A limp drama encumbered by screeching allusions to Greek tragedy and shockingly unlikely dialogue, the third part of Woody’s unofficial London trilogy is so frightful you feel obliged to speak up against it. All that is necessary for the triumph of evil and all that.
With Match Point and Scoop, we were prepared to believe, despite evidence to the contrary, that the director’s horrible understanding of English dialect was entirely on purpose. It turns out that what we misconstrued as Woody’s Arch Commentary On Traditional Representations Of Class In Britain is nothing more than bad writing and a poor grasp of manners and mores from anywhere that isn’t Manhattan.
Cassandra’s Dream, ostensibly a contemporary London drama, seems to have been pieced together from newsreels dating from the winter of discontent; HP Sauce on Shepherd’s Pie, brown wallpaper that Vera Drake would reject as drab and trips to the country that are just glum enough to recall Winston and Julia’s pastoral retreats in Orwell’s 1984.
A character called Lord Buffington-Huffington, well known bounder and cad, can’t be too far away. Oh wait. There he is in the Upper Class Party Scene. We are spared maggoty serfs, though we do get Colin Farrell and Ewan McGregor as two cash-strapped brothers with petit bourgeois aspirations. Colin, a grease monkey with a gambling problem, wants to buy a home for his poignantly common girlfriend (Sally Hawkins giving an encore for Happy-Go-Lucky’s Poppy). Ewan, exuding even less charm than he did as Obi Wan Kenobi, dreams of owning hotels in California and life with the preening stage actress Hayley Atwell. Their Uncle Howard (Wilkinson), a mysterious millionaire who seems to have wandered in from Death Of A Salesman, may have a solution to their problems. They, in turn, must do something for him. Something bad.
Towards the end, Woody’s filmmaking expertise kicks in, bringing a crafted suspense to action that scarcely deserves it. Everything else – from the film’s embarrassing attempts to approximate the British to its lazy fatalism – looks and sounds off-key.
The director’s next film is set in Barcelona. Spanish may not be his first language but it can’t be any worse for him than English seems to be at the moment.