'Wonder Wheel' • Movie Review:
Kate Winslet Singes in Woody Allen's Dour Drama

By Peter Travers, rollingstone.com
November 30, 2017

Actress sets the screen on fire in filmmaker's torrid period drama about broken Brooklyn dreamers.

Kate Winslet is on fire in Woody Allen's Wonder Wheel, playing Ginny, an unhappily married waitress living near the boardwalk on Brooklyn's Coney Island circa 1950.

This broken dreamer is pushing 40 and reaching the limits of her patience with Humpty (a solidly affecting Jim Belushi), the carousel-operator she married to provide a semblance of security for her pre-teen, budding-pyromaniac son Richie (Jack Gore). The Wonder Wheel outside their window spins in circles – just like Ginny, who drinks too much and lashes out at anyone who doesn't like it.



She's lost any hope for her would-be acting career or a fresh incentive in life. Then in walks Mickey (Justin Timberlake), a studly young lifeguard who sees himself as a dramatist ready to give Broadway a new voice. "I relish larger-than-life characters," he tells us in banal voiceover. (Allen doesn't give the role many colors, which limits Timberlake’s performance.) The kid is a delusional prettyboy. But Ginny, who Winslet makes larger-than-life, sees him as her way out. They're both kidding themselves.



This is somber material, like something Mickey might write while imitating Clifford Odets, that socially-conscious playwright known for his tough talk and thrusting the audience into the middle of a dramatic conflict without preamble. In Barton Fink, the 1991 film from the Coen brothers, the title character played by John Turturro was created in the image of the Waiting for Lefty author, an up-from-poverty New York Jew whose plays championed the common man. Hollywood thought it wanted "that Barton Fink feeling," until his seriousness choked off the box office. You might get that "Barton Fink feeling" watching Wonder Wheel, since Allen lays low on the laughs to brings us in to the lives of loud desperation led by his characters.