The Reluctant Film Art of Woody Allen (23 page)

If we accept this interpretation of the ending of
Hannah and Her Sisters,
we do so in the knowledge that nowhere else in Allen’s work is there any suggestion that children represent a form of immortality their parents can produce. The narrator of Gabe’s novel in
Husbands and Wives
characterizes procreation as “a nitwit strategy,” a judgment apparently borne out by the fact that children are generally seen and not heard throughout Allen’s films.

Hannah’s brood at her Thanksgiving dinner, for instance, are segregated off at their own table, barely perceivable at the margin of the screen, the half dozen or so of them never once interrupting the ritualistic gestures and genteel conversation being conducted at the adults’ table. Although there are brief dramatizations of warm relationships between Isaac Davis and his son in
Manhattan
, and between Larry Weinrib and his adopted son in
Mighty Aphrodite,
these sons are included primarily to heighten dramatic tensions (Isaac’s apprehensions about his boy’s being raised by lesbian partners) or to facilitate plot development (Larry’s search for and relationship with Max’s biological mother). The son Larry and Carol have produced in
Manhattan Murder Mystery
has for character the fact that his parents annually take him to ‘21’ for his birthday, and the primary purpose Joe and Steffi’s daughter, DJ, serves in
Everyone Says I Love You
is to orchestrate Joe’s erotic liaison with Von. Harry Block’s real affection for his son, Hilly, is clearly subordinated to Harry’s other preoccupa-tions: his adoration of Fay and his writer’s block. None of the characters Allen portrays before or after Mickey Sachs—whose narrative’s positing of paternity as the solution to his existential questions, in fact, is never dramatized in
Hannah,
it being left to the audience to make the inference—remotely perceives progeny as an answer to questions about the meaning of human life.
⁵

Judged on the basis of his entire film output, Allen is no more likely to conclude a film addressing existential issues with the dramatization of his protagonist’s achieving symbolic immortality through the generation of offspring than he is to resolve one through the protagonist’s successful creation of a work of art. Overall, Allen’s films endorse the attitude Mia Farrow cites him as maintaining throughout her memoir,
What Falls Away:
“I have zero interest in kids,” he told her early in their relationship, and when they were about to adopt their first child together, he explained, “Look, I don’t care about the baby. What I care about is my work.”
⁶
During the public airing of their disintegration as a couple, Allen told
Time Magazine,”The
last thing I was interested in was the whole parcel of Mia’s children….I spent absolutely zero time with any of them.”
⁷
“It’s no accomplishment to have or raise kids,” he insisted earlier, “Any fool can do it.”
⁸

Such disavowals of interest in family notwithstanding, Allen does conclude
Alice
with the title protagonist repudiating both her marriage and her writing ambitions in favor of dedicating herself to motherhood; the closing image of Alice pushing two of her children on swings clearly evokes a character whose liberation from upper East Side wealth and her marriage to a compulsive adulterer is utterly redemptive. The title character of
Alice
replicates and celebrates Mia Farrow’s intense commitment to her children, a dedication which Allen and others often publicly commended. “Mia has a talent for mothering the way some people have a green thumb for gardening or an ear for music or a talent for medicine,” Allen told
People Magazine
in 1992, and Rose Styron, the godmother of one of Farrows adopted children, Soon-Yi, suggested that “I’ve never known anyone who cared so selflessly about children, and who put so much of herself into them….They always came first.”
⁹

Accordingly, Farrow’s
What Falls Away
proliferates with expressions of her belief in the sacredness of the family, one of which includes her explanation to her mother of how she came to adopt and bring into her family children designated “difficult to place.”

When my mother asked why, I told her that I learned from Moses, firsthand, that meeting special needs is a special privilege, which brings a parent special rewards. It seemed that on the deepest level the other children understood this. Matthew, at seventeen and Yale- bound, had written in his college application essay, “Only now do I fully understand that my mother’s way of making life meaningful was to give a home to orphaned children. As a result she has saved four lives and enriched her own. If I can do as much, my life will be a success.”
¹⁰

When Allen concurred in Farrow’s desire to adopt another child in the mid- 1980s, Farrow hoped that Dylan Farrow would be the one to “open [Allen’s] heart” to children and family. In recalling this desire in
What Falls Away,
she articulates clearly both her conception of family and her understanding of Allen’s opposition to it:

I still hoped that he would love this child, that she would be the one to open his heart, and that through her he would learn to love without suspicion; that through her, he would see that a person other than himself, with needs and interests distinct from his, can exist not as a threat, but as one worthy of respect and love. And in discovering this, he would surely acknowledge all my children, he would see who they are as human souls, and in knowing them, how could he not love them? And then he would know all they mean to me, and finally he would understand who I am; and knowing my heart, he would feel safe, and love me back with certainty. In loving this child, he would place her needs before his own—he would begin to hope on her behalf, and in doing that he would have access to a purer, deeper connection to life; and we would all be there together, a family. That is what I hoped.
¹¹

The upshot of Farrow’s hopes fueled the tabloid press for months during 1992-1993; six years earlier,
Hannah and Her Sisters,
with Farrow’s children Daisy Previn and Moses Farrow portraying Hannah’s children, constituted Allen’s first attempt to evaluate artistically Farrow’s familial ethic. The film’s contrived ending communicates Allen’s insuperable doubts about the validity of the
Hannah
affirmation and unambiguously expresses his inability to endorse the family. Following the Soon-Yi revelations, Mia and Moses Farrow would agree on the motivation for “the atrocity … committed against our family” by Allen. “[H]e had an unfathomable and uncontrollable need to destroy everything positive in his life, so he tried to destroy our family.”
¹²
Farrow summarized her son’s interpretation, which echoes her own explanation of Allen’s disruption of a lovely family Christmas moment: “Everything was too nice, too beautiful. He just had to ruin it.”
¹³
Hannah
is Allen’s exquisitely framed cinematic vehicle for expressing the familial ambivalence both Farrows would subsequently ascribe to him;
Husbands and Wives
would be Allen’s unsparing repudiation of the familial values equivocally treated in
Hannah
.

It’s possible to attribute
Hannah’s
inordinately happy ending to external causes: Allen’s contentment with his stable relationship of seven years with Farrow,
¹⁴
and the good feelings arising from working with a first rate cast. The structural dynamic spanning three Thanksgiving celebrations (a holiday similarly sacramental in
Broadway Danny Rose,
though one commemorated by characters markedly less culturally privileged) to which his screenplay committed him may have also been a factor. More compelling, in critical terms, is to see the pregnancy ending as a resolution dictated by one of the two plot strains of
Hannah and Her Sisters,
the conclusion reflecting a perception of reality largely alien to Allen’s characteristic vision. To illuminate that bifurcated structure of
Hannah and Her Sisters,
it’s useful to begin by accounting for the fact that this film presents a more positive depiction of the relationship between art and its audience than does any of the other films previously discussed in this text.

There are two worlds dramatized in
Hannah and Her Sisters,
and art is largely contained within the domain in which Hannah is the central figure and symbol. Her husband, Elliot (Michael Caine), and sister, Lee (Barbara Hershey), both recognize Bach’s “Concerto for Harpsichord in F Minor” and experience pleasure in listening to it; both have read Richard Yates’s
The Easter Parade
and talk briefly with each other about the novel’s effect upon them, and they share a passion for the poetry of e.e. cummings, which Elliot employs in seducing Lee. Hannah and her mother, Norma, have portrayed Ibsen’s Nora in
A Doll’s House
on the New York stage, and Hannah will soon play Desdemona in
Othello,
her highly successful acting career presented as the apparent source of the comfort in which she and her family live. Norma and her husband, Evan, entertain guests at parties with nostalgic vocal/piano duets of standards by composers such as Cole Porter, Richard Rodgers, and Lorenz Hart; Holly briefly dates David, an architect who enjoys showing her his favorite New York buildings and has a private box at the Metropolitan Opera. Hannah, her family, and those with whom they associate are what Allen described to Bjorkman as “people who are sensitive and cultivated,” those for whom art represents “entertainment on a very, very high level.” (Their degree of sensitivity and cultivation, the film clearly implies, is a function of their very comfortable material circumstances.
¹⁵
) For them, art is pleasurable largely because they assign it to an appropriate place in their lives: none of them expects a Bach concerto or Puccini’s
Manon Lescant to
“save” them, and David’s enthusiasm for his aesthetic occupation is clearly a product of his understanding that architecture is art in which people live and work.

The characters from Allen’s earlier films that Hannah’s extended circle most obviously resemble are the highly cultured members of Eve’s family in
Interior’s
. An important difference, however, is that in
Hannah
there is no matriarch exaggerating art’s significance to human beings or grotesquely seeking to make people’s lives imitate some ideal aesthetic stasis. The one professional artist in Hannah’s immediate family—Hannah herself—balances her acting career with raising a large family, unlike
Interiors
Renata, whose art seems an excuse for ignoring familial obligations.
¹⁶

The character in
Hannah
who
does
make an island of art and who solipsistically refuses to countenance others’ perceptions of it is quickly and even a little heartlessly dispatched. Lee tells her lover, Frederick, whom she had once wanted to teach her “everything about poetry, about music,” that it’s asking too much for her to act as his only connection to the world. She consequently moves from the dismal Soho warehouse studio he inhabits to the bright Upper East Side apartment of her parents. Significantly, the audience of the predominantly upbeat
Hannah
is allowed only briefly to witness the suffering his self-imposed artist’s isolation has brought upon Frederick, as compared to
Interiors
extended dramatization of the emotional wages of Eve’s life- denying aestheticism.
¹⁷

In her desperate search for a viable career for herself, Holly misconstrues the proper balance between art and life that her sister seems to embody and thus offends Hannah by creating a script extravagantly predatory upon real life—Hannah’s married life in particular—and inadequately informed by creative imagination. However, since reading her second script to him becomes the catalyst through which the romance between Holly and Mickey develops, her literary trespasses seem to be pardoned through her announcement that she will soon present Mickey with life rather than what she’d previously offered him—an exceedingly poor dramatic imitation of it.
¹⁸
Art, in Hannah’s world, is a complement to life rather than a substitute for it, and if the characters within her circle come off better than they should because of the film’s willingness to gloss over flaws and frictions that other Allen films would routinely explore, their attitude toward art goes so completely unquestioned as to seem indistinguishable from Allen’s own.