Scenes from a Mall

Scenes from a Mall casts Woody Allen and Bette Midler as Nick and Deborah Fifer, a married couple whose innocuous trip to a nearby shopping mall takes an increasingly disastrous turn following a series of personal revelations. It’s a thin premise that’s employed to progressively lackluster effect by filmmaker Paul Mazursky, which is a shame, really, given that the movie does open with a fair amount of promise – as the stars’ affable work is heightened by their genuine chemistry with one another (ie it’s not difficult to swallow that Nick and Deborah have been married for 16 years). The couple’s initial arrival at the title locale is handled relatively well by Mazursky and the back-and-forth banter between Allen and Midler’s respective characters is generally compelling, and yet there reaches a point at which Scenes from a Mall begins to palpably run out of steam – with the film’s second half adopting a repetitive vibe that grows more and more problematic as time progresses. It does, as a result, become awfully difficult to work up any interest in the protagonists’ on-again-off-again exploits, and there’s little doubt that the movie loses its grip on the viewer long before the somewhat anticlimactic finale rolls around.

** out of ****