The narrator in “You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger” quotes Shakespeare in the opening minutes, telling us that the story we’re about to see is “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” Allen’s latest film doesn’t signify nothing (though it certainly is told by a gaggle of idiots), and while a slight, unfussy entry in his filmography, set to a breezy soundtrack and populated with a vivacious cast, it is also lean and nimble, a pointed drama masquerading as a flirtatious domestic comedy.

“Tall Dark Stranger” is about the human propensity to always find the grass greener on the other side of the fence. Little do we know, that’s just because it’s Astroturf. Be careful what you wish for, you can almost hear Allen saying, you just might get it. Alfie (Anthony Hopkins) was married to Helena (Gemma Jones) for 40 years before a midlife crisis drove him to divorce. While Alfie finds solace in the arms (and legs) of Charmaine, a call girl half his age, Helena’s comfort is in the increasingly fruity prophecies of a tarot card reader. Alfie and Helena’s daughter Sally (Naomi Watts) isn’t doing much better. She’s married to a has-been novelist named Roy (Josh Brolin) who is obsessed with their neighbor Dia (Freida Pinto), while Sally pines for her art gallery boss (Antonio Banderas).

“Tall Dark Stranger” finds Allen back in Europe. No matter the city—London or his cuckolded geographic mistress, Manhattan—the tone is blessedly the same. “Tall Dark Stranger” is about the dangers of dissatisfaction. The folly of these characters is that they try to transform their fantasies into reality. This being a Woody Allen film, the moment they get what they think they want, reality become intolerably worse. Life acts as a sort of whirling centrifuge, spinning out bodies that land in crumpled heaps and then beginning crawling over the shattered, razor-sharp debris of their lives to get back to where they started from.

The cynical Allen clearly wants us to see these characters as fools and invites us to laugh at them (albeit with the understanding that, there but for the grace of a God he doesn’t believe in go we), but he is also interested in just desserts. He may not believe in God, but he certainly believes in divine justice (even if he doesn’t always let us see it). At times it seems like every Woody Allen film is nothing more than a sequel to “Crimes and Misdemeanors.”

“Sometimes illusions work better than real medicine,” a character bemoans in the film. Indeed, sometimes they do. At least for a while. This is probably why the film also tells us that truth, rather than being beautiful, is quite often wretchedly ugly. If people can fool themselves into believing the gorgeous chimera, what good is truth? And for this reason, more than any other, the only characters in “You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger” who find happiness are the ones who are indubitably nuts.

GRADE: B+

Directed by: Woody Allen

Starring: Anthony Hopkins, Gemma Jones, Lucy Punch, Naomi Watts, Josh Brolin, Freida Pinto, Antonio Banderas

Rated R for some language.

Running Time: 94 minutes

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