Filth and Wisdom - Slant Magazine Review

It was my original intention to review Filth and Wisdom without ever mentioning Madonna's name, but given how much the pop icon's past and present—like her sense of image—informs every frame of the film, to have done so would have been foolish. More so than Angelina Jolie, whose screen performances have become near impossible to scrutinize without also grappling with her immense superstardom, Madonna brings considerable baggage to her feature-length directorial debut, which tells the story of a close-knit group of down-and-out London artists simply trying to get by—a story that not only suggests an elaboration on the lives of Madonna's "Hung Up" dancers but a rebuke to Vicky Cristina Barcelona.

Critics have fallen hook, line and sinker for Woody Allen's trite vision of pretty people bumping uglies in fashionable Catalonia, lavishing the film with the sort of write-ups you'd expect to read in US Weekly and Travel and Leisure. (Even some of the most sensible film writers in the world have noted how shooting in Spain seems to have invigorated and liberated Allen—almost as if they were praising him for having had a bowel movement.) When jet-setting through posh European locales and seeing Javier Bardem, Penélope Cruz and Scarlett Johansson make out is enough to give a movie a free pass, you know film culture has reached some sort of dead end. Indeed, so successful is the film's luxe patina that Allen's sexual and gender politics—like his repugnant reduction of the Mediterranean to a "lusty" type—have gone completely ignored. But Filth and Wisdom isn't interested in creating such an obnoxious show of distraction