The Reluctant Film Art of Woody Allen (37 page)

The “whole story” of Sandy Bates’s relationship with Dorrie, Judy’s objection would suggest, can’t be epitomized by the “Stardust memory” of a lovely Sunday morning idyll any more than the aesthetic joy engendered by
Wild Strawberries
—or by
Duck Soup
—is anything other than a passing emotional experience; consequently, it is nothing upon which to predicate the continuation of a marriage—or of an existence.
¹⁷
Gabe’s attempt to reduce a complex past to representative “isolated moments” partakes of precisely the same emotional need for the memorial restructuring of experience which makes films seem a distortion to Allen: the metonymic attempt to make “the world stand still here,” to reduce its complexly on-rushing fluxion to humanly gratifying shapes and stories, necessarily falsifies actuality. (The larger cultural projection of this impulse is equally fraudulent, according to Harry Block in
Deconstructing Harry:
“Tradition,” he explains, “is the illusion of permanence.”
¹⁸
) In
Husbands and Wives,
nothing—Di Palma’s camera in particular—stands still, and rather than affirming his now-terminated relationship with Judy by recalling fond moments, as Alvy does in the denouement of
Annie Hall and
Sandy Bates does through his “Stardust memory,” in the film’s final line, Gabe instead invokes the omnipotence of temporality, the utter human subjectedness to time: “Can I go? Is this over?”

Many in the audience at the time of the film’s release would need a copy of the day’s
New York Post
in order to confidently answer that question, so ensnared in the popular mind had the production of
Husbands and Wives
become with the disintegration of the Allen/Farrow relationship. Although Allen routinely insisted that Gabe and Judy are fictional characters, Farrow’s reading of the film disagreed. In
The New York Times,
Maureen Dowd quoted Farrow as “expressing dismay that Mr. Allen had made her play out a fictional version of the triangle with her adopted daughter, Soon-Yi, before she learned of the affair.”
¹⁹
One needn’t accept Farrow’s interpretation, however, to find in
Husbands and Wives
substantial evidence testifying to the impartibility of art and life. Gabe’s novel (which often serves as the film’s equivalent in the plot, both—in Rain’s characterization—presenting “all this suffering and making it so funny”
²⁰
) includes a barely fictionalized version of his and Judy’s meeting in the Hamptons, which the viewer sees in flashback, Judy explicitly objecting to her husband’s self-serving appropriation of this scene from their marriage for artistic purposes. Gabe’s attempt to placate Judy by praising the character modeled on her—“She’s the best woman in the book; that’s why he married her”—only evinces his inability to separate art and life. Gabe Roth’s heedless aesthetic imperialism links him to Holly in
Hannah and Her Sisters
and to Harry Block of
Deconstructing Harry,
but his surname clearly identifies him with another artist who has made a career of scandalously transforming his personal experience into art—Philip Roth.
²¹

Rain’s critique of Gabe’s manuscript is a sophisticated reading of the text as a reflection of the character and values of its author, her indictment inevitably widening outward to include the author’s author in its condemnation. “Isn’t it beneath you as a mature thinker,” Rain asks Gabe, “to allow your lead character to waste so much of his emotional energy obsessing over this psychotic relationship with a woman that you fantasize as powerfully sexual and inspired when in fact she was pitifully sick?” The appearance of Gabe’s “kamikaze woman”—a woman whose erotic attractiveness is inseparable from her mental instability—is what Rain is disparaging in his novel, it having not occurred to her that, were she to have a role in his life, that would be it. Her critique reinforces the film’s ongoing demonstration that Gabe’s existential fixations and erotic conflicts are the stuff of his fiction, while extending beyond him to remind the viewer how regularly “kamikaze women” like Mary Wilke in
Manhattan
and Dorrie and Daisy of
Stardust Memories
appear in Allen’s films. (Jack, in turn, completes the circle by ascribing Gabe’s erotic vulnerability to “kamikaze women” to popular media: “Like all of us,” he explains, Gabe “grew up with movies and novels in which doomed love was romantic.”) It’s also difficult to ignore how similar the section of his novel visualized in the film recalls Allen’s episodically structured
Everything You Wanted to Know About Sex
and anticipates the dramatization of scenes from Harry Block’s fiction in
Deconstructing Harry
. If there is anything
Husbands and Wives
is
not
about, clearly, it is absolute demarcations between art and life. Allen’s awareness of the artistic potential for exploiting his and others’ personal grief for the purposes of making a film is even more self-consciously revisited in
Deconstructing Harry,
which, as Allen threatened to do a year before its release, goes “right into the teeth” of the public’s view of him by having him portray a “nasty, shallow, superficial, sexually obsessed guy. I’m sure everybody will think—I know this going in—they’ll think it’s me.”
²²
They’re wrong, of course; but Allen has contrived in making that film—as he had in creating
Stardust Memories, Radio Days, Hannah and Her Sisters,
and
Husbands and Wives
—to make it impossible for the viewer to confidently distinguish fact from fiction, autobiography from story.

A sex-obsessed guy named Harry Block isn’t Woody Allen, any more than a red-haired kid named Joe or a demoralized filmmaker named Sandy is, and the popular media’s inability—or refusal—to distinguish between an estranged couple in a movie and a real-life couple whose separation hadn’t occurred when the film was being scripted is surely irresponsible, if not comical. At the same time, for Allen to pretend that a film which insists (as many of his screenplays do) on the autobiographical basis of art should be read completely in isolation from the real-world circumstances that clearly inspired its mood and certainly influence its plot reflects an equally oversimplified understanding of the complex transactions between art and life which are his films and which so often comprise the subject of his movies. What makes absolutely no sense, of course, is for the viewer to believe that what happens on the screen bears a one-to-one relationship to Woody Allen’s life, to believe that s/he knows anything true about Allen or his relationships from watching his movies. Far more reasonable and justifiable is Denby’s reaction, which affirms the discomfort arising from viewers’ inability to separate their knowledge about the director and female lead from their emotional responses to the film. Because of its subject matter,
Husbands and Wives
seems to deliberately exploit that conflict in the audience, making watching the film feel like an invasion of real people’s privacy—”I felt like I was snooping,” as Denby complained. Creating those feelings of discomfort in Denby and other viewers is Allen’s chief rhetorical strategy in
Husbands and Wives,
the deliberate blurring of fact and fiction in the movie giving the audience an emotional experience equivalent to the characters’ feelings of betrayal, demoralization, and disorientation.those feelings of discomfort in Denby and other viewers is Allen’s chief rhetorical strategy in
Husbands and Wives,
the deliberate blurring of fact and fiction in the movie giving the audience an emotional experience equivalent to the characters’ feelings of betrayal, demoralization, and disorientation.

Many of the same reviewers who found the movie’s aura of autobio-graphical self-disclosure painful to witness also expressed incomprehension about the identity of the film’s narrator/interrogator and the relevance of Carlo Di Palma’s lurching handheld cinematography. (Jokes in reviews about Dramamine being sold at concession stands in theaters showing the movie were very popular.) These devices, along with its fiction/autobiography conflations, make
Husbands and Wives
Allen’s least artistically consonant film, which is to say the one least possessed of the aesthetic contrivances and artifices that shape and lend coherence to works of art. In Denby’s formulation, the film lacks “the minimal degree of illusion necessary to fiction” because it deliberately complicates the issue of what “degree of illusion” is necessary to effective fictional rendering, pushing the envelope of anti-aesthetic form as far as Allen is likely to push it. In a film whose central question is “Do you ever hide things from me?”
Husbands and Wives
reduces both characters and cinematic techniques to a level of nakedness unprecedented in Allen’s work, the characteristic civility of his films giving way to profanity (Sally’s explosion, “Fucking Don Juans—they should have cut his fucking dick off,” for instance), violence (Jack’s ugly attempts to force Sam [Lysette Anthony], with whom he’s been living, into his car as they leave a party at which they’ve quarreled), and camera movements and scene compositions evocative of such emotional eruptions. Nor, as in most Allen films, do viewers have the luxury of reassuring themselves that what is on the screen is only fictional fabrication—because they have no way of knowing which scenes derive from actual events and which don’t—or that the consolations of aesthetic form will kick in to generate a meaningful artistic resolution. “I’m exaggerating for comic purposes,” is Gabe’s defense of his novel to Rain, “I’m deliberately distorting it in order to show how hard it is to be married.” What the viewer of this most peevish of Allen’s cinematic inbreeding of fact and fiction never knows is what is distorted life and what isn’t. Let the movie’s characterization of Judy serve to exemplify
Husbands and Wives
discomfort-inducing conflation of art and life.

Husbands and Wives
revisits a central tension of
Hannah and Her Sisters,
this time generating a less gratifying resolution of it. In
Hannah,
the issue of the title character’s aura of independence and self-containment, which is dramatized simultaneously as one of her virtues and as a source of her loved ones’ resentment, is dissolved by the termination of Elliot’s affair with Lee and his reconciliation with Hannah. “I don’t deserve you” is Elliot’s summation upon their rapprochement, he having apparently forgotten that this conviction about his wife’s superiority had contributed to his attraction to the significantly less- accomplished Lee in the first place. In
Husbands and Wives
, Hannah’s self-sufficiency and relentless decency reemerges more emphatically in Judy as passive- aggressive behavior; both of her first two husbands in the film comment on her tendency to get what she wants from men by assuring them, “No, no, I’ll be okay, don’t help me.” Like Hannah, Judy is quick to offer help to others, but her personal agenda in doing so is more transparent. Her ostensible penchant for other-directedness elicits an explosion from Michael when she assures him that she is “not pushing” him to spend a Sunday with her while he attempts to get over the loss of Sally. “Yes, you are,” he angrily responds, “in that quiet, steady way of yours. You’re always there for me. Supportive is your word—understanding. God—stop being so damned understanding!” When she runs from the room in tears, Michael follows her out into the rain, embracing her and swearing, “I don’t deserve you—I’m sorry.” Once they have married, the interrogator/narrator asks Judy and Michael how things are. Judy admits great satisfaction with her third marriage but expresses concern with how it came about. “I hope I didn’t push,” she says, “I wanted it to work, it’s true.”

“I told you,” is her first ex-husband’s summary: “she gets what she wants.”

John Baxter describes Hannah as “so generous, understanding and virtuous [that] she’s almost insupportable,” Allen’s fourth biographer suggesting that she and Marion Post, the protagonist of
Another Woman,
“hint at a subtext of resentment felt by Allen towards the woman with whom he was, however tentatively, sharing his life.”
²³
The characterization of Judy in
Husbands and Wives
extends that critique by emphasizing the disparity between Judy’s self-effacing exterior and the effectuality with which she carries out her private agendas.
What Falls Away,
with its consistent depiction of Farrow as a passive recipient of fortune and the world’s ills, reinforces Baxter’s identification. The affectively New Age memoir never reveals a trace of the young actress who once affirmed, “I want a big career, a big man, and a big life. You have to think big. That’s the only way to get it.”
²⁴
Similarly, the memoir’s sincere celebration of Farrow’s family often lapses into sanctimoniousness and melodramatic prose posturings which belie the very real achievement her assemblage and sustenance of that family is. The viewer never hears any of the poetry Judy shows Michael in
Husbands and Wives,
but it’s not surprising that the woman on whom she’s modeled is capable of the poetic flights of
What Falls Away,
a number of which could have benefitted from the editorial critique of someone like Gabe, whom Judy considers “too critical” and “not supportive enough” to show her poems to.
²⁵

It’s easy to attribute the pervasive negativism evoked by the formal frazzledness of
Husbands and Wives
to the tabloid battles being fought out while it was in production, and to settle for the interpretation that it is simply a film in which art is mirroring life in a particularly pessimistic and unsettling way. (“Life doesn’t imitate art,” a line in one of Rain’s stories contends, “it imitates bad television.”) Although real-world bad feeling surely inflects the mood of the movie, its not really necessary to go outside the film to account for its consistently anti-aesthetic impulses. As is usually the case in Allen’s films, anti-aesthetic attitudes in
Husbands and Wives
are traceable to art’s being indivisible from the human.