A Rainy Day in New York (2019)
Directed by Woody Allen
No — A Rainy Day in New York is not woke, scoring 5 out of 100 on our wokeness meter.
A Rainy Day in New York is a minor Woody Allen romance, all wet sidewalks, jazz piano, and young people mistaking urban atmosphere for destiny.
Consciousness Markers
The cast is overwhelmingly white, with Selena Gomez and Diego Luna providing the only notable non-white presence, and neither is framed as a statement of inclusion. A standard Woody Allen ensemble with no deliberate diversity agenda.
The dialogue is famously pretentious and name-dropping, but its sermonizing is about jazz, Cole Porter, and Manhattan sophistication rather than any social-justice message.
The film is a vintage Allen male-fantasy construction in which a young woman is passed among older male artists and reduced to a punchline about her lack of cultural literacy. No feminist critique is present.
Wealth and high society are depicted, and the mother's backstory touches on how her escort earnings seeded the family fortune, but this is character revelation rather than any systemic critique of capital.
No LGBTQ+ characters, themes, or subtext appear anywhere in the film's romantic entanglements.
Race is entirely absent as a subject; the film's Manhattan is a rarefied white milieu with no engagement with racial dynamics.
Rain is deployed purely as romantic atmosphere and plot device, not as any environmental statement.
No body-positivity themes; the film's treatment of Ashleigh's raincoat scene is closer to titillation than body acceptance.
Gatsby is called 'eccentric' and 'brainy,' but this is a quirk of characterization, not any depiction or advocacy of neurodivergence.
The film engages no historical subject matter and revises nothing.
Why it received this score
A Rainy Day in New York is a minor Woody Allen romance, all wet sidewalks, jazz piano, and young people mistaking urban atmosphere for destiny. Its social consciousness is largely inherited set dressing. The Manhattan on display is a rarefied white salon, with Selena Gomez and Diego Luna drifting through as ordinary cast members instead of an inclusion statement. No LGBTQ thread disturbs the romantic machinery, and race never enters the conversation. This is not a film with a diversity agenda. It is a film with a dinner reservation.
Gender politics are vintage Allen. Ashleigh is passed among older male artists, then reduced to a punchline about her failure to tell Cole Porter from Shakespeare. The camera treats her raincoat predicament as titillation, not body acceptance, and Gatsby's brainy eccentricity remains a characterization quirk, not an argument about neurodivergence. Rain falls for romance and plot convenience, never for environmental alarm. The family gala and the mother's escort backstory supply a burst of class texture, but the film turns that revelation into personal healing, not a systemic critique of capital. There is no racial consciousness here, no historical revision, no sermon about the planet.
The dialogue does lecture, endlessly, about jazz, sophistication, and the correct way to revere Manhattan. That is pretension, not progressive messaging. The film arrives with a heavy external reputation, thanks to its director and the cultural weather around its release, but the text itself is almost serene in its lack of social argument. It wants to be a breezy romantic trifle and mostly succeeds at being a strained one. As a cultural artifact, it is less a provocation than a time capsule from a vanished mode of upper-middlebrow courtship. The rain keeps falling, the Cole Porter references keep coming, and the movie's conscience remains comfortably asleep.
Analysis generated by our Consciousness Algorithm
Synopsis
Two young people arrive in New York to spend a weekend, but once they arrive they're met with bad weather and a series of adventures.
Questions about A Rainy Day in New York
Is A Rainy Day in New York woke?
No — A Rainy Day in New York is not woke, scoring 5 out of 100 on our wokeness meter. That earns it a verdict of Ultra Based.
Does A Rainy Day in New York have any woke elements?
Very few. None of the 10 markers reaches 30, the level where a marker counts as present; the highest is Representation Casting at 18.
How does A Rainy Day in New York compare to other 2019 movies?
It ranks #239 of the 284 films from 2019 we've scored; their average is 22. The wokest is Black Christmas (79).
How is the Woke Score calculated?
An AI-assisted process researches the film and its reception, scores it 0–100 on ten markers, then combines those into one 0–100 Woke Score. It measures a specific set of 2020s cultural themes, not film quality.