The Reluctant Film Art of Woody Allen (42 page)

After Laius (David Ogden Stiers) and Jocasta (Olympia Dukakis) recount their family history of parricide and incest, and the blind Oedipus (Jeffrey Kurland) wanders around helplessly, blundering into people and things, a member of the chorus abruptly asserts the link between Laius’ family heritage and depth psychology: “And a whole profession was born, charging sometimes as much as $200 an hour, and a fifty minute hour at that.” (Allen’s additional jibe at that profession is contained in his script’s establishing that Linda too charges $200 a session.) The emergence of psychoanalysis out of this family history suggests that the myth of Laius, Jocasta, and Oedipus isn’t about people acting in compunction to divine but psychic necessity. This point is reinforced by the chorus leader’s quintessentially Allenesque repudiation of political explanations for human behavior: “Curiosity, that’s what kills us, not muggers or all that bullshit about the ozone layer. It’s our own hearts and minds.” He’s wrong that curiosity kills anyone in
Mighty Aphrodite,
but in terms of the universe of Woody Allen films, he’s locating the source of pain and conflict in exactly the right places.

The choral leader is, of course, himself an expression of Lenny’s “heart and mind,” ceasing gradually to oppose Lenny’s quest for knowledge by counseling that he meet Linda for the first time not at the Plaza but “somewhere out of the way” like her apartment, and subsequently deciding that “it would be nice if [Lenny] could bring off” getting Linda together with Kevin, his stance contesting the chorus’s firmly maintained conviction that the matchmaking effort constitutes “hubris.” When he begins asking Lenny, following his lovemaking with Linda, “Was she great? Was she great in bed? You can tell me. I mean, a woman with all that experience!” it’s clear enough where the chorus leader’s spiritual priorities have migrated to. Accordingly, the chorus leader’s closing affirmation of life as “unbelievable, miraculous, sad, wonderful” seems an articulation of the look on Lenny’s face after seeing Linda at FAO Schwartz beneath the toy emporium’s trademark clock face. This time piece evokes playtime rather than humankinds inescapable destiny, and provides an appropriate symbol of the happy culminations of both Lindas and Lennys narratives, their mutually benign fates filling Lenny with the same sense of wonderment the choral leader expresses. By the end of the movie, this source of dark admonitions has metamorphosed into a traditional voice-over film narrator passing on the good tidings of Lenny’s happy ending, the chorus leader getting all but absorbed into the person whose fatalistic side he represented.

The film offers still more evidence that Lenny’s Greek interlocutors are projections of his own incipient fatalism. When Lenny first encounters Cassandra, her warning that if he perseveres in his quest, “You’ll be sorry—I’m telling you, quit now!” prompts him to say “You’re such a Cassandra”; she responds that she isn’t “such a Cassandra” but
is
Cassandra, then admonishes him against buying a Hamptons property that Amanda wants because the prophetess foresees beach erosion and a heavy mortgage. Phobic about sand ticks and aware of Hamptons resident Jerry Bender’s designs on Amanda, Lenny has no desire to buy a house there, his opposition getting voiced in Cassandra’s prophecy. When Lenny offers her these explanations for not purchasing the property, Amanda’s response is “You’re such a Cassandra!” Lenny’s next line, were it not truncated by the cutting away to the next scene, might be that he is not “such a Cassandra,” but
is
Cassandra. Tieresias’s disclosures are similarly limited to Lenny’s most immediate psychic concerns, the seer’s graphic description of Amanda kissing her would-be seducer, Jerry Bender (Peter Weller), representing, in Tieresias’s words, “something you don’t want to know, but you’d have to be blind not to see it.” In this highly Freudian reading of the workings of Greek drama, the chorus and its Attic cohorts are neither divine oracles nor embodiments of tragic fatality, but are the voices of Lenny’s psyche, delivering admonitions (“Please, Lenny—don’t be a schmuck!”) in the only language he understands—his own. Denby’s argument seems indisputable: in
Mighty Aphrodite,
tragedy’s vision of humanity as unconsciously fulfilling an unintelligible destiny dictated by the gods gives way to the comic vision of the case of Lenny Weinrib, whose only fate is to fulfill his desires.

So upbeat is
Mighty Aphrodite’s
delineation of human possibility, in fact, that it dramatically reverses a recurrent Allen attitude. Early in the film, Amanda attributes to Lenny a characteristic we’ve noticed in a number of Allen’s protagonists: he’s “opposed to change in any form.” Lenny is obviously discomfited by the growth in Amanda which culminates in her independently gaining the funding to open her own art gallery in Soho, chastening her for the fact that “you’ve changed” and hinting darkly that “things have really changed between us.” But as the movie proceeds, Lenny comes increasingly to ignore the chorus’s injunctions to “Turn back, don’t meddle any further!” Refusing to.“[a]ccept the truth” of who Linda is as they demand, Lenny indulges not only the curiosity they condemn but also the impulse they denounce even more energetically: his quest “to change her life.” And so Lenny gradually evolves into the agent Linda is unconsciously invoking in describing her dream of “someone who could come along… and want to change my life for me.”
¹³
When Kevin rejects Linda because of her X-rated career, Lenny tells him, “People change—you’re going to hold her past against her?” In Lenny’s view—a view the film endorses—her past is no more finally determinant of who she is than her sons heredity has dictated the “terrific kid” he’s become. (Analogously, it’s chance—not fate—which directs helicopter Don to descend into Lindas life, their meeting facilitated less by the intercession of Zeus than by the loan of Lenny’s car.
¹⁴
) That Linda ends up married with a child and Lenny experiences a rebirth of his marriage to Amanda are testaments to the ability of human beings to change, a capacity the film symbolizes most charmingly in the chorus’s metamorphosis from purveyors of tragic knowledge into a jaunty song and dance team.

The somewhat mixed reviews
of Mighty Aphrodite
suggest, however, that not all viewers perceived the film’s closing familial union and reunion as being as charming as was apparently intended.
¹⁵
If the movie is not completely successful in its projection of a traditional romantic comedy resolution with good feelings all around, a few of the film’s materials may be responsible. Amanda is certainly the least sympathetic wife of an Allen protagonist since Wendy (Joanna Gleason) in
Crimes and Misdemeanors,
her negatively portrayed qualities ren-dering ambivalent the viewer’s feelings about both her characterization and Lenny’s reunion with her. She’s often shot with her hair obscuring her face, the visualization seeming to reinforce her secretiveness, her concealment from Lenny of the rapid progress she’s making toward opening an art gallery in Soho obliging her mother (Claire Bloom) to reveal to him her success in obtaining funding for the project. (Significantly, though, Lenny is no less clandestine in his pursuit of Max’s mother.) Although the viewer is given only cursory glimpses of the Manhattan art world with which Amanda is so tirelessly involved, it seems to have at its heart not aesthetic commitment or the communication of depthless human truths but the making of connections and raising of money, its central embodiment being the incessantly predatory, professionally and erotically on-the-make Jerry Bender. (Lenny’s sports writing profession, on the other hand, is depicted as fulfilling, unpretentious, and fun, its portrayal reflecting Allen’s much-chronicled affection for sports.
¹⁶
) Surprisingly, Allen also burdens Amanda with
the
quintessential wifely defect of Hollywood films: Max asks Lenny who is the boss between him and Mommy; Lenny replies, “I’m the boss. Mommy says what we do, and I have control of the channel changer.” The film’s plot corroborates this assessment, Lenny’s concealment of his Linda Ash redemption project from Amanda seeming like the revenge of the powerless against the powerful. Add to these unlikable qualities the fact that Amanda is saddled with a habit which Allen’s films consistently convey as an unattractive manifestation of insecurity and anxiety—smoking—and it’s difficult to understand why Lenny wants her back.
¹⁷

Reviewers of the film caviled less with Amanda’s character than they did with the films treatment of Linda and Kevin. Much of the films humor, Nick James contended, “is at the expense of their ignorance. We are invited to mock and chide their limited aspirations as they make slow progress towards some kind of Upper East Side vision of whatever it is nice, uncultured, ordinary folks do.”
¹⁸
Condemning every comic film which satirizes its characters’ want of intelligence would, of course, leave us with precious few comedies, and it is arguable that the Times Square restaurant scene in which Linda and Kevin speak intimately with each other commingles palpable sympathy for them with the laughs it elicits at the expense of their cultural unawareness. Nonetheless, the categorical nature of Allen’s reported single instruction to Sorvino about her role—“I don’t want a glimmer of intelligence to show through [in Lindas character] because not only is she dumb but she’s stupid“
¹⁹
—seems to support James’s contention that Linda Ash was conceived in remarkably, and perhaps excessively, one-dimensional terms.

To raise such an objection, however, is to read
Mighty Aphrodite
purely as a realistic or representational film, a critical strategy which nearly always misperceives Allen’s movies.
Mighty Aphrodite
moves a little slowly for the first half hour, the adoption plot, Amanda’s overbearing nature, and the odd choral interruptions seeming pleasant enough, but unmemorable. The movie gathers a completely different level of energy when Lenny arrives at Lindas apartment for the first time, the scene which follows being classable with the finest and funniest Allen has ever shot. In at least fifteen of his previous twenty-four films, we’ve watched Allen’s protagonists define themselves largely through their desperate erotic pursuits of one female or another; what Lenny is en-countering in Linda Ash is the aggregate of all that sexuality distilled into a single “ur-woman,” an “Amazonian bimbo”
²⁰
whose power is as overwhelming as it is mindless. Lenny pursued Linda in hopes of finding in her virtues confirmation of his perception of his son as an exemplar of human intelligence; she is instead the embodiment—if not the living parody—of human sexuality, a cheerful, obscenity-spouting porno queen whose comedic character and symbolic presence seem summarized by the titles of her adult movies:
Snatch Happy
and
The Enchanted Pussy
. (She is a personification of the humongous breast of the
Everything You Wanted to Know About Sex
monster movie spoof, the overmatched Allen protagonist’s role in both films being to domesticate this omnipotent force.) Allen has repeatedly enacted his protagonist’s imperilment in all sorts of situations, but he has never seemed so utterly and completely engulfed as he does by Sorvino’s Linda/Judy Cum, her assisting him in undoing the strings of her sweater reducing him to a twittering idiot, her tongue in his ear transforming him into a tiny old man whose spastically kneading hands seem to be simultaneously expressing pleasure and signaling for help.
²¹
Sorvino’s Linda
is
Mighty Aphrodite, the cipher and summation of the sexuality that has energized practically all of Allen’s films, and Lenny’s initial confrontation with her hilariously demonstrates how thoroughly powerless his civilized inhibitions are against her resolutely anti-intellectual, unapologetically vulgar, relentlessly physical presence.

Given that the might of Aphrodite prevails in the film, its appropriate that one of the images in the closing montage is of Lenny and Amanda (whose lovemaking earlier on fails because he “couldn’t find it”) passionately making love. More disquieting, but equally appropriate, is the fact that as Cassandra, Tieresias, and others back in the Greek Theater watch the chorus performing “When You’re Smiling,” Oedipus is putting the heavy make on Jocasta. It’s not his tragic fate he’s acting out, and it’s certainly not comedy—it’s just sex, and
Mighty Aphrodite
with its vibrantly hyperbolic personification of that force is Allen’s refreshingly raunchy tribute to it. In other words,
Mighty Aphrodite
offers as benignly comedic a cinematic validation as Allen could manage to create of his much-quoted self-justification during the tabloid wars, “the heart wants what it wants.” Perhaps more than any other Allen film,
Mighty Aphrodite
is simultaneously an affirmation of the comedic vision of things, a celebration of existence, and a dramatic delineation of the erotic grounds for that celebration.