Looking for Something When Life Signifies Nothing

“You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger” begins with an unseen narrator — Zak Orth, sounding a lot like Woody Allen — paraphrasing Shakespeare. You may remember the quotation from high school English, about how life is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. The observation is attributed to the playwright himself (“Shakespeare once said”), rather than to Macbeth, whose grim experience led him to such nihilism, but never mind. In context, it amounts to a perfectly superfluous statement of the obvious. This movie, after all, is a tale told by Mr. Allen, who is very far from an idiot and who has become the American cinema’s great champion of cosmic insignificance.

Not that there’s much sound and fury here, though there are a few bouts of yelling and screaming, and potentially tragic situations played with an unlikely and not unwelcome buoyancy. The metaphysical pessimism that constitutes Mr. Allen’s annual greeting-card message to the human race — just in case we needed reminding that our existence is meaningless — is served up in “Tall Dark Stranger” with a wry shrug and an amusing flurry of coincidences, reversals and semi-surprises. There are hints of farce, droplets of melodrama, a few dangling loose ends and an overall mood of sloppy, tolerant cynicism.

At this point in his career — 40 features in about as many years — Mr. Allen has both mastered his craft and grown indifferent to it. Does he take any pleasure in making these movies? Does he expect the audience to take any?

It’s hard to say, since he seems to make films, and we seem to watch them (at least those of us who still do), more through force of habit than because of any great inspiration or conviction. Given the nonexistence of any controlling moral order in the universe, what else can we do? And what else would we want him to do?

“You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger” finds Mr. Allen back in London (the setting of “Match Point,” “Scoop” and “Cassandra’s Dream”) with some Spanish financing (as he had in “Vicky Cristina Barcelona”) and an international cast that includes, principally and in alphabetical order, Antonio Banderas, Josh Brolin, Anthony Hopkins, Gemma Jones, Freida Pinto, Lucy Punch and Naomi Watts. They all hit their marks and barrel through Mr. Allen’s grammatically impeccable (and in this case mostly joke-free) dialogue, turning some of the city’s nicer real estate, gilded by Vilmos Zsigmond’s suave cinematography, into tableaus of romantic disappointment, domestic misery and erotic longing.

Mr. Brolin is Roy, a onetime doctor who, after some initial success as a novelist, is skidding toward failure. His creative blockage frustrates his wife, Sally (Ms. Watts), whose nagging only makes it worse. So do the tipsy, unannounced visits of her mother, Helena (Ms. Jones), whose money supports the couple in their book-encumbered, upper-bohemian lifestyle and who therefore feels entitled to dispense criticism and advice. She does so with special zeal once she starts visiting a psychic (Pauline Collins), who is a genteel version of the vaudeville magic acts that have long been one of Mr. Allen’s preoccupations.

Another has been the restless nature of sexual desire — the male variety in particular — here embodied both by Mr. Brolin and by Mr. Hopkins, who plays Alfie, Helena’s former husband and Sally’s father. In a panic at his looming mortality, or perhaps just wondering what it’s all about, Alfie has embarked on a wild second youth with a wild second wife, a former prostitute named Charmaine (Ms. Punch), whom he has bought out with furs, jewels and a spectacular apartment.

Ms. Punch’s golden-haired gold digger is an extended, unfunny dumb-blonde joke — she’d rather go to a nightclub than the theater! — and she struggles thanklessly to give the character a spark of genuine comedy and a shred of dignity. Mr. Hopkins, the silver-haired possessor of this sexual trophy, just seems weary, mumbling his lines and looking pained in creamy cashmere sweaters and awkward bedroom situations. Certainly he has the ability to pivot, in character, from aloofness to lust to jealous rage, but perhaps this time he just did not feel like it.

Since Mr. Allen is a notoriously nondirective director of actors, the performances in his movies tend to be all over the map, and “You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger” is more scattershot than most. Mr. Brolin, angry and sweaty, with a bad haircut and a wardrobe stolen from a graduate student’s closet sometime in the late 1970s, seems to be working much too strenuously and Roy’s unpleasantness makes it hard to believe that Dia, Ms. Pinto’s character — a pretty neighbor whose window he peers into when she’s undressing — would fall for him.

Given the way Mr. Allen scripts their flirtation, it would be hard to believe even if he were as charming and relaxed as Mr. Banderas, who plays Sally’s rich and sexy boss. Roy nonchalantly confesses his voyeurism, and Dia, rather than investing in heavy curtains or a restraining order, smiles sweetly and ends up introducing Roy to her parents.

But then again, the whole message of “You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger” is that believing in some kind of nonsense is a natural way of coping with the howling void that surrounds us. (That was also the moral of Mr. Allen’s previous movie, “Whatever Works,” which didn’t.) The more ridiculous manifestations of faith — notably Helena’s spiritualism, which leads her into romance with the owner of an occult bookshop — are more charming and more persuasive than the earnest pursuits of love and success that drive most of the people in this overcrowded movie. For the most part, everyone struggles through, with at best mixed success. The audience included.

“You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). It has sexual situations and naughty words.

Opens on Wednesday in Manhattan.

Written and directed by Woody Allen; director of photography, Vilmos Zsigmond; edited by Alisa Lepselter; production designer, Jim Clay; costumes by Beatrix Aruna Pasztor; produced by Letty Aronson, Stephen Tenenbaum and Jaume Roures; released by Sony Pictures Classics. Running time: 1 hour 38 minutes.

WITH: Antonio Banderas (Greg), Josh Brolin (Roy), Anthony Hopkins (Alfie),Gemma Jones (Helena), Freida Pinto(Dia), Lucy Punch (Charmaine), Naomi Watts (Sally), Pauline Collins (Cristal) and Zak Orth (narrator).