Wonder Wheel (2017)
Film Overview
Against the noise, colour and fading glamour of 1950s Coney Island, a former actress trapped in an unhappy marriage begins an affair with a young lifeguard whose attention soon shifts towards her husband’s estranged daughter.
Kate Winslet plays Ginny, once an aspiring actress and now working as a waitress in a clam house on the Coney Island boardwalk.
She is married to Humpty, played by Jim Belushi, a carousel operator recovering from alcoholism. Their marriage is strained by disappointment, money and Ginny’s growing conviction that her life has narrowed into something far smaller than she once expected.
Justin Timberlake plays Mickey Rubin, a lifeguard and aspiring playwright who also narrates the story. Ginny’s affair with him becomes both romantic escape and evidence that another life may still be possible.
Juno Temple plays Carolina, Humpty’s daughter from an earlier marriage. She arrives unexpectedly after leaving her gangster husband and needs somewhere to hide from the men searching for her.
When Mickey becomes attracted to Carolina, Ginny’s temporary escape begins collapsing. Vittorio Storaro photographs Coney Island in highly expressive colour, turning the changing light around the amusement park into a direct reflection of Ginny’s emotional state.
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My Review
The brightest lights in one of Allen’s darkest emotional worlds
Wonder Wheel is visually one of Woody Allen’s most colourful films and emotionally one of his least forgiving. Coney Island blazes behind people who feel increasingly trapped inside lives that have stopped moving.
Ginny once wanted to act. Now she waits tables and goes home to an apartment where the giant Wonder Wheel is almost permanently visible through the window.
That image contains the cruelty of the film. Thousands of people arrive at Coney Island looking for excitement while Ginny experiences the same rides, lights and crowds as the scenery of routine.
The amusement park promises escape to everybody except the people who work there.
The Wonder Wheel keeps turning outside Ginny’s window, offering everybody else a ride while her own life feels completely stationary.
Kate Winslet gives the film an enormous performance. Ginny is theatrical even when she is not on stage because performance is the language she once hoped would become her life.
She can turn a conversation into a scene, an argument into melodrama and a temporary romance into evidence that destiny has finally remembered her.
Mickey therefore becomes much more than a lover. He is proof that Ginny is still capable of being desired by somebody connected to youth, culture and the future.
That is why losing him becomes psychologically catastrophic.
Justin Timberlake’s Mickey is deliberately unreliable as a romantic object. He wants to be a playwright and narrates the story as though he is already arranging life into scenes.
Ginny interprets his attention through the seriousness of her own need. Mickey experiences the affair far more lightly.
When Carolina appears, his attraction moves with alarming ease.
Ginny has mistaken being part of Mickey’s summer for being the centre of his future.
For Ginny the affair is rescue. For Mickey it is a chapter. They discover the difference far too late.
Juno Temple gives Carolina a vulnerability that makes Ginny’s resentment more painful. Carolina has not arrived intending to steal anything.
She is frightened. The mob may be looking for her, and returning to Humpty is an act of necessity after years of estrangement.
Humpty responds with a paternal tenderness that temporarily reveals a different man beneath the roughness Ginny lives with every day.
That change creates another wound. Ginny sees Humpty capable of warmth at the same moment she has emotionally left their marriage.
Jim Belushi is very good because Humpty could easily have become a caricature. He is loud, limited and often insensitive, but not emotionally empty.
His love for Carolina is real. His attempt to remain sober matters. His marriage to Ginny may be disappointing, but he is not aware that she has already turned elsewhere for hope.
The tragedy comes from everybody living inside slightly different versions of the same household.
Nobody possesses enough information to understand what the others are becoming.
Everybody shares the same apartment. Emotionally, they are living in completely different buildings.
Storaro’s lighting is extraordinary. Colours do not merely decorate the 1950 setting; they change with the emotional direction of scenes.
Warm amusement-park reds and oranges can make Ginny briefly appear inside the romantic story she wants. Cooler light removes that protection when reality returns.
The artificial quality is deliberate. Mickey is an aspiring dramatist and Ginny a failed actress, so the world itself often looks like theatre.
Coney Island becomes both real place and stage set.
The Mills Brothers’ Coney Island Washboard is the obvious musical centre, returning us repeatedly to the location through a cheerfulness entirely at odds with the emotional material.
Jo Stafford’s You Belong to Me adds another particularly pointed song to a story full of people attempting to claim one another emotionally.
The soundtrack belongs to the nostalgic pleasure of Coney Island, while the story underneath the music becomes increasingly bleak.
That tension suits Allen perfectly.
The music remembers Coney Island as fun. Ginny experiences it as the place she cannot get away from.
The final moral choice surrounding Carolina is where Ginny’s desperation becomes hardest to defend.
Until then, she has been unhappy, jealous and frightened of losing the one future she has allowed herself to imagine.
Then information arrives that could help Carolina, and Ginny’s response reveals how far jealousy has altered her judgement.
The film does not need to turn her into a conventional villain. It allows one failure to become the moment everything else in her emotional life is exposed.
The final scenes return Ginny to roughly the same physical situation with which she began. The amusement park continues.
That may be the bleakest element. Personal catastrophe does not stop the rides. The crowds still arrive and the lights still come on.
Winslet makes Ginny’s final state feel less like melodramatic punishment than exhaustion after a performance that could not change the script.
For me, Wonder Wheel is uneven but fascinating, with one of Allen’s strongest late visual concepts and a tremendous central performance.
Coney Island closes every night and opens again the next morning. Ginny’s tragedy is discovering the world does exactly the same thing.
Cast and Characters
Kate Winslet
A former actress now working as a waitress at Coney Island whose affair with Mickey becomes an increasingly desperate hope for another life.
Jim Belushi
Ginny’s carousel-operator husband, a recovering alcoholic whose estranged daughter unexpectedly returns.
Juno Temple
Humpty’s daughter, hiding from gangsters connected to the husband she has left.
Justin Timberlake
A Coney Island lifeguard and aspiring playwright who narrates the story and becomes romantically involved with Ginny.
Jack Gore
Ginny’s young son, whose fascination with starting fires adds another persistent source of anxiety to the household.
Tony Sirico & Steve Schirripa
Gangsters searching Coney Island for Carolina after her decision to leave her husband.
The Mills Brothers make Coney Island sound happier than anybody living there
Popular recordings from the first half of the twentieth century create a nostalgic musical Coney Island around a story becoming progressively darker.
Coney Island Washboard
The Mills Brothers recording is the film’s most closely associated song, linking the soundtrack directly to the amusement park while maintaining a cheerful surface at odds with Ginny’s emotional decline.
Romantic songs surrounding people who cannot make romance behave
Jo Stafford’s You Belong to Me is another prominent recording, its title perfectly suited to the jealousy at the centre of the story.
The older songs help create an idealised memory of Coney Island against which Ginny’s actual experience becomes increasingly painful.
You Belong to Me
The romantic standard becomes almost painfully literal inside a story about Ginny’s fear that Mickey belongs emotionally to somebody else.
Boardwalk Nostalgia
The older popular recordings reinforce the period setting without requiring a conventional original score.
Music Against the Rides
The cheerful soundtrack repeatedly contrasts with the disappointment and jealousy experienced by the people who work at the amusement park.
Memory Versus Reality
The songs belong to an idealised Coney Island of popular memory while the drama steadily dismantles that idealisation.
Locations
The real Coney Island beach, boardwalk and rides are combined with studio sets and digital reconstruction to return the amusement district to the early 1950s.
Wonder Wheel
The famous Ferris wheel towers over the family apartment and becomes the defining visual symbol of the film.
Riegelmann Boardwalk
The real boardwalk provides the principal geography connecting the beach, restaurant and amusement park.
Ruby’s
The real boardwalk bar was redressed for the clam-house environment where Ginny and Carolina work.
The Cyclone
The historic roller coaster appears among the real rides used to establish the amusement park.
New York Chinese Scholar’s Garden
The garden provides an unexpected visual departure from the boardwalk during Ginny and Mickey’s relationship.
Silvercup Studios
The family apartment and other major sets were constructed at Silvercup, allowing Storaro complete control over the highly expressive interior lighting.
Awards and Recognition
Closing Night Film
Wonder Wheel closed the 55th New York Film Festival in October 2017.
World Premiere
The film received its world premiere at Alice Tully Hall as the festival’s closing gala.
Vittorio Storaro
Storaro’s highly expressive colour photography became one of the most widely discussed aspects of the film.
Kate Winslet
Ginny gives Winslet an unusually theatrical and emotionally exposed central role.
Coney Island Recreated
Real locations, production design and digital effects combine to reconstruct the amusement park as it appeared around 1950.
A Drama in Colour
The film pushes Allen and Storaro’s collaboration towards a deliberately expressive visual style in which changing light becomes part of the storytelling.