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A review with brevity (if not wit)
Wonder Wheel is Woody Allen’s love letter to both Coney Island and to the playwright Eugene O’Neill (and don’t worry, we will get to the 98-pound neurotic elephant in the room in a few minutes).
Wonder Wheel is impeccably acted by every single member of the cast Kate Winslet, Juno Temple, and Jim Belushi (save Justin Timberlake, who is fine, but is a bit hard to see as a Woody Allen stand-in or as a New Yorker) and very well written (although a bit heavy on the exposition in the first thirty minutes).
I often feel haunted myself about the New York City of my memory (I was born in Manhattan), a New York City that no longer exists and maybe never did. I suspect Mr. Allen is haunted every day by a New York that feels achingly familiar but never quite matches up to his memories from his childhood.
Allen’s loving and sad recreation of the Coney Island of his youth serves two purposes here: 1) to function as a stand-in for his own longings and 2) as a metaphor for the central problem his characters Ginny, Carolina, and Mickey face (the problem of showing one thing while hiding another).
There is a moment in the middle of Wonder Wheel where Timberlake’s Mickey, a Coney Island lifeguard, defines the movie in reference to Eugene O’Neill. He says something about how…
