Most published critics are idiots. Yet again this verity was reinforced to me whilst popping in and watching one of the latest films by Woody Allen to hit DVD. Cassandra’s Dream was almost wholly ignored in this country, lasting only a couple of weeks in the theaters. Yet, it is one of the two best films that Allen has made this decade, along with his other, earlier British murder drama, Match Point. While that film was lauded by critics as a return to top form by Allen, this film has been derided as a mere copycat of that film, which was, in many ways, a reworking of the serious half of Allen’s monumental 1989 film Crimes And Misdemeanors. Both claims are essentially true, but Cassandra’s Dream takes elements from both Match Point and Crimes And Misdemeanors and reworks them in novel ways. While it is not an indisputably great film like the first film in this ‘murder trilogy,’ it is, in a different way, a film that hits near greatness, like Match Point.
This hour and 45-minute long film opens with two brothers (a la the murderous siblings in Crimes And Misdemeanors), Terry (Colin Farrell) and Ian (Ewan McGregor) Blaine, running down a dock to look at a small sailboat they want to buy. This imagery is very important, because in the two grown men we see a childlike abandon that foreshadows the immaturity both brothers will display later in the film. They buy the boat and name it Cassandra’s Dream, after a horse that Terry, an inveterate gambler, wins some money on. The name also has resonance since, in classical Greek mythos, Cassandra was cursed with the gift of foresight but doomed to never be believed by anyone. In a similar way, Terry will soon see things in his and his brother’s future that he will warn his brother of, and not be believed.
Terry is an auto mechanic and Ian a failed entrepreneur. Their father (John Benfield) runs a restaurant, and their strong mother (Clare Higgins) is constantly belittling him for his economic failures vis-à-vis her brother, the boys’ uncle Howard (Tom Wilkinson), a wealthy plastic surgeon who has always bailed the family out of situations and jet sets between London, Hollywood, and China. The lives of the two brothers are sketched very well by a series of brief encounters that show their good and bad sides. Allen establishes their characteristics so firmly, poetically, and quickly, within the first 20 minutes, and with brief scenes that show fleeting reactions to good, bad, and routine events that populate an existence, that it’s a wonder why so few filmmakers realize that such table setting reaps huge benefits in plot developments, for with a character established a plot can plow ahead without derailing over some minor digression to explain a thing that can be made to seem obvious by the look of the character or the shrug of a shoulder.
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