Woody Allen 101
Though his now four-decade-long moviemaking career
technically began with the overdubbed 1966 lark What's Up, Tiger Lily?—addressed here in
"Miscellany," where it belongs—any formal Woody Allen education must
begin with 1969's Take The Money And Run. When people talk about
Allen's "early, funny period," this is the model: A goofy, inconsequential
85-minute comedy that pulled off the not-inconsiderable feat of stuffing the
physical and verbal comedy of the Marx brothers within the slender frame of a
clumsy, bespectacled Jew from New York. Taking the form of a mock documentary,
the film chronicles the life and times of a petty criminal (Allen) whose
ineptitude in robbing banks is equaled only by his ineptitude with women.
Right from the start, Allen established a comedic
persona that would more or less stretch through every phase of his career. Yes,
he has depths of intellect and melancholy that don't surface here, but other
elements are firmly in place: The runaway neuroses, the merciless
self-deprecation, the bumbling physical hijinks, the ongoing feelings of
romantic and sexual inadequacy. In a cinema full of glamorous heroes,
characters like Allen's Virgil Stockwell (one of his funniest character names,
second to Bananas'
Fielding Mellish) were refreshingly down-to-earth, the personification of the
klutzy, neurotic fussbucket that exists in all of us. Finally, someone to
relate to!
Take The Money And Run is somewhat unique to the
Allen filmography in that it has no subtext whatsoever. It's simply about
stringing together as many gags as possible, which makes it lumpy viewing at
times, but mostly confirms Allen as a gifted, energetic, inspired new presence
in American comedy. A textbook gag about a bank robbery foiled by poor
penmanship ("I have a gub") is the obvious highlight, but Allen gets a lot of
mileage out of the faux-documentary conceit, from the wry narration and
hilarious talking heads (especially his mortified parents) to the running joke
that the audience is watching a filmed monument to one man's failure.
Allen stepped up his game considerably with his
1971 follow-up Bananas, perhaps the zaniest and most purely pleasurable
of his early-period laughers. Once again, Allen plays an inept fool: an
empty-headed consumer-products tester whose infatuation with a good-looking
political activist (Louise Lasser) leads him to the unstable Central American
banana republic of San Marcos, where he unwittingly gets involved in the
revolution. And somehow, through a combination of dumb luck and one incredibly
goofy Fidel Castro-inspired fake beard, he becomes a figurehead among San
Marcos' rebels, impressing the girl after all.
Much like Duck Soup, an Allen favorite, Bananas takes a typical jester's
stand on politics—declaring it all a circus that sweeps up the naïvely
idealistic (or, in this case, horny) and deposits them wherever the winds may
blow. It's telling that Howard Cosell of ABC's Wide World Of Sports serves as commentator for
the assassination of "El Presidente" and Allen's marital consummation at the end of
the film, as if both were equally absurd. But mostly, Bananas is a cavalcade of inspired
silliness, with highlights that include Marvin Hamlisch's infectious score
(with kazoo!), a courtroom scene where Allen breathlessly interrogates himself
("Does the codename 'sapphire' mean anything to you?"), and some funny physical
business involving a young Sylvester Stallone as "Subway Thug #1."
Allen delved into politics again with his
ingenious 1973 science-fiction spoof Sleeper, which takes place in a
future world dominated by an oppressive, invasive government. Again, he joins
an anti-government group less out of an activist impulse than a desire to get a
few spins with Diane Keaton in the Orgasmatron. Playing a health-food-store owner frozen by scientists and
awakened 200 years in the future, Allen shows off an impressive repertoire of
physical and verbal comedy. Some scenes have the quality of a classic silent
movie, like one where Allen wakes up with massive disorientation and muscle
atrophy, or another where he clumsily imitates a robot to infiltrate the
government. (He keeps his glasses on, which sets him apart from other robots.) He
capitalizes on the futuristic setting, which allows him to speculate on mating
habits and rewrite giant swaths of history. If the history books were rewritten
in accordance with Sleeper, Bela Lugosi would be the former mayor of New
York, Charles de Gaulle a famous French chef with his own television show, and
Howard Cosell a form of punishment for high crimes against the state.
No longer content with simple laughs, Allen moved
decisively into the next phase of his career with 1977's Annie Hall, which won him Oscars for
Director, Screenplay, and Picture, as well as Best Actress for his effervescent
co-star Diane Keaton. While refining his distinctive brand of New York Jewish
humor, Allen turned his attention for the first time to a serious, insightful
look at a romance that waxes and wanes, flourishing until finally, like a
shark, "it has to keep moving or it dies." One of the remarkable elements of Annie
Hall—and
what separates it from every Woody Allen film to this day—is its
loose-limbed, discursive structure, which gives Allen the opportunity to talk
to the camera, move freely back and forth in time, insert random gags when
necessary, and chart the full history of a relationship, including the romantic
pasts of both people involved. As with all Allen films to come, its view of
love is fundamentally pessimistic, but its tone is airy and accessible, and its
observations universal.
The breadth of Annie Hall's influence can't be
overstated. It's the birth of a modern-day American romantic comedy, where
relationships are forged via banter-filled walk-and-talks and the male lead's
idea of courtship is an extended stand-up routine. Annie Hall is to romantic comedies
as Halloween
is to slasher films—a great achievement that spawned a lot of bad movies.
Allen's habit of breaking the "fourth wall" and addressing the camera directly
has been similarly imitated, but beyond that, the movie serves as a clinic in
how to mix serious insight and bright comedy without drawing too severe a line
between the two.
Allen collected another Oscar for writing 1986's Hannah
And Her Sisters,
a dense, sophisticated comedy-drama about siblings who hurt each other while
following their foolish romantic impulses. Mia Farrow is married to Michael
Caine, but Caine's eye drifts to her beautiful younger sister Barbara Hershey,
who in turn is committed to a severe older artist, played by Ingmar Bergman
muse Max Von Sydow. Catastrophically, Caine and Hershey pursue their latent
affections; their affair speaks to a recurring theme in Allen's work—that
love is selfish, destructive, and utterly, tragically inescapable. The
characters in Hannah And Her Sisters are slaves of the heart; it helps that Allen
offsets their cruelty and pain by casting himself as the comic relief, playing
Farrow's hypochondriac, death-fearing former husband with a typical absence of
vanity. He also gives himself a sage line: "The heart is a resilient little
muscle."
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Intermediate work
1975's Love And Death marked the end of an era
as the last—and one of the best—of Allen's early, funny films, a
period that would be endlessly romanticized in the following decades. Though as
ramshackle and gag-driven as many of the films that preceded it, Love And
Death
boasts a growing intellectual ambition. In a broad parody of Russian
literature, Allen plays a hapless schlemiel who gets conscripted into the
Russian army and, through a series of comic misadventures, ends up conspiring
with his wife (Diane Keaton) to assassinate Napoleon. It's one of Allen's
funniest films, but also reflects his lifelong fascination with literature and
philosophy while paying homage to his inspirations.
"Chapter one. He adored New York City. He idolized
it all out of proportion. No, make that, he romanticized it all out of proportion.
To him, no matter what the season was, this was still a town that existed in
black and white and pulsated to the great tunes of George Gershwin." That's an
uncharacteristically boyish Allen at the beginning of 1979's Manhattan, as Gershwin's "Rhapsody
In Blue" soars in a delicate duet with Gordon Willis' sumptuous black-and-white
rendering of New York at its most swooningly photogenic. It's a rapturous love
letter to Allen's hometown that doubles as a statement of purpose. With Manhattan, Allen self-consciously
attempted the leap from great comedy-writer to great filmmaker. Manhattan flaunts its ambition as
well as its pretension. A genius gag-smith had tasted the forbidden fruit of
high art. His oeuvre would never be the same.
The choice of opening music is telling. With
"Rhapsody In Blue," Gershwin made an analogous leap from pop and jazz to the
rarified world of classical music. Much like Allen's best films, "Rhapsody In Blue"
captures something ineffable and powerful about what it means to be an
American, about the endless promise of bustling cities and their frenzied
inhabitants. Gershwin's music and Willis' cinematography contribute as much to
the film's success as Allen himself. Willis' daringly dark
cinematography—as audacious in its way as his revolutionary work on The
Godfather—sets
an appropriately somber tone for a film that plays like the broody sibling to Annie
Hall.
A moody, cerebral look at the neuroses and interlocked
romantic entanglements of the smart set, Manhattan casts its writer-director
as, of all things, a neurotic comedy writer torn between fresh-faced underage
girlfriend Mariel Hemingway and angsty Diane Keaton, the high-strung mistress of
best friend Michael Murphy. The flaws that hinder Allen's later work are much
in evidence. Allen and Marshall Brickman's screenplay name-drops the likes of
Kierkegaard and Mahler as if they're being paid by the reference, and the
dialogue is sometimes stilted. It's yet another Allen movie where the
bespectacled hero tells a devastated, beautiful younger woman—in this
case Hemingway—that while she's, you know, beautiful, intelligent,
erotic, and sensational, and he's probably crazy not to jump at any
opportunity to be with her, she's ultimately too young and naïve for him. There
is a YouTube montage to be made of all the scenes where Allen regretfully,
stumblingly rejects the romantic or sexual advances of women young enough to be
his daughter.
Yet Manhattan gains a steady cumulative
power in its final act, and Allen's habitual self-aggrandizement is nicely
undercut by self-deprecating humor about his lesbian ex-wife (a young Meryl
Streep) and Keaton's sexually masterful ex-husband (Wallace Shawn). Keaton's
lionization of Shawn and his sexual performance certainly goes a long way
toward explaining why she finds the short, bespectacled, nebbishy
writer-director so devastatingly attractive. Manhattan builds into a melancholy
meditation on love, loss, and the eternal appeal of the New York skyline.
For all its off-putting intellectual airs and
regrettable pretension, Manhattan is a big squirmy puppy of a movie compared to 1980's Stardust
Memories,
which chased Allen's 1979 Ingmar Bergman homage Interiors with a feature-length
navel-gaze inspired by Federico Fellini's 8 1/2. It's an almost comically
combative exercise in dreamy, free-associative autobiographical surrealism that
spews vitriol in every direction, mercilessly skewering fans, film critics,
studio executives, actresses, actors, academics, and the ignorant, unwashed
rabble that makes up Allen's audience. The ugliness of Allen's fan base is
literal as well as figurative: bit parts are filled out with gargoyle-faced
extras straight out of a Diane Arbus photograph, though to be fair, Allen
blends in with the ostentatiously unattractive crowd. Still, it's a strangely
likeable wallow in misanthropy, a jaunty, lighthearted take on man's search for
meaning in a cruel, unknowable universe. Allen's search for meaning often
centers on fleeting moments of human connection and the timeless pleasures of
art and entertainment, whether he's regaining his will to live after watching
the Marx brothers in Hannah And Her Sisters or realizing that Mariel
Hemingway's face is right up there with Louis Armstrong and Willie Mays in a
list of things that make life worthwhile in Manhattan.
In 1985's exquisite Purple Rose Of Cairo, hard-luck Depression-era
waitress Mia Farrow treats cinema as a religion, worshiping frothy, escapist
studio comedies that once made a suffering nation forget their troubles for an
hour or two, not including newsreels and cartoons. Night after night, Farrow
loses herself in the fizzy delirium of the eponymous light, continental comedy.
Then one magical night, dashing, clean-cut explorer Jeff Daniels comes down
from the screen to woo Farrow in person. Allen's favorite of all his films is a
lovely, quietly devastating, sweet exploration of the genius and limitations of
escapism. It's also just about perfect, tragic undertones and all. In Allen's
world, people inevitably disappoint, institutions lie, religion and philosophy
promise infinitely more than they can deliver, but Fred Astaire and Ginger
Rogers dancing to "Cheek To Cheek" will never let you down.
In the 1984 farce Broadway Danny Rose, Allen's title character
places his faith in show business, in spite of its shadowy depths. In one of
his most charming performances, Allen plays a third-rate agent who never gives
up on his stable of hapless performers—from drug-addled Puerto Rican
ventriloquists to a small army of balloon-benders—in spite of their
near-total lack of talent. Allen's luck appears to change, however, when a
second-rate lounge singer (Nick Apollo Forte) gets some choice breaks and looks
primed for a comeback. Alas, Forte's comeback is anything but smooth,
especially for Forte's long-suffering mistress Mia Farrow. Allen agrees to act
as Forte's beard, and in a textbook case of mistaken identity, Allen and Farrow
are pursued by Mafia goons convinced Allen has stolen Farrow from one of their
own. Broadway Danny Rose oozes affection for its lovingly depicted milieu.
For all his accolades and prestige, Allen remains a vaudevillian at heart, and Rose lovingly,
affectingly takes Allen back to his Borscht Belt roots.
Allen's love for old-time jazz pervades 1999's Sweet
And Lowdown, a
bittersweet comedy about the world's second-greatest jazz guitarist (Sean
Penn), an insanely gifted idiot-savant whose idea of a romantic evening entails
shooting rats at the city dump. Samantha Morton co-stars as Penn's love
interest and the latter-day Allen's version of the perfect woman: saintly,
endlessly supportive, and mute. In a bravura, Oscar-nominated turn, Penn plays
an artist as unself-conscious and oblivious as
Allen and his cinematic surrogates are neurotic, and the film compellingly
chronicles the life and times of a man who might be the worst possible vessel
for a truly astounding gift. The result is a return to form and Allen's best
film in the stretch that followed Husbands And Wives.
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Advanced studies
A savvy director always know when to capitalize on
a recent hit by pursuing a project a studio wouldn't permit a failure to helm.
Hence Steven Soderbergh's remake of Solaris, made possible by Ocean's
Eleven,
or Martin Scorsese's New York, New York, produced on the heels of Taxi Driver. With everyone calling
him a genius after Annie Hall, Allen defied expectations—and the wishes
of the vast majority of his fans—by blowing his currency on 1978's Interiors, an austere, humorless
drama made in the style of his cinematic hero, Ingmar Bergman.
On the one hand, Allen's refusal to be pigeonholed
as a funnyman remains a bold act of artistic defiance; on the other, Interiors often feels unnatural and
mannered, like a lifeless imitation of someone else's work. That said, there's
a direct line between the sibling dynamic in Interiors and the one in Hannah
And Her Sisters,
and Allen gets an opportunity to address one of his favorite
subjects—death—with a piercing directness that wouldn't have been
possible in a straight-up comedy. It's an underrated effort overall, and far
superior to the feckless one-two punch of 1987's September (a chamber drama so
misconceived he had to restart the whole thing from scratch) and 1988's Another
Woman.
Allen wisely retreated to comedy for much of the
decade following Interiors, and even stepped back into the wacky élan of his
earliest work with 1983's Zelig, a brilliantly conceived, technically
masterful mock documentary that takes Allen's self-deprecating persona to its
logical extreme. Using actual newsreel footage and a bluescreen that seamlessly
incorporates his actors, Allen and ace cinematographer Gordon Willis create a
revisionist history with a comical figure at the center. Allen plays Leonard Zelig,
a "human chameleon" who's capable of hobnobbing with the elite and proles, and
appears in photos next to such famous figures as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Charles
Lindbergh, Al Capone, Adolf Hitler, Babe Ruth, Charlie Chaplin, and countless
others. Some complained that Zelig stretches a good idea too thin, even at a slim 79
minutes, but the film includes enough marvels to go the distance: On a purely
technical level, the mix of vintage footage and new images is a marvel, and
would be co-opted later for movies like Forrest Gump. The film also gave Allen
a chance to dig deep into his record collection for the soundtrack, which also
integrates witty original tunes in the same styles, furthering the illusion
that the human chameleon really did sneak into the historical frame. But
mostly, Zelig
riffs playfully on Allen's savage image of himself; look past the comedy and
there stands a weak conformist, present at historical moments, but doomed not
to make an impression on them.
Still, the relationship between Woody Allen the
onscreen persona and Woody Allen the man is tricky, and shouldn't necessarily
be taken at face value. It's tempting to call 1992's wrenching Husbands
And Wives
his most personal film, a revealing examination of broken marriages made at a
time when his relationship with Mia Farrow was very publicly falling apart. And
yet it's hard to know who the real Allen is: From Take The Money And Run on, he's always put the
worst image of himself on the screen—weak, ineffectual, clumsy, neurotic,
inept with women, pathologically afraid of death, etc. Husbands And Wives just seems more personal
because it's rawer than any film he'd made before or since, refusing to spin betrayals
of the sort seen in Hannah And Her Sisters into easily digestible entertainment.
Employing a shaky handheld camera and effective
documentary-style confessionals, Allen opens with Judy Davis and Sidney Pollack
casually announcing to another couple, played by Allen and Farrow, that they're
splitting up. The news has a powerful ripple effect, not least because Allen
and Farrow always assumed their friends had the perfect marriage, and certainly
one stronger than their own. So eyes start drifting: Pollack takes up with a ditzy
personal trainer who couldn't be further removed from his sharp, headstrong
wife. Davis goes for a sensitive man (Liam Neeson) with none of her husband's
brutish qualities. And Allen, a creative-writing professor, takes a special
interest in a talented and much younger student (Juliette Lewis). Husbands
And Wives
is full of combustible elements—Pollack and Davis are startlingly good—and
a prevailing cynicism about relationships that curdled into misanthropy in Deconstructing
Harry,
but feels bracingly honest here.
Though Allen has always acknowledged and mostly
forgiven the flaws in people—himself especially—he can be a
moralist, too. 1989's Crimes And Misdemeanors concerns an
ophthalmologist (a brilliant Martin Landau) who's been cheating on his wife for
years, common enough in a Woody Allen movie. But his weakness goes much deeper
than the usual Allen character: When his mistress (Anjelica Huston) threatens
to reveal the affair and sabotage his life, Landau turns to his no-good brother
(Jerry Orbach), who knows somebody who can take care of the problem. Meanwhile,
Allen plays a documentary filmmaker whose struggles to make a movie about a
philosophy professor lead him to a devil's bargain in which he's commissioned
to shoot a profile of a boobish TV producer (Alan Alda). Similar to Hannah
And Her Sisters,
only much more severe, Crimes And Misdemeanors keeps the "serious"
subplot and the "funny" subplot separated like a McDLT: The hot and cold sides
don't come together until the end, when Landau and Allen meet at a party and
their sins are weighed against each other. The strategy seems bound to yield a
movie of schizophrenic tones, but the film is perfectly balanced: Both stories
are strong, and the comic relief is especially welcoming after the heavy moral
ruminations of Landau's actions. (The metaphorical nature of his
occupation—an ophthalmologist who can't see—is a little much,
though.)
Allen apparently loved the murder subplot in Crimes
And Misdemeanors
so much that he recycled it twice in quick succession with 2005's Match
Point
and 2007's Cassandra's Dream. The
first film again deals with an affair so intoxicating that it leads to murder,
and the second finds two ambitious brothers willing to kill in order to climb
out of a gambling debt and realize their get-rich-quick dreams. Match Point was hailed as a
triumphant return to form after an extensive lean period for Allen, and Cassandra's
Dream was
mostly dismissed for returning to the well one too many times, but had the
latter come before the former, it seems possible that it would have been the
triumph and Match Point the failure. In any case, both films are intriguing but
extremely problematic: Working in England for the first time, Allen doesn't
have much of a feel for the differences in language and culture. Either film could
have been set back in New York without requiring much revision to the scripts.
And though Allen attacks the thriller elements with confidence and a renewed
sense of élan, the mechanics are a little creaky.
Still, Match Point and Cassandra's Dream both push issues of money
and social class to the foreground, which breaks strongly from Allen's
Manhattan movies, where wealth and privilege are just taken as a given. Murder
become a desperate, last-ditch attempt to either achieve status or hold onto it,
and Allen does a fine job explicating the reasons his characters are driven to
such extremes. At a minimum, both films are lively and engaged, which
immediately puts them a notch above most of Allen's work in the late '90s and
early '00s, and suggest he's due for a comeback.
And, lo, Allen's new film, Vicky Cristina
Barcelona,
turns out to be his best in well over a decade—witty, sexy, vibrant, and
somehow both skeptical about love and infectiously enthusiastic about romance.
Unlike Allen's other cinematic adventures in Europe, the film wouldn't make
sense in New York, since it so explicitly contrasts American and European
values. As with any fruitful relationship, chemistry is everything: Allen
always rotates his casts, but here he lands on precisely the right people for
each role, particularly Javier Bardem as a libertine painter with the courage
to proposition two American women at once and the charisma to succeed, and Penélope
Cruz as Bardem's tempestuous wife, whose unpredictable moods are as fickle as
love itself.
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Diversions
Though his work has deepened and darkened as the
years have passed, Allen has never lost his fundamental impulse as an
entertainer, and several of his movies are nearly all surface, all pleasure. To
wit:
While Allen has sometimes delved into the past, he
could hardly be considered a nostalgist; he admits to never revisiting his own
films when they're done, for fear that the mistakes would be painful. So count
1987's Radio Days as a happy anomaly in Allen's filmography, an unabashedly
nostalgic reflection on growing up in a world without television. Looking back
affectionately on a middle-class Jewish family in Rockaway Beach, New York,
circa 1942, Allen contrasts the hilarious cacophony of their modest home with
the far more urbane and sophisticated world piped in through the ever-present
radio.
Personally and professionally, Allen had a rocky
relationship with Mia Farrow, but there's enormous sweetness and affection to
the way he treats her in 1990's Alice. While Farrow was guilty
of doing her own Woody Allen impression, her charms are apparent in a
wide-ranging performance that finds her searching for love with the help of a
Chinese herbalist and his magical potions. The basic outlines of Alice are awfully
familiar—disenchanted housewife, cheating husband (William Hurt),
available bachelor (Joe Mantegna)—but the tone is so wispy and inviting
that at one point, Farrow becomes a ghost.
Having just made his darkest film in Husbands
And Wives,
Allen wisely shifted gears for 1993's Manhattan Murder Mystery, which applies the
handheld aesthetic to a willfully inconsequential sleuthing plot. The story of
middle-aged apartment-dwellers who investigate a neighbor's suspicious death
was actually a discarded subplot from Annie Hall, so it's only natural
that Allen used the opportunity to pair up with Diane Keaton—always his
brightest screen partner—for the first time in nearly 15 years. Allen and
Keaton's amateur sleuthing leads to many funny moments, often heightened by the
fact that both are pitiful scaredy-cats.
For his next movie, Allen again went for another
breezy comedy in 1994's Bullets Over Broadway, a broad period farce
about a playwright (John Cusack) who compromises his play to accommodate a
mafia organization (represented by Chazz Palminteri) willing to finance it, under the condition that the boss'
ditzy, no-talent moll (Jennifer Tilly) gets a starring role. Allen's script,
co-written with Douglas McGrath, has the right screwball snap, and the supporting
performances are vivid, particularly Tilly—who channels Judy Holliday in Born
Yesterday—and
Dianne Wiest as a fading star who latches onto Cusack's talent. Suggested
second feature in the double-bill: Barton Fink.
It's not entirely an insult to call Allen's 1996
musical Everyone Says I Love You "sloppy," since he chose to use the
actors' real voices (save for an overdubbed Drew Barrymore, who couldn't carry
a tune at all) and keep the choreography stripped-down and sometimes
deliberately clumsy. Though it's still sloppy in ways it shouldn't be, the film
gets swept up in New York and Paris at their most intoxicatingly romantic, and
a few numbers really shine, especially Edward Norton's ungainly rendition of
"My Baby Just Cares For Me." It's the rare occasion where Allen allows himself
a happy ending—and earns it.
Demerits
Since breaking out with 1969's Take The Money
and Run, Allen
has vied for the title of hardest-working auteur in Hollywood, cranking out
films at an astonishing clip and working his way through just about every genre
short of tentacle-porn and steampunk. As a result, he's arguably directed more
masterpieces than any other filmmaker of his generation. But Allen's
unimpeachable work ethic and profligacy cuts both ways: He's also produced a
gaudy abundance of duds, mediocrities, and flat-out stinkers, especially in
recent years.
In 1972, Allen took on a unique challenge in
adapting the ubiquitous sex manual Everything You Always Wanted To Know
About Sex* But Were Afraid To Ask into a ribald collection of sketches. The project
took Allen back to his formative days as a boy genius pounding out sketches and
gags for Sid Caesar on Your Show Of Shows, but the results are infinitely more miss
than hit. Gene Wilder provides the film's sole bright spot in a sketch about a
doe-eyed doctor who falls helpessly in love (or at least lust) with a sexy,
sexy sheep, a funny yet strangely moving development.
A decade later, Allen once again stumbled with a
titillatingly titled romp in 1982's A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy, a thin, feeble homage to
Ingmar Bergman's Smiles Of A Summer Night, which also inspired Stephen Sondheim's A
Little Night Music. Allen
reportedly wrote the script in two weeks. It shows.
Beginning with 1995's Mighty Aphrodite, Allen alternated largely
between affable mediocrities and hateful, misogynistic misfires. Allen was once
rightly hailed for writing unusually rich, complex roles for women, but in the
aftermath of that whole unpleasantness with Mia Farrow and Soon-Yi Previn, the
women in his films began to inhabit a narrow range of reductive stereotypes. In
1995's laugh-deficient Mighty Aphrodite, Mira Sorvino plays an archetypal
hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold who stumbles into the life of Allen's neurotic
sportswriter when he discovers she's the likely birth mother of his beloved
adopted son. Here, Allen's lovingly cultivated misogyny joins forces with his equally
formidable classism.
In 1997's Deconstructing Harry, Allen channels Philip
Roth's bile with little of his attending insight or wit. The film is
nevertheless a towering masterpiece compared to 1998's equally hateful, even
lousier Celebrity, a smug, brutally unfunny meditation on the empty spectacle
of celebrity that combines facile observations about show business with
paper-thin characterizations. And in the annals of bad Woody Allen
impersonations, Kenneth Branagh's is unquestionably the worst.
With 2000's Small Time Crooks, Woody Allen seemingly took
a cue from the aliens in Stardust Memories and their love of his
early, funny films by returning to the goofy, gag-driven broad comedy from his
pre-Annie Hall days.
But Allen's comic chops had atrophied. A filmmaker who once conjured up huge
laughs effortlessly was now struggling mightily to generate even the meekest
chuckles. Fans who pined for years for the return of the funny Allen must have
found Crooks doubly
disappointing.
Small Time Crooks set the tone for the
string of mediocrities that followed. 2001's Curse Of The Jade Scorpion found the stubbornly
old-fashioned filmmaker once again drawing inspiration from show business'
misty past in a genial yet wholly uninspired period comic mystery about an
insurance investigator and an efficiency expert hypnotized into committing
crimes—a plot that inexplicably failed to resonate with contemporary
audiences, even though it boasted the largest budget of any Allen film to date.
Allen's losing streak continued with 2002's Hollywood
Ending, another
feeble show-biz spoof about an over-the-hill, Peter Bogdanovich-like director
(Allen) who snags a plum directing job and must hide his blindness in order to
hold onto the job. It's an eminently forgettable light comedy fortified with
hopelessly geriatric physical comedy. Allen fans once expected greatness: Each
new project radiated potential. Yet by this point in his career, fans were
all-too-grateful for anything that wasn't too egregiously awful or malicious.
The veteran gag-smith/deep thinker reached a
professional nadir with 2003's barely-released Anything Else, a film that found Allen
shamelessly cannibalizing his past. In this case, he essentially remade Annie
Hall with American Pie's
Jason Biggs in the Allen role as a 21-year-old divorced comedy writer (huh?),
and Christina Ricci as his succubus girlfriend. Like Deconstructing Harry, Anything Else is notable mainly for its
exceedingly ugly take on the human condition, and also for the casting of Allen
as a paranoid gun-nut who sees an anti-Semitic conspiracy around every corner.
But bleakness is no substitute for funny, and Anything Else radiates creative
exhaustion. On the plus side, it left him nowhere to go but up.
In 2005, Allen couldn't decide whether he wanted
to make another mediocre comedy or a painfully stilted, pretentious drama, so
he combined the two in Melinda And Melinda. The film opens with
Wallace Shawn and his egghead pals arguing whether the essence of life is
fundamentally dramatic or comic, an argument dramatized (in the loosest sense)
by dual narratives—one faintly comic, the other ostensibly
dramatic—about Radha Mitchell's troubled single woman and her quest for
love. Gigantic WASP Will Ferrell makes a surprisingly inspired Allen doppelgänger,
but otherwise, this is the kind of experiment that should have been abandoned
early on.
By late-Allen standards, the breezy 2007 comic
mystery Scoop isn't
half-bad, though that says more about how far Allen expectations have fallen
than it does about the film's quality. It's a featherweight romp that casts
Allen as the Great Splendini, a hack magician embroiled in intrigue involving
Ian McShane (a legendary journalist pursuing one last scoop from beyond the
grave), college reporter Scarlett Johansson (unconvincingly cast as the scion
of an Orthodox Jewish family), and Hugh Jackman, a wealthy playboy who may or
may not be the infamous Tarot Card Serial Killer. It repeatedly brings
audiences to the verge of laughter, only to strand them there, though Allen's
string of invented revelations about fake-daughter Johansson is a consistent
source of mild amusement.
Miscellany
Woody Allen has shown little interest in
contemporary popular culture in the past few decades, but he was unmistakably
plugged into the zeitgeist early in his career. The collection Stand-Up
Comic compiles
classic, early routines that radiate brainy geek-chic and a finely honed
persona that combined a Catskills comedian's genius for rib-tickling one-liners
with a philosophy graduate student's heady concerns.
Though it can be hard to conceive of this
quintessential neurotic as a Swinging '60s kind of guy, Allen veered shockingly
close to being groovy in 1965's What's New Pussycat, a libidinal farce about a
guilt-stricken womanizer (Peter O'Toole) who enters a unorthodox form of
treatment with a kooky shrink (Peter Sellers) in a bid to leave his cheating
ways behind so he can give himself over completely to his fiancée. Allen wrote
a sizable supporting part for himself that was whittled down once
Sellers—a much bigger star at the time—decided he'd rather deliver
Allen's choicest lines himself. The result, a funny but fatally compromised
romp, led to Allen pursuing more and more control over later projects.
Allen hooked up with an all-star cast (including
his nemesis Sellers) in 1967's overwrought, overstuffed James Bond spoof Casino
Royale,
playing a sex-crazed self-caricature obsessed with eliminating his romantic
competition, even if it meant destroying much of the world. Along with
seemingly every other prominent writer in Hollywood, Allen worked on the
script, but precious little of his comic sensibility survived the muddled,
big-budget excess.
Allen's directorial debut of sorts, 1966's What's
Up, Tiger Lily?, once
again found him struggling to put his brainy, absurdist stamp on someone else's
material, in this case a '60s Japanese spy thriller Allen and co-writer Mickey
Rose reconceived and overdubbed as a zany search for the world's greatest
egg-salad recipe. Though the film has its fans, it's an awfully inauspicious
beginning for a legendary directorial career.
Throughout the '60s and '70s, Allen thrived in
multiple mediums. He conquered the worlds of theater, television, movies,
nightclubs, and the written word. Classic collections of short comic pieces like Without Feathers and Side Effects introduced multiple generations to the joys of
literary humor through bits like "The Whore Of Mensa," about prostitutes who
promise to get customers off intellectually instead of sexually. Bits and
pieces of Allen's literary fiction appear in several of his movies, while the
one-act play "Death" became the basis for 1992's indifferently received Shadows
And Fog, an
extended homage to German Expressionism.
After Allen's frustrating experience with What's
New Pussycat?, he
appeared primarily in his own films. But he's branched out with appearances in
other directors' work on occasion. In 1975's The Front, Allen contributed a
well-received dramatic lead performance as a bookie who acts as a front for
friend Michael Murphy and a number of other blacklisted writers. The film took
on a personal dimension for co-star Zero Mostel and writer Walter Bernstein,
both of whom had been blacklisted themselves.
During his mid-'90s doldrums, Allen took a big
step backward by returning to television with a pair of modest TV movies, a
1994 adaptation of his Cold War spoof Don't Drink The Water, which had previously been
adapted for the big screen in 1969 with Jackie Gleason in the lead role, and
1995's The Sunshine Boys, which cast him opposite Peter Falk. In John Erman's adaptation of
the classic play by Neil Simon—another distinguished alumnus of Your
Show Of Shows—the
two men play a legendary comedy duo that reunites after decades of acrimony.
Allen played (or at least voiced) a cartoon
version of his fussy, anxious persona in the 1998 computer-animated hit Antz, DreamWorks' answer to
Pixar's far superior A Bug's Life. The schlocky result was nevertheless one of the
biggest commercial hits of Allen's career. It also introduced his time-tested
shtick to a new generation of youngsters. Then again, Antz was a big step up from
1991's Scenes From A Mall, a failed comedy-drama that cast Allen as a
surfboard-toting, pony-tailed yuppie whose marriage to Bette Midler falls
apart, then comes back together during an eventful, disturbingly sex-filled day
at a Southern Californian mall.
Given Allen's venerability and ubiquity, it's not
surprising that he's been spoofed extensively in television and film. SCTV contributed perhaps the
greatest Woody Allen spoof in its classic send-up of the Allen-penned movie Play
It Again, Sam
with "Play It Again, Bob" a loving homage that imagines Rick Moranis'
uncannily accurate Woody Allen teaming up with Dave Thomas' equally genius Bob
Hope—a huge, oft-overlooked influence on Allen's humor and
persona—to make a film that'll finally nab Hope a long-overdue Oscar.
The Ben Stiller Show, a proud acolyte of SCTV, produced a genius Allen
spoof of its own by cross-pollinating Husbands And Wives with Universal horror
movies. It's a pitch-perfect recreation of horror-movie archetypes and the raw,
voyeuristic, John Cassavetes-inspired intensity of what may have been Allen's
last masterpiece. Allen doesn't show any sign of slowing down, let alone
retiring, but even after he's gone, his influence will live on.
The Essentials
1. Annie Hall
(1977)
In
this great evolutionary step forward, Allen moved beyond the vaudevillian
shtick of his early films to a new dramatic and emotional richness while
diligently preserving the funny. It's a valentine to Diane Keaton at her most
irresistible, a jaundiced New Yorker's take on the vast intellectual wasteland
that is Los Angeles, and a playfully postmodern comedy with a big, vital heart.
2. Purple Rose Of Cairo (1985)
Like
1980's shamefully underrated Pennies From Heaven, Allen's 1984 masterpiece
eked bottomless pathos and surprising humor out of the unbridgeable gulf
between the dizzy, sophisticated movies of the Depression and the
ever-suffering dreamers in the audience.
3. Hannah And Her Sisters (1986)
Perfectly
integrating a serious take on familial and romantic relationships with deft
comedic business, Allen's comedy-drama orchestrates a complicated series of
loves and betrayals with clarity and sophistication.
4. Bananas
(1972)
Allen
paid homage to the wiseass, anarchic spirit of his heroes the Marx brothers,
specifically Duck Soup (which also appears in a key scene in Hannah And Her
Sisters),
in this zany 1971 political satire.
5. Husbands And Wives (1992)
The public collapse of Allen's marriage to Mia
Farrow brought an unvarnished immediacy to his 1992 drama, which unloads so
much emotional baggage that he spent subsequent years fleeing to
inconsequential comedies.