The sound of arcade gunfire drives Ginny nuts. The image of the Wonder Wheel literally fills the living-room window, but that’s the least oppressive aspect of being there. Ginny, who’s approaching her 40th birthday, now works as a waitress in a Coney Island clam bar and lives with her 10-year-old son, Richie (Jack Gore), and her second husband, Humpty ( Jim Belushi) - not the boy’s father - in a cramped apartment directly across from the giant blue Ferris wheel with pink lettering that’s the amusement park’s signature attraction. She plays Ginny, a once-fiery redhead who used to be married to a jazz drummer she adored, but that all seems like a mirage from the past. She long ago made a decision to stop being anyone’s dream-factory sweetheart, and Allen, in “Wonder Wheel,” has written her a role that fits the new hardscrabble Winslet like a rough but perfectly shaped glove. In the 20 years since “Titanic,” Kate Winslet’s acting has acquired a distinct edge, a certain remorseless quality of harsh-tongued resolve that she wears quite proudly. It may or may not turn out to be an awards picture, but it’s a good night out, and that’s not nothing. “Wonder Wheel” isn’t a comedy - on the contrary, it often feels like the most earnest kitchen-sink drama that Clifford Odets never wrote. It’s also strikingly acted by a cast of players who don’t just walk through the Woody motions (though at least three of them can be caught doing the stutter) they grab their roles and charge them with life. It’s got movement and flow, it’s got a vibrant sunset look of honky-tonk nostalgia, and it’s got a bittersweet mood of lyrical despair that the film stays true to right up until the final note. Yet it’s more than a therapy session with antiquated wisecracks. Set in Coney Island in 1950, it’s a bit too tidy and programmed in a well-made-play-from-the-postwar-era kind of way.
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