Woody Allen’s latest effort, You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, opens with Shakespeare’s famous Macbeth quote about life being “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” Allen likely intends the quote to be a wry, self-deprecating commentary on the human foibles viewers are about to witness. But it’s really more an indicator of how little he’s come to care about his creations: The lovelorn fusspots in You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger certainly sound like characters in a Woody Allen movie, and they get themselves in various romantic entanglements, but damned if the sum of their mixed-up lives amounts to anything in particular. Like the worst of late-period Allen, the film recycles character types from his previous work without inventing new reasons to summon them into existence. They’re left stranded, seven characters in search of an author.
