One of the great American directors, Peter Bogdanovich, has returned with his first feature for many years. Sadly, it’s a strained and dated screwball farce, crammed with wacky coincidences and self-conscious cameos but not many funny lines, notionally set in present-day New York, but looking as if it could be happening decades before that.
In fact, She’s Funny That Way feels like one of Woody Allen’s recent luxury-tourist European capers, and bathed in the orangey-yellow light that suffuses a certain kind of old-fashioned hotel lobby. Imogen Poots plays Izzy, a wannabe Broadway star making a living as an escort — one of her most gallant and infatuated clients is Arnold (Owen Wilson), who happens to be the theatre producer for whom she is auditioning.
There is a great big tangle of twists, involving another of Izzy’s clients, a judge (Austin Pendleton), who sees the same therapist as her, the imperious Jane (Jennifer Aniston), whose boyfriend (Will Forte) is a dramatist and has actually written the very play that Izzy’s trying out for. This is a movie with its finger some way from the pulse of modern life: an oddity which captures neither the classic feel of the Ernst Lubitsch Golden Age nor the reality of present day Manhattan. There are one or two laughs.
