The Reluctant Film Art of Woody Allen (35 page)

Like Kleinman in
Shadows and Fog,
Allen’s most predominant 1990s response to this artistic conflict has been to say, “What better way to spend the rest of my life than to help with all those wonderful illusions of [Irmstedt’s]?” because in committing himself to this enterprise he’ll be “doing something I really love.” But Kleinman/Allen suffers under no delusion that the illusions he/Irmstedt creates have any real power over the prevailing force at work in the world: the killer/Death. Consequently, the impotence of his art sometimes—as Bates’s projected analyst suggests about his patient’s art—makes him feel guilty, its contrivances and misrepresentations of actuality appearing to him as manifestations of some shallowness in himself, of some long-standing, deeply suspect need to make people laugh. At other times, however, the aspirations toward the magical which his films embody seem to Allen as their raison d’etre: “I always loved magic as a boy, and I feel that the only way out of things is magic,” he told Anthony DeCurtis. “Everything is so glum, so really depressing, that the only hope you have is … it would require magic, you know. There’s no way, short of a magical solution. All the rational solutions, you know, are degrees of workable but not thrilling.”
¹⁷

If there is greatness in Allen’s art comparable to that of the filmmakers he venerates, it may reside in the one place he’d be least liable to see it: in his films’ continual debate between the human need to seriously confront the conditions of existence and the conflicting desire to wrest pleasure from the brief span of existence human beings have—“the ancient legitimate cure for mortality’s anxieties,” as Cynthia Ozick has described this remedy: “Seize the day.”
¹⁸
Each film of Allen’s since
Annie Hall
defines a slightly revised stance vis-a-vis Tom Baxter’s appeal to Cecilia in
The Purple Rose of Cairo:
“I don’t want to talk any more about what’s real and what’s illusion. Life’s too short to spend time thinking about life. Let’s just live it” (p. 440). The fact that Allen is dependent upon the highly technological process of film production to express this ideal of unreflectiveness represents what may be the central paradox of his art and life.

In sum, one of the things which makes Allen’s cinematic oeuvre interesting to consider even when individual films seem less than completely successful is the debate he’s conducting with himself from movie to movie over the value of art to lives—that is, the necessity of illusions to human psychic equi-librium—and the film-by-film reconceptualizing of his attitude toward art as the redemption of life and art as a deliberate distortion and falsification of life. The resolution of
Bullets Over Broadway
(1994) represents, as we’ve seen, Allen’s most unambiguously negative appraisal of the artistic enterprise following
Interiors
and preceding
Deconstructing Harry
(1997). Contesting that verdict are four of his 1990s films—
Shadows and Fog
(1992),
Manhattan Murder Mystery
(1993),
Mighty Aphrodite
(1995), and
Everyone Says I Love You
(1996)—which embody markedly more positive attitudes toward the tissue of narrative artifice that is cinematic creation, these movies implicitly affirming and celebrating the consoling artifices of art. But then,
Celebrity
(1998) and
Sweet and Lowdown
(1999) depict the devotion to art as, respectively, inextricable from the corruptions of American tabloid culture and as a narcissistic evasion of life, as justification for circumventing the human relatedness which is at the center of the aesthetic exchange. Characteristically, Allen closed out the century offering cinematic cautions about the art whose indispensability to humanity he had begun its final decade by affirming.

In terms of Woody Allen’s 1990s cinematic output, this overview omits only the film to which we turn next:
Husbands and Wives
(1992), Alien’s most controversial and perhaps most distinctive movie with its raw, painful, and—for Allen—unprecedentedly personal projection of the vexed relationship between art and life.

14

Because It’s Real Difficult in Life

Husbands and Wives

Oh, yeah. All right, well … well, go, go! See if I care. Go, see what it is out there. … It ain’t the movies! Its real life! It’s real life, and you’ll be back! You mark my words! You’ll be back!

—Monk warning Cecilia what awaits her out in the world as she leaves him in
The Purple Rose of Cairo

Now that the protracted media paroxysm with which
Husbands and Wives
was so inextricably linked has receded into whatever part of the national memory it is in which we store yesterday’s scandals, it’s more difficult to perceive the movie as the source of extreme discomfort that so many of its reviewers described it as being. David Denby’s reaction to the film typifies the frustrations of reviewers attempting to respond critically to a work of art the tabloids had already designated a cinematic
roman
à
clef
Allen’s characteristic disavowal of autobiography in his films—“Movies are fiction,” he told
Time,
“The plots of my movies don’t have any relationship to my life”
¹
—convinced no one. “When I saw
Husbands and Wives,
” Denby wrote in
Newsweek,
“the audience, caught between loyalty and distaste, was clearly uncomfortable. So was I. Parts of the movie are excruciating—the scenes between Woody Allen and Mia Farrow, for instance, lack the minimal degree of illusion necessary to fiction. … I felt like I was snooping.”
²

The twelve-year relationship between Allen and Mia Farrow was by all accounts in a stage of terminal disintegration as the movie was being shot, and surely that reality inflects the film’s aura of marital discord and collapse. If there is any justification for the insatiable curiosity the media and public displayed regarding the Farrow/Allen split, it lies in the fact that the thirteen films they made together between 1981 and 1992 blurred the distinction between the couple’s private and public lives. In fact, four of those films look like either celebrations of Farrow’s private life virtues and/or metacommentaries on the health of her private relationship with Allen. Dr. Eudora Fletcher’s loving solicitousness to Leonard Zelig’s extraordinary psychic needs is clearly what allows him to survive the media frenzy to which he’s subjected,
Zelig—
the couple’s second film together—seeming to evoke Allen’s sincere affection for and gratitude to the partner whose relationship with him was practically as public as is Fletchers and Zelig’s.
³
Hannah and Her Sisters
offered a much less oblique and markedly more equivocal portrait of the relationship, the film never managing completely to reconcile the self-containment, WASP deco-rousness, and familial devotion of Hannah with the existential anxieties of Mickey Sachs except through the
deus ex machina
resolution of Mickey’s miraculously restored fertility.
Alice
seems a sincere attempt on Allen’s part to create a type character—the wealthy Manhattan mom with too much money, too many servants, and too little to do—whose dramatic evolution consists in her gradual acquisition of Farrows maternal virtues and social conscience (though his original ending of having her travel to India to work with Mother Teresa among the poor seems to transform her from one type of character to another). In ways allegorical or literal, depending on the viewers reading of the film,
Husbands and Wives
marks the emotionally antagonistic end of their relationship. If viewers share the illusion of possessing special insight into the evolution of the Farrow/Allen relationship—from the private/public amicability of
Zelig
to the rancorous abrogations of
Husbands and Wives
—their illusion is one which Allen’s movies have clearly contributed to fostering.

Even if viewers don’t share Denby’s sense of intruding on private grief in watching the Farrow/Allan scenes of
Husbands and Wives,
few would deny that the raw edges of the breakup’s contentiousness are manifested in the remarkably unAllenesque raggedness of Carlo Di Palma’s cinematography, as well as in the plot’s relentless dramatization of the narcissism which inspires the characters to perceive others purely as means to their own self-gratifica- tions. Admittedly, the film’s technique was an innovation for Allen, one seemingly intended to undermine the uniform, visually centered, and stable framing of the Hollywood style characteristic of Allen’s own previous work. Less un-precedented was the film’s exploration of the narcissism of erotic attraction, Allen and Farrow having delved into this psychological theme in
September
and
Another Woman,
neither film proving any more successful than is
Husbands and Wives
in presenting a solution to the
Civilization and Its Discontents
conflict between the need for the formation of stable families built on trust and the incessant demands of the libido. Perhaps it’s because
Husbands and Wives
is one of only three films—the others being
Zelig
and
Broadway Danny Rose
—in which Allen’s protagonist and Farrow’s character comprise a couple that reviewers like Denby found the arguments between Gabe and Judy Roth so painful to witness. Nonetheless, there was very substantial and very public evidence that Allen and Farrow split over quite different issues than the ones that divide Judy and Gabe.

Although Gabe’s attraction to a much younger woman prompted many reviewers to draw parallels with Allen’s relationship with Farrow’s adopted daughter, Soon-Yi, little else in the film’s plot (which concerns several forming and dispersing couples, not just one) seems directly to mirror the far more lurid Farrow/Allen breakup. In fact, Elliot’s infidelity with Hannahs sister in
Hannah and Her Sisters
could be said to more closely resemble the circumstances chronicled so sensationally by tabloids in 1992-1993 than anything in
Husbands and Wives,
both subversions of familial trust and solidarity involving adultery with a family member.

It’s always misguided to impute one-to-one correspondences between Allen’s life and his screenplays, and reading
Husbands and Wives
as pure auto-biography is certainly to misinterpret and distort the film. It would be even more seriously unreasonable to believe that
Husbands and Wives
offers details of Allen’s private life as if it were a cinematic version of the tell-all book Isaac Davis’s ex-wife publishes about their marriage in
Manhattan
or the memoir that book now seems to have prefigured, Mia Farrow’s memoir,
What Falls Away
. At the same time, responsible criticism of Allen’s work must also recognize how insistently a few of his films—
Stardust Memories, Hannah and Her Sisters, Radio Days,
and
Deconstructing Harry
are the other most obvious examples—intrude the issues of autobiography into their narratives as inescapable components of the films’ constructions. In essence, none can be adequately interpreted without critical attention being paid to the ambiguous role that Allen’s self-extrapolation of a protagonist in the movies plays in relation to him.

As we’ve seen, it’s not entirely clear whether Sandy Bates or Woody Allen is exiting the Stardust Auditorium at the end of
Stardust Memories,
the film having irremediably conflated them, while to turn
Radio Days
from a series of nostalgic/comic vignettes into a consonant, artistically coherent film, it’s necessary to recognize filmmaker Allen’s mediating presence—his deliberately celebratory cinematic visualizing of what Little Joe and his family could only imagine when they heard it described on the radio. The very intentional failure of
Husbands and Wives
to reach any form of closure or resolution is a consequence of the film’s formal dislocations having their correlative in the narrative’s irresolvably ambiguous relation to the real-life experiences of its actors. That the film lacks, in Denby’s characterization, “the minimal degree of illusion necessary to fiction” reflects its rejection of the blandishments of artistic distance, its calculated refusal to function according to the aesthetic defense Alvy Singer offers for his first play in
Annie Hall:
“You know how you’re always trying to get things to work out in art because it’s real difficult in life.” In
Husbands and Wives,
the impossibility of “getting things to work out in life” is translated into a cinematic indictment of the very art which seeks to order and render humanly coherent that impossibility.
Husbands and Wives
comes as close as an Allen film ever does to fulfilling the conditions evoked by Cecilia of
The Purple Rose Of Cairo
in her effort to describe a universe without God to Tom Baxter: “It’d be like a movie with no point and no happy ending” (p. 408).