Magic in the Moonlight (2014)

Making 'Magic': Emma Stone and Colin Firth in
Woody Allen's "Magic in the Moonlight."

The magic in Woody Allen’s “Magic in the Moonlight” is meant to be celestial, referring to the seemingly perfect way the stars line up and twinkle in the sky on a clear night. “You think that's menacing?” a character asks while contemplating the vast and mysteriously beautiful cosmos in one such composition. “I think it's pretty romantic.”

Actually, it may have more to do with how the main characters in this slight but charming romantic comedy—in which a famous, insufferably pompous illusionist from upper class Europe falls in love with a naive, dime store clairvoyant from Kalamazoo—manage to be so likable despite being, essentially, a pair of scoundrels.

The movie opens in Berlin in 1929, where Stanley Crawford (Colin Firth) is finishing up another performance as the eminent magician Wei Ling Soo, who stuns audiences with such gimmicks as sawing people in half and vanishing enormous pachyderms. Backstage, in between removing his Chinese regalia and barking criticisms at his subordinates, Stanley greets an old friend and fellow illusionist, the duplicitous Howard Burkin (Simon McBurney), who brings a challenge to debunk a young medium poised to use her mystic powers to swindle a rich widow.

The action shifts to the French Riviera, where a fetching, flamingly red-haired clairvoyant named Sophie Baker (Emma Stone) has set up shop at the posh home of an old matriarch desperate for various assurances about her dearly departed. Stanley arrives, incredulous and curmudgeonly, and immediately begins hurling contemptuous witticisms at Sophie in an effort to discredit her. “My visions are cloudy,” she says at one point. “Are they cumulous clouds or cirrus,” he quips.

But Sophie turns out to be a tough nut to crack, and part of the fun is that the more deep secrets she reveals by gazing into the great unknown with her big eyes, the more the perpetually cynical Stanley—clearly representing the erudite, faithless intellectual that Allen would usually play—begins to believe in all the spiritual hokum he’s been dismissing. Plus, he’s falling in love with her.

One of the pleasures of the film is the way Firth and Stone stir up an unlikely chemistry with a playful mixture of insults, mischief and scandal. It’s an implausible romance that recalls the mismatched leads in some of the venerable screwball comedies of Ernst Lubitsch (“Trouble in Paradise”) and Howard Hawks (“His Girl Friday”). Notable supporting performances include Eileen Atkins as Stanley’s lovable and unapologetically pretentious Aunt Vanessa; and Hamish Linklater as a warbling, ukulele-playing heir hopelessly smitten with Sophie.

Allen’s visuals and signature long takes are radiant. Especially sumptuous are lush scenes of the French countryside near dusk, with the setting sun imbuing everything with a warm, amber glow. Perhaps the best moment, however, takes place when Stanley and Sophie dash into an observatory during a thunderstorm, a scene that echoes Allen and Diane Keaton at the beginning of their romance in “Manhattan.”

And the soundtrack, a proverbial joy in any Allen film, is a gloriously mellifluous valentine to hot jazz greats of the era—the burgeoning Cole Porter and the inimitable Bix Beiderbecke in this case taking center stage. “Magic in the Moonlight” may not be in the upper class of Allen’s oeuvre, but it certainly is fun to watch and a considerable delight to listen to.