BEFORE: Mia Farrow carries over for a third night in a row.
THE PLOT: In 1930s New Jersey, a movie character walks off the screen and into the real world.
FOLLOW-UP TO: "Ruby Sparks" (Movie #1,627)
AFTER: I'm not sure why this film makes the list of "1,001 Movies You Must See Before You Die", and the majority of Woody Allen's catalog doesn't, but whatever. Such decisions are above my pay grade.
Like "Ruby Sparks", this film investigates the pros and cons of falling in love with an imaginary character somehow made real. In this case, an explorer named Tom Baxter notices a woman who comes to see the movie "The Purple Rose of Cairo" again and again, and he gradually falls in love with her, and somehow breaks through the fourth wall to appear as flesh and blood in the movie theater and run off with her.
This causes a number of problems, such as the other characters in the film being unable to move the plot forward without this character - they simply do not know what to do without him, because he's central to the plot. (However, each character believes, mistakenly, that they are the central character in the film - nice touch.) Also, the woman in question is married, so she's not completely free to have a relationship, even with a fictional character.
The problems are compounded when the actor who played Tom Baxter shows up to investigate (he simply can't have a character that looks like him running around, causing trouble, and apparently in the 1930's, "trouble" meant raping women) and the actor comes face to face with the character, who looks just like him, but doesn't understand how everything works in the real world. For example, in the movie world, the screen usually fades to black before a love scene, so the character has no idea what comes after kissing...
Although this is a wildly original idea (but is also simultaneously a throwback - in some of the old Buster Keaton films I think his character used to walk off the screen into the movie-viewers "reality") the question then becomes: are we supposed to take the events depicted as literal truth? Should these events be taken instead as the fantasy of a woman in an unhappy marriage, who longs after the people and places she sees on the movie screen?
Setting the film during the Depression is a stroke of genius - that's really when movies exploded in popularity, because as someone says in this film, everyone was sad and had no money. For some reason I want to dispute this - I think maybe somebody somewhere had money during that time, but perhaps this was the prevailing perception.
NITPICK POINT: I get that the characters in the film didn't want the projector to be turned off, for feat that they would cease to exist or something - but doesn't the film take place over several days? Wouldn't they have to shut the projector off at some point, or close the theater at the end of the night? How long could they keep the projectionist in the booth, constantly changing reels, just to keep the characters on the screen? It's a nice idea overall, but once you start examining the logistics of keeping an image on the screen around the clock for three days, the premise starts to fall apart. I know, I know it's a fantasy but I still have to figure out how it's all supposed to work.
Also starring Jeff Daniels (last seen in "Looper"), Danny Aiello (last seen briefly in "Broadway Danny Rose"), Edward Herrmann (last seen in "Welcome to Mooseport"), John Wood, Deborah Rush, Van Johnson, Zoe Caldwell, Dianne Weist (last seen in "The Horse Whisperer"), with cameos from Milo O'Shea, John Rothman (last seen in "Stardust Memories"), Glenne Headly (last seen in "The X-Files")
RATING: 6 out of 10 bottles of champagne
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