practical intelligence very different from Stanley’s theatrical superiority.
He loves her, which means the possibility of losing her can expose emotional needs that philosophical scepticism normally keeps safely abstract.
The observatory sequence after the storm is especially effective because the setting makes the debate almost visual. Stanley and Sophie stand inside a place built to understand the heavens while their own conversation becomes less certain about what understanding means.
It is romantic without pretending romance has supplied a scientific argument.
The revelation that Sophie’s powers are fraudulent initially appears to restore Stanley’s universe. He was right. The tricks have explanations.
Yet the victory does not produce the satisfaction he expected. Having briefly experienced the possibility of wonder, he cannot simply return to the emotional position he occupied before.
Sophie may have lied about the supernatural, but Stanley’s feelings were not part of the deception.
The sceptic therefore discovers that exposing the trick does not automatically explain everything that happened while he believed it.
Stanley succeeds in proving Sophie is a fraud and discovers that being correct has not solved the problem he actually cares about.
The Côte d’Azur is ideal for a story about rational resistance collapsing under beauty. Villa Eilenroc, the Nice Observatory, Hôtel Negresco and the coastline create a world almost aggressively designed to weaken Stanley’s cynicism.
Anne Seibel’s production design and Khondji’s photography make the period feel luxurious without turning every room into a museum display.
The light is especially important. The film is full of terraces, gardens, windows and late-afternoon warmth.
Stanley spends much of the story insisting the world contains nothing beyond matter while the film keeps making matter look extraordinarily attractive.
Cole Porter’s You Do Something to Me is the natural musical centre. The title states the romantic problem more efficiently than Stanley ever could.
The soundtrack also includes Kurt Weill, Nat Shilkret and classical pieces by Stravinsky, Ravel and Beethoven.
The mixture suits the 1920s setting while allowing the music to move between nightclubs, romance and Stanley’s more serious intellectual world.
Like the film itself, it keeps elegance and playfulness in balance.
Cole Porter gets there before Stanley does: somebody has done something to him, and proving how it happened is no longer the important question.
The final romantic turn is knowingly old-fashioned. Stanley’s intellect has spent the film building objections that his feelings gradually refuse to obey.
I do not think the film is arguing that scepticism is wrong or that supernatural claims deserve belief. Sophie is, after all, exposed.
What it questions is Stanley’s assumption that disproving one kind of mystery eliminates every other kind.
Love remains irrational, inconvenient and impossible to demonstrate through the methods he would prefer.
For me, Magic in the Moonlight works best as a light philosophical romance rather than as a mystery. The plot’s solution is less interesting than what belief temporarily does to Stanley.
Firth and Stone make a deliberately mismatched pair, Atkins is wonderful, and the French locations give the film a visual generosity that carries even the lighter scenes.
Stanley begins believing the world has already revealed all its mechanisms.
He ends in roughly the same universe, but considerably less certain that knowing the mechanism is the same thing as knowing how to live.
Cast and Characters
Colin Firth
A celebrated magician and dedicated sceptic whose confidence is challenged by Sophie’s apparently impossible abilities.
Emma Stone
A young American medium whose apparent supernatural gifts fascinate the Catledges and infuriate Stanley.
Eileen Atkins
Stanley’s intelligent and affectionate aunt, one of the few people capable of challenging his certainty without losing his respect.
Simon McBurney
Stanley’s fellow magician and friend, who asks him to investigate Sophie’s extraordinary claims.
Hamish Linklater
The wealthy young heir captivated by Sophie and entirely willing to believe in both her powers and their romantic future.
Marcia Gay Harden
Sophie’s mother and travelling companion, fiercely protective of both her daughter and the opportunities created by her reputation.
Cole Porter makes the romantic mystery considerably easier to understand
Jazz-age recordings and classical music create the elegant late-1920s world in which Stanley’s certainty begins to come apart.
You Do Something to Me
Leo Reisman and His Orchestra perform Porter’s standard, a song whose title quietly explains the emotional problem Stanley spends most of the film trying to intellectualise.
A soundtrack suspended between reason and enchantment
The film combines period recordings with Stravinsky, Ravel and Beethoven, allowing Stanley’s theatrical world and intellectual seriousness to exist inside the same musical landscape.
Kurt Weill and popular dance music add the cabaret atmosphere of the late 1920s.
It’s All a Swindle
Ute Lemper’s performance provides a title almost suspiciously well suited to a story about professional deception and spiritualism.
Moritat
Conal Fowkes performs music from The Threepenny Opera, extending the soundtrack’s European cabaret character.
Boléro
The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra brings another layer of deliberate theatrical build and romantic tension.
Symphony No. 9
Beethoven supplies the soundtrack with grandeur worthy of Stanley’s enormous confidence in his own understanding of the universe.
Locations
The Côte d’Azur is fundamental to the film’s sense of possibility, using villas, observatories, hotels and coastline to recreate the glamorous south of France in the late 1920s.
Villa Eilenroc
The grand villa provides major interiors and gardens for the Catledge estate, including the film’s elegant party setting.
Observatoire de la Côte d’Azur
Stanley and Sophie shelter here during the storm, producing one of the film’s most important romantic and philosophical scenes.
Hôtel Negresco
The famous Promenade des Anglais hotel supplies the bar used to represent the Berlin cabaret.
Opéra de Nice
The opera house exterior becomes the Berlin theatre where Stanley performs as Wei Ling Soo.
Château du Rouët
The Provençal estate provides Aunt Vanessa’s beautiful home.
Côte d’Azur
The wider coastline and landscape create the sunlit world in which Stanley’s determined scepticism becomes increasingly difficult to maintain.
Awards and Recognition
Darius Khondji Returns
Khondji returned to Allen after photographing Midnight in Paris, again bringing a distinctive warmth to a European period setting.
Anne Seibel
After her Oscar-nominated work on Midnight in Paris and work on To Rome with Love, Seibel again created Allen’s European period world.
First Allen Collaboration
The film began a two-film run with Stone, who returned the following year for Irrational Man.
Shot Across the Riviera
The production used major historic villas, hotels and cultural landmarks throughout the Alpes-Maritimes and Var.
The Jazz Age
Its late-1920s setting gives Allen another opportunity to combine period design with the popular music of an era central to his filmography.
Scepticism Meets Romance
The film places Allen’s recurring questions about belief, reason and mortality inside one of his lightest European romantic comedies.