You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger (2010)
Film Overview
A group of Londoners chase youth, romance, professional success and supernatural certainty while repeatedly discovering that the stories they tell themselves are often more persuasive than reality.
Anthony Hopkins plays Alfie, who leaves his wife Helena after forty years of marriage in an attempt to recover the youth he believes he has lost. Gemma Jones plays Helena, whose devastation sends her towards fortune teller Cristal, played by Pauline Collins.
Their daughter Sally, played by Naomi Watts, is increasingly unhappy in her marriage to struggling novelist Roy, played by Josh Brolin. She develops an attraction to her gallery-owner boss Greg, played by Antonio Banderas.
Roy, meanwhile, becomes fascinated by Dia, played by Freida Pinto, a young woman he watches through the window of the neighbouring building. His professional desperation creates an even more dangerous problem when he sees an opportunity to claim another writer’s manuscript as his own.
Lucy Punch plays Charmaine, a much younger woman Alfie initially meets as a prostitute and then decides to marry, convinced that a new relationship can restore the life he imagines he should still be living.
Vilmos Zsigmond photographs London while an eclectic soundtrack moves from Leon Redbone and Benny Goodman to Boccherini, Mozart, Donizetti and Giulia y Los Tellarini. The result is a comedy about people who would rather believe a comforting prediction than accept an inconvenient fact.
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My Review
Everyone wants the future to tell them what they want to hear
You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger is a film about prediction in which almost everybody spends the present trying to force the future into a more attractive shape.
Helena asks a fortune teller what will happen. Alfie tries to outrun ageing. Sally imagines a relationship with her boss. Roy imagines a literary career he has been unable to create on the page.
Every character has a preferred version of what comes next.
The comedy comes from reality showing remarkably little interest in cooperating with any of them.
Everybody in the film wants to know the future. What they really want is confirmation that the future has already agreed with them.
Gemma Jones gives Helena a sadness that prevents the fortune-teller material from becoming merely a joke about gullibility.
Her marriage has collapsed after four decades. The world she understood has suddenly disappeared, and Cristal provides something nobody else can offer: certainty.
Whether the predictions are rational almost becomes irrelevant. Helena feels better after hearing them.
That creates one of the film’s more interesting arguments. An illusion that allows somebody to continue living may occasionally be more useful than a truth that leaves them paralysed.
Cristal may not know Helena’s future, but she understands exactly how valuable certainty becomes when somebody’s past has just collapsed.
Anthony Hopkins plays Alfie’s fear of ageing much more broadly. He begins jogging, exercising, changing his appearance and constructing a younger life around Charmaine.
The tragedy, if it can be called that, is that nothing he does actually makes him younger. It merely requires increasing effort to maintain the illusion.
Lucy Punch is very funny as Charmaine because she has no interest in pretending their relationship is a profound meeting of souls.
Alfie sees evidence of renewed masculinity. Charmaine sees a comfortable arrangement with an older wealthy man.
Alfie does not fall in love with youth. He falls in love with the possibility that being near youth might make time reconsider.
Naomi Watts gives Sally perhaps the most quietly frustrating story. She is capable, intelligent and increasingly aware that Roy’s stalled writing career has placed enormous financial pressure on their marriage.
Working for Greg creates a professional opportunity and an emotional fantasy. Antonio Banderas makes Greg warm enough that Sally can plausibly interpret ordinary attention as something more.
She begins imagining another life before she has evidence that the other person is imagining it too.
That is the pattern running throughout the film: desire becomes prediction.
Josh Brolin’s Roy is more dangerous because his fantasy of success eventually crosses an ethical line.
He once published a successful novel and has spent years trying to prove that success was not accidental. Every rejected manuscript makes the earlier achievement feel less secure.
Then his friend Henry produces a genuinely excellent novel and appears to die in an accident.
Roy sees the manuscript and, for one terrible moment, sees a future in which the talent can become his simply by changing the name on the page.
Roy wants to be a great novelist badly enough that eventually he decides actually writing the great novel may be an unnecessary technicality.
The theft of the manuscript is the film’s darkest strand because it resembles a fantasy almost everybody has had in harmless form: what if the thing you desperately needed simply fell into your hands?
Roy initially believes circumstances have removed the moral obstacle. Henry is dead. Nobody else knows the manuscript.
Then reality changes the facts again. Henry has not died and may recover.
The future Roy believed had solved his life instantly becomes a threat.
Freida Pinto’s Dia becomes another projection of Roy’s dissatisfaction. He first sees her through a window, which is exactly the right visual introduction.
She is literally framed as an image of another life.
Roy knows very little about her initially, but that makes fantasy easier rather than harder. The less information he has, the more freely he can imagine what being with her would mean.
When the relationship becomes real, it still cannot solve the professional and moral disaster he has created elsewhere.
Dia first appears through a window because Roy is not really looking at a woman. He is looking at an alternative version of his life.
London is used very differently from the expensive world of Match Point. Bell Street, Cleveland Square, Notting Hill, the South Bank and St James’s Park produce a more varied and lived-in city.
Jonathan’s occult bookshop is particularly appropriate for Helena’s story, while Sally’s gallery gives professional ambition its own geography.
The Old Vic and other cultural locations keep art, music and literature close to characters who are constantly trying to turn culture into a more successful identity.
Zsigmond photographs it all with an understated warmth that makes the characters’ private unhappiness feel almost independent of the pleasant city around them.
The music is wonderfully chosen. Leon Redbone’s When You Wish Upon a Star makes the film’s central joke explicit before anybody has even begun making a mistake.
Everybody wishes. Very few wishes arrive in the form expected.
Benny Goodman’s If I Had You, the Eddy Davis Trio’s I’ll See You in My Dreams and Only You all circle around romantic longing, while Boccherini and Mozart provide a more classical counterweight.
Donizetti’s music introduces genuine operatic tragedy into lives that remain mostly comic in their self-deception.
“When You Wish Upon a Star” promises dreams can come true. The film spends the next ninety minutes examining the small print.
The most satisfying strand ultimately belongs to Helena. The character everyone else regards as irrational may be the person who finds the most workable form of happiness.
Her belief in Cristal leads her towards Jonathan, a man whose interest in the occult happens to align perfectly with the worldview she has adopted.
Perhaps Cristal predicted correctly. Perhaps Helena rearranged reality until the prediction became useful.
The distinction matters far less to Helena than it would to Boris Yellnikoff.
Allen ends without bringing every story to a morally satisfying conclusion. Roy’s situation remains precarious. Sally has not received the romantic or professional future she imagined. Alfie’s campaign against ageing has failed.
Helena, the character most willing to believe something unprovable, has found companionship.
That is the film’s final joke and perhaps its most generous idea.
Sometimes people survive not because they understand reality more accurately, but because they find a story about reality that allows them to keep going.
The supposedly irrational Helena may finish the film happiest because she is the only person who stops demanding that reality justify her happiness first.
I like the way You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger refuses to declare one illusion uniquely foolish.
Fortune telling is easy to mock, but Roy’s belief in his future literary greatness, Sally’s belief that Greg will rescue her, and Alfie’s belief that a younger wife can defeat age are not really more rational.
Everybody is predicting.
Cristal is simply the only person charging by the hour.
Cast and Characters
Gemma Jones
Devastated by the end of her marriage, Helena finds stability by embracing the predictions of fortune teller Cristal.
Anthony Hopkins
Helena’s husband of forty years, whose fear of ageing leads him towards an expensive attempt to reconstruct his youth.
Naomi Watts
Their daughter, unhappy in her marriage and increasingly attracted to Greg, the owner of the gallery where she works.
Josh Brolin
Sally’s struggling novelist husband, whose professional desperation and fascination with Dia lead him towards increasingly reckless decisions.
Freida Pinto
The young woman Roy first sees through a neighbouring window and gradually turns into the symbol of another possible life.
Lucy Punch
The much younger woman Alfie marries in his attempt to convince himself that age can be defeated by lifestyle.
Every song seems to promise the future will turn out beautifully
Jazz, popular standards, classical guitar and opera surround characters who keep mistaking desire for prediction.
When You Wish Upon a Star
Leon Redbone’s performance opens a film entirely concerned with wishes, predictions and the stubborn tendency of reality to deliver something other than what was requested.
Jazz, opera and songs about wanting somebody else
Benny Goodman, the Eddy Davis Trio, Boccherini, Mozart, Donizetti and Giulia y Los Tellarini create a deliberately eclectic soundtrack.
The songs repeatedly echo the characters’ hopes for romance and transformation, usually with far more confidence than the story itself allows.
If I Had You
The romantic standard could belong to almost every character in a film filled with people imagining how life would improve if only somebody else were theirs.
I’ll See You in My Dreams
The title neatly connects romance with the film’s wider interest in fantasy, prediction and imagined futures.
Tu che a Dio spiegasti l’ali
The performance by Luciano Pavarotti, Nicolai Ghiaurov and the Orchestra of the Royal Opera House brings a full operatic register into the London story.
Mais Si L’Amour
After their memorable contribution to Vicky Cristina Barcelona, the Barcelona group appears again on Allen’s soundtrack.
Locations
London becomes a network of windows, bookshops, galleries, parks and streets in which the characters repeatedly imagine another life taking place just beyond the one they already have.
Bell Street
Bell Street provides the location for Jonathan’s bookshop, where Helena finds a man whose beliefs fit comfortably with her newly adopted spiritual world.
Cleveland Square
The elegant square appears among the residential streets connecting the characters’ overlapping London lives.
Talbot Road & Powis Square
Notting Hill locations establish Dia’s neighbourhood and the geography of Roy’s increasingly obsessive romantic fantasy.
The Thames
Sally is seen along the South Bank, giving her story some of the film’s most recognisably contemporary London imagery.
St James’s Park
Sally and Greg spend time together in the park as her hope that their relationship might become something more begins to grow.
The Old Vic
The theatre becomes part of Sally and Greg’s cultural London, reinforcing the world in which she begins imagining another romantic and professional future.
Awards and Recognition
Out of Competition
The film premiered at the 2010 Cannes Film Festival outside the main competition.
Another Allen Collaboration
The veteran cinematographer returned for another London production after previously photographing Cassandra’s Dream and Melinda and Melinda.
ALMA Award
Banderas received the ALMA Award for Favourite Movie Actor for his performance as Greg.
Allen Returns to Britain
After the Spanish setting of Vicky Cristina Barcelona and the New York return of Whatever Works, Allen moved the next ensemble story back to London.
A Dedicated Album
The film’s eclectic thirteen-track soundtrack was released commercially, bringing together jazz, classical music, opera and contemporary recordings.
Illusions That Work
The film returns to a recurring Allen question: whether comforting illusions may sometimes sustain people more successfully than uncomfortable truths.