The Reluctant Film Art of Woody Allen (41 page)

Mighty Aphrodite’s
Greek chorus appears to be on loan from a performance of
Oedipus the King
taking place in an amphitheater in Greece. (Actually, the Greek Theater in Taormina, Sicily.) Accordingly, they seem to follow the Sophoclean concept of the chorus’s role, commenting on and influencing the action of Allen’s plot without ever directly entering it. In describing the role of the chorus in Greek tragedy, Bernhard Zimmerman argues that it “leaves the narrow circle of the action to meditate on past and future, on distant times and people, indeed on humanity itself, in order that it may derive great truths from human experience and pronounce the lessons of wisdom.”
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The closest Allen’s chorus comes to pronouncing on “great truths of human experience” is their lamentation about children “growing up and moving out, to ridiculous places like Cincinnati or Boise, Idaho. Then you never see them again.” As Bernard Knox demonstrated in
Oedipus at Thebes,
the chorus of Sophocles’ tragedy rejects all attempts by Jocasta and Oedipus to deny the truth of prophecy, viewing the oracles of the gods as absolute and humanly incontrovertible.
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Conversely, the chorus of
Mighty Aphrodite
is far more relativistic in its judgments, answering the question, “Is there a growing void in the Weinribs’ marriage?” which has led them so suddenly to adopt a child, “We didn’t say there was. We’re all just speculating on possible motives.”

Reviewers of
Mighty Aphrodite
tended to perceive the presence of the chorus in the film as an arbitrarily imposed frame for the narrative, which produced a few jokes of the deflation-of-high-culture-icons characteristic of Allen’s comedy from his stand-up days, literary allusions and philosophical schemes alike getting reduced to their most common and trivial consequences. (“Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead,” the court fool announces in
Everything You Wanted to Know About Sex,
“their tailor shop is closed” Mickey Sachs decides in
Hannah and Her Sisters
that he can’t embrace Nietzsche’s notion of the Eternal Return because it would mean that he has to sit through the Ice Capades again.) Certainly, the disparity between the dignity of the Sophoclean chorus’s somber dithyrambs and the Oprahesque kibitzing of Allen’s chorus is much of the fun
of Mighty Aphrodite
. However, there is an element of Sophocles’ play that his and Allen’s choruses have in common. Confronted with the possibility that they inhabit a universe in which oracles are substanceless and the prospering of evil only proves the nonexistence of the gods, Sophocles’ chorus angrily threatens to repudiate their choral role: “If irreverent action is to be respected and profitable, why should I dance?”
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As if confirming that we inhabit a just universe, one well worth celebrating, Allen’s tragic chorus not only dances; while dancing, they also sing “You Do Something to Me” and “When You’re Smiling.” The Dick Hyman Orchestra and Chorus’s ebullient renditions of these songs and Graciela Daniele’s exquisite choreography of the chorus’s not completely un-Greek song and dance combine to create what may be Allen’s single most infectious and compelling emblem of existential affirmation. Its effectiveness is firmly founded in the fact that, despite their thoroughly unexpected flair for musical comedy, the chorus with their masks and bleakly flowing robes never completely sheds their associations with unsmiling speculations and dark necessities.

The god whose existence is implicitly affirmed by the chorus’s dazzlingly affecting performance of “When You’re Smiling” at the end of the film is the Mighty Aphrodite of the title, a deity who never literally appears in the movie but whose influence generates its buoyant resolution. Lenny’s wife, Amanda (Helena Bonham Carter), has realized she loves him,.not her seductive art gallery colleague, while Lenny’s night of lovemaking with Linda Ash rejuvenates his commitment to his marriage. For her part, Linda loses the onion farmer with whom Lenny has fixed her up when Kevin (Michael Rapaport) happens upon a video in which she appears in her Judy Cum incarnation, but driving back from an unsuccessful attempt to win Kevin back in upstate New York, Linda picks up a grounded helicopter pilot whom she ultimately marries instead. (“Talk about a
deus ex machina!
” the chorus leader, briefly becoming the films narrator, responds to the helicopter’s fortuitous descent as Linda drives by.) There are other things humans can’t know about their circumstances, the film suggests: Linda doesn’t know Lenny’s adopted son, Max, is her child, while Lenny doesn’t know that the daughter he meets Linda with in FAO Schwartz years later is the child they parented during their night together. (“Yes, yes—isn’t life ironic?” is the chorus’s perky gloss on the meeting of unwitting parents and children at the toy store.) Aphrodite is indeed mighty, her interventions in the lives of men and women regularly determining the plot resolutions of Allen’s happiest films.

And yet, much of what happens in
Mighty Aphrodite
seems the result of human agency rather than divine intervention. Lenny defends the unscrupulous tactics he uses to learn the name of his adopted son’s birth mother by dismissing the warnings of the chorus leader who has dropped in while Lenny illicitly searches the files of the adoption agency: “That’s why you’ll always be a chorus leader. I act. I take action, I make things happen.” As much as this might seem the kind of self-congratulatory line a Woody Allen protagonist could be expected to spend the rest of his film disproving by acting out through progressively comical scenes his passivity and want of control over anything, in
Mighty Aphrodite,
Lenny is absolutely right. By obtaining courtside New York Knicks’ tickets for her pimp, Lenny frees Linda from subjection to him, and Lenny coaxes her in the direction of hairdressing, which will become her post-hooking career.
⁷
As Mary P. Nichols demonstrates, Lenny’s matchmaking efforts on Linda’s behalf fail because of the outrageous lies he tells her and Kevin about each other in order to pique their romantic interests, the film thus suggesting the limits of human beings to intervene effectually in the fates of others.
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Nonetheless, it’s driving back from visiting Kevin in Wampsville, New York, in Lenny’s car that Linda experiences the
deus ex machina
of the descent of helicopter pilot Don from the sky. That Lenny unknowingly leaves Linda pregnant with the daughter who constitutes unintended compensation for the son he’s gained from her provides more evidence that Lenny—even more than her helicopter pilot—has been the answer to her dreams. On their first date, she and Kevin exchange descriptions of their dreams, Linda confiding that “My dream is that someone would come along and think I was special. That, you know, they’d want to come and change my life for me.”

Immediately after Linda has been rejected by Kevin and Lenny has learned that Amanda plans to leave him, he tells Linda, echoing an argument we encountered in
Broadway Danny Rose,
.“Remember you once said we were a couple of losers? Well, I think that’s definitely true.” Allen thinks that’s definitely untrue, the lovemaking that immediately follows Lenny’s declaration putting both characters on the road to forming or reforming the happy families of three Linda and Lenny are enjoying when they meet in FAO Schwartz two years later.
Mighty Aphrodite
is not a film in which such fatalistic formulations as “we are a couple of losers” are ever validated, Lennys commitment to action and the consequent altering of circumstance often being carried out in defiance of such deterministic conceptions.

One central set of mechanistic assertions that are repudiated through Lenny’s quest in the film are those relating to heredity. In the opening scene of the movie, Lennys friend, Bud (Steven Rendazzo), counsels him and Amanda against adoption because they might get what he refers to as “a bad seed.” He later implants the notion of seeking out Max’s birth mother in Lennys mind when he suggests that “It’s like raising thoroughbreds—this kid must come from good stock. He’s good- looking, he’s got a high IQ, he’s got a great personality, and he’s amusing. … A good father and a dynamite mother produces a kid like Max.” Lenny’s tireless interrogation of Lindas genetic inheritance provides nothing but contrary evidence to Bud’s genetic thesis. She doesn’t know who Max’s father was (“It could have been one of a hundred guys” she acknowledges), but her father was a drug pusher, pickpocket, car thief, and epileptic who was finally jailed for mail fraud. The only exceptional person in his family was a brother who was supposed to be a genius but whose chances to excel in math were nullified when he became a serial rapist; the rest of her family, in Lindas words, “is all slugs and lowlifes.” The film misses no opportunity to establish that Max’s mental gifts don’t come from his mother, either, Linda constantly comically misconstruing what others say. (When she asks Lenny if he works out; he responds, “Not religiously”; she replies that she’s not religious either, though her parents were Episcopalians.) Linda lays claim to and proves to have a good sense of humor, and perhaps the “amusing” quality Bud attributes to Max is hereditarily coded; otherwise, the film seems to consistently insist that there’s no necessary connection between gene pools and character or innate ability, the affirmation of randomness implicit in that judgment—given that it projects no obstacles to Linda’s happiness despite her “slugs and lowlifes” heredity—being depicted in
Mighty Aphrodite
as a cause for celebration. The irrelevance-of-heredity theme culminates in the final scene in Lenny’s response to the daughter Linda shows him whom he doesn’t know he fathered: “You’ve got to have a very handsome husband,” he tells Linda, “she’s got a great face.”
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The film’s other, more obvious repository of deterministic ideas are the Greek tragedy figures who ultimately provide—ironically—the movie’s comic frame. A messenger (Dan Mullane) invokes the entire lexicon of Greek tragedic dire consequence in describing Lenny’s obsession with learning more about his son’s mother: “I come from the midtown area, where Lenny Weinrib, tortured by passions too overwhelming to regulate, did indeed call this little hustler on the phone in earnest attempt to see her again. At first, he wrestled with his drives, trying to master a curiosity not slaked by this initial meeting, but only whetted by it. His thirst to know this woman more did inexorably provoke him to call her.” The messenger’s rhetoric of impending disaster to the contrary, Lenny’s passionate curiosity, instead of precipitating his self-destruction, has thoroughly benign effects on both himself and its object.

Similarly, the chorus and its prophetic sidekicks, Cassandra (Danielle Ferland) andTieresias (Jack Warden), are constantly and futilely warning Lenny against the future ramifications of both his search for Max’s mother and of seeking to meddle in her fate once he’s found her. “You never should have looked for her,” Cassandra admonishes Lenny, “Now I see
big trouble
.” But there is no big trouble, even Linda’s bondage to her procurer proving surprisingly easy to annul with choice NBA seats, the film charmingly and rather uncontestedly cruising toward its happy ending.

The chorus leader’s insistence that “Of all human weaknesses, obsession is the most dangerous” isn’t borne out by the plot, either: Lenny’s obsession with gaining absolute knowledge of his son’s mother proves highly productive and beneficial to both her and to his own marriage. (Even the chorus has a response for their leaders dark declaration: “And the silliest!” is their mincing reply.) As David Denby noticed, Lenny never listens to the “choral laments and injunctions,” and “the movie shows he’s right to ignore them. None of the chorus’s most dire predictions come true, and the movie slips into a pleasant fable. Life is not riddled with catastrophes. Life is a comedy.”
¹⁰

Denby’s argument that the film affirms comedy over the ominous injunctions of the chorus with its lamentations—“Woe unto man!”—and its invocations of tragic heroes whose lives illustrate the bleak fates humanity is heir to is surely the most convincing justification for their presence in the film that criticism has thus far provided. However, two other explanations present themselves, the latter more demonstrable than the former.

Appearing on
Sixty Minutes
during his public battle with Mia Farrow, Allen recalled for Steve Croft a threat he claimed that Farrow had made against him, one which sounds weirdly like a tragedian’s reconfiguring of the plot of
Mighty Aphrodite:
.“You took my daughter, and I’m going to take yours.” (Linda doesn’t know that Lenny “took” her son through adoption; Lenny doesn’t know that Linda “took” the daughter with whom he impregnated her by never informing him of her existence.) Allen continued,.“[Farrow] threatened to have me killed and kill me. And then to stick my eyes out, to blind me. Because she became obsessed with Greek tragedy and felt like that would be a fitting, you know, vengeance.” Farrow denied ever having made the threat, but she acknowledged having compared herself to Hecuba in
The Trojan Women
—actually, in Euripides’
Hecuba
—who avenges herself on Polymestor’s murder of her son, Polydorous, by blinding him.
¹¹
It seems not inconceivable that Allen used the writing
of Mighty Aphrodite
partly as a means of deflecting Farrow’s threat by transforming the child stealing/murder into comedy. Through introducing the chorus into the film, he ridicules both their constant invocation of fatalistic imperatives such as vengeance and tragic flaws and their reading of “the ways of the heart” as manifestations not of human desire but of “malice or ineptitude of the gods.”
¹²
In other words, Farrows threat is empty because the spokesmen (in Allen’s incarnation of them, spokespersons) of Greek necessity are just fashionably draped guys and gals who want most to sing Tin Pan Alley favorites and dance a bit. Whether the presence of the chorus in the film actually constitutes Allen’s parodic rejoinder to Farrows breakup-inspired “obsession with Greek tragedy” is admittedly less clear than that it is so repeatedly aligned with human psychology as to seem the projection of the only character in the film who ever becomes conscious of its existence—Lenny.