Autumn in New York is a 2000 American romantic drama film directed by Joan Chen, written by Allison Burnett, and starring Richard Gere, Winona Ryder, Anthony LaPaglia, Elaine Stritch, Vera Farmiga, and Sherry Stringfield. The film follows a successful middle-aged restaurateur and womanizer who falls in love with a terminally ill young woman.[2] US distributor MGM took over the film from Chen and significantly re-edited the film, which also involved deleting a Ryder nude scene.[3] The film received generally negative reviews and grossed $90 million against a $65 million budget.
Plot
Will Keane is a successful 48-year-old restaurateur and womanizer. Free-spirited haberdasher Charlotte Fielding celebrates her 22nd birthday in his upscale Manhattan restaurant, and he immediately notices her. Her grandmother introduces them. Will learns that Charlotte is the daughter of his ex-girlfriend Katy, who died in a car accident shortly after Charlotte's birth.
The next day, Will calls and asks Charlotte to make a hat for his date to an upcoming benefit dinner. When she delivers the hat to his apartment a few days later, he invites her to accompany him to the formal benefit under the guise that he had been stood up. There, they get to know each other and become lovers. The next morning, while having breakfast on his terrace, Will explains that their relationship has no future. She acknowledges this, revealing she is dying of a heart condition.
The next day, they walk through the fall foliage in Central Park, and Charlotte takes Will's watch, saying she will return it when he forgets she has it. At his restaurant, they prepare a meal together for his staff, and he begins to fall in love. Back at his apartment, Charlotte has an episode of severe chest pain, and Will rushes her to the hospital. The doctor explains that her neuroblastoma, a rare illness in young adults, has produced a tumor near her heart, estimating that she has only one year to live.
At a Halloween party, Will runs into a former girlfriend and they end up on the roof having sex. Afterward, Charlotte suspects that he was unfaithful, and after denying it, he admits his infidelity. Devastated, Charlotte breaks off their relationship.
Meanwhile, Will receives a letter from his illegitimate daughter, Lisa Tyler, whom he has never met. He goes to the museum where she works and recognizes her from an old photograph, but is unable to approach her. A few nights later, he arrives home and finds her in the lobby; they talk for the first time. Married and pregnant, she has become sentimental about parenthood, wanting to meet her own father. She tells him of a recurring dream in which her father says he is sorry for abandoning her. Will quietly asserts that he is sorry.
The next night, Charlotte returns home to find Will asleep in a chair in her bedroom. She tells him to leave, but he apologizes and pleads for another chance. She cries as he holds her in his arms. Later, while skating at Rockefeller Center, she suddenly collapses. At the hospital, they are told the tumor has grown and she has only a few weeks left.
In the next days, Will frantically searches for a specialist to perform the complicated surgery to save Charlotte. After he asks Lisa for help, she finds a specialist who agrees to perform the surgery when the time comes. On Christmas morning, Charlotte wakes up and hears Will decorating. As she prepares to bring him his Christmas gift, she collapses. Will rushes her to the hospital and calls the surgeon.
Will, friends, Lisa, and Charlotte's grandmother wait during the long hours of surgery. When the specialist finally emerges from surgery, it is clear that he could not save her. Back at his apartment, Will finds Charlotte's Christmas gift to him on the floor—a small box with the hat stem she designed for him. Opening the box, he finds his watch she took from him on their first date. He stands at his window weeping, holding the box to his chest.
The following summer, on a small boat on Central Park Lake, Will is holding his newborn grandson in his arms as Lisa looks on lovingly. Will notices a swan, and then a reflection in the water of a woman walking over the bridge.
Autumn in New York grossed $37.8 million in the United States and Canada, and $52.9 million in other territories, for a worldwide total of $90.7 million.[1]
Autumn in New York received generally negative reviews from film critics. On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 20% based on 71 critic reviews, with an average rating of 4.3/10. The website's critics consensus reads, "Although the film isn't as bad as feared (it wasn't pre-screened for reviews), it's not that good, either. Most noticeable flaws are the sappy romantic cliches and lack of chemistry between Gere and Ryder."[9]Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 24 out of 100, based on 21 critics, indicating "generally unfavorable" reviews.[10]
Emanuel Levy of Variety gave the film a negative review, writing: "Autumn in New York is not a bad picture, just utterly banal. Desperately eager to register as a love affair in the mold of Hollywood's classics, Joan Chen's tediously sappy romantic meller is a kind of modern-day Love Story, with a 'new' twist: The casting of Richard Gere as a suave lover old enough to be Winona Ryder's father. MGM release, which went into theaters without a press screening, should enjoy a decent opening due to an aggressive marketing campaign targeted at young susceptible femmes, but tearjerker should be out of sight long before the season in which its pedestrian story is set."[11]
Owen Gleiberman of Entertainment Weekly wrote: "It's unfortunate that the film was directed by Joan Chen, who made the shattering Xiu Xiu: The Sent Down Girl. The gentle humanism of Chen's touch is much in evidence here, yet she can't undo the howler at the movie's center – namely, that Gere's serial dater has conveniently chosen to fall in love with the one young woman in Manhattan who won't be around in six months anyway."[12] Peter Rainer of New York wrote that Chen had a "lovely sense of film rhythm and a sophisticated eye for luxe effects, but she fell into a vat of goo and there's no climbing out of it".[13]
