Wonderful film. Woody Allen is the best of the best filmmakers. The film is funny but not clownish and not a 4 letter word or violent action in sight. Just great.
Cute fantasy set in New Jersey in the 1930s. Mia Farrow plays a bullied housewife so starved of love that she dreams, or wills, an explorer (Jeff Daniels) off the cinema screen and into her arms. As he is a celluloid character from a screwball comedy, the clean cut adventurer must learn to live in the real world of the depression.
Then, in a spellbinding echo of Buster Keaton's 1924 classic, Sherlock Jr, Mia ultimately enters the screen herself, and experiences all the glamour of the Hollywood dream. This is a brilliant technical feat from cinematographer Gordon Willis, in which characters enter/leave the screen, transforming from black and white to colour. The sets and period detail are exceptional.
Beyond the comic and romantic premise, this is a heartbreaking work of illusion in which cinema becomes the drug that palliates the horror of reality. Unfortunately, the misogynistic, violent and impoverished world that Mia inhabits is so appalling that it is difficult to reconcile this barbarity with such a sentimental diversion.
This conflict is mainly due to a most effective performance from Danny Aiello as the abusive husband. Still, the final scene in which his wife has been let down so badly she struggles to lose her heart to the magic one more time, while Fred and Ginger dance on the big screen, is a killer. If you don't shed actual tears, call for an ambulance.