The astonishing thing about "A Late Quartet" is that Woody Allen didn't make it. It has the Allen look — set in a resplendent and privileged Manhattan, with lingering shots of apartment interiors; the Allen-like cast — consisting of some of the most talented actors in American cinema playing members of a renowned string quartet (Christopher Walken, Catherine Keener, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Mark Ivanir); the Allen-esque issues (famous musician mom and a daughter struggling to come into her own, an older man in an affair with a much younger woman, a marriage fraying at the edges, etc.). Only, they've all been assembled in concert, so to speak, by director Yaron Zilberman, who adeptly brandishes his conductor's baton.
Zilberman is by no means an Allen clone, however — in fact he adds just the sort of scope and depth that Allen prefers to sacrifice in the name of comedy, or his own, lofty depression. This isn't to say that Zilberman is a better filmmaker, just a different one from Allen, despite the deceptive facade.
The defining thread running through "A Late Quartet" is discipline. Unlike an Allen story, none of Zilberman's characters are willing to give up their professionalism to indulge in emotions — their own or anyone else's. In one scene, the quartet viola player Juliette (Keener) says to her husband, second violinist Robert (Seymour Hoffman): "This isn't about you or me ... This is about the quartet." He doesn't like that at all, and storms out of the taxi they were in. But he knows too well that capitulating to personal feelings of lust or jealousy, will never be as important as being part of their quartet, and that has been his lifeblood for 25 years.