The Reluctant Film Art of Woody Allen (50 page)

Another Woman
was criticized by some reviewers as being excessively formulaic in structure, the highly traditional self-confrontation, reversal-and-recognition narrative being underlined by Marions quotation of the final lines of Rilke’s “Archaic Torso of Apollo”: “For here, there is no place that does not see you: you must change your life.”
⁴
When compared with the aleatorily postmodernist psychic indirections of
Celebrity,
what’s most striking about
Another Woman
is how insistent this film is upon the capacity of the individual to use her head and heart to conceptualize, comprehend, and change her life. Philosophy professor Marion Post has no appetite whatsoever for self-scrutiny, but she is compelled nonetheless by the world around her to under-take a process of self-confrontation which the denouement reveals to be—at least in her assessment of it—efficacious. As a result of her psychic quest, Marion divorces her unfaithful husband, reconciles with her brother, and learns that her alter ego, as if validating Marions own recovery, has terminated her psychoanalytic treatment, Hope effectively disappearing from Marions life. Neither she nor Marion has reason any longer to feel as Hope did when Marion overheard her for the first time: “I couldn’t tell who I really was.”

Marion’s ultimate reward for her personal journey is a literary confirmation that she is indeed a creature of passion. Reading Larry Lewis’s latest novel, she discovers a passage about a character, Helinka, whom Marion dreams Lewis claimed to have modeled on her.
⁵
“Her kiss was full of desire,” Lewis wrote, “and I knew I couldn’t share that feeling with anyone else. And then a wall went up, and just as quickly I was screened out, but it was too late because I now knew that she was capable of intense passion, if she would one day allow herself to feel.” What we watch in
Another Woman
are the days—and the psychic progress they adumbrate—that culminate in Marion’s allowing her-self to feel. She affirms the efficacy of her journey in the movie’s closing lines: “I closed [Lewis’s] book, and felt the strange mixture of wistfulness and hope. And I wondered whether a memory is something you had, or something you’d lost. For the first time in a long time, I felt at peace.” The reiteration of the word in Marion’s final monologue seems to validate her mood of psychic resolution: the woman who couldn’t feel is very
emphatically feeling
. “the wistfulness and hope” of Lewis’s depiction and
feeling
at peace as her journey of self-confrontation ends.

Among the conflicting reviewers’ responses to
Another Woman
—which ranged from its being described as “the most significant achievement of [Allen’s] career” to.”
Another Woman
is the weakest movie of his career”
⁶
—can be found no doubts expressed about the sincerity of its resolution. For all the evidence the film offers of Marion’s emotional growth and development, there remains something teasingly ambiguous about the medium through which she achieves the reward—Joseph Campbell would say “boon”—of her journey. Marions on-screen quest is inaugurated by her assertion that writing a book “requires that I cut myself off from everything but my work.” If that act of self-seclusion is her symptom manifestation #1, resolving it through her reading of another book seems problematical, or at least potentially ironic. Richard A. Blake suggests that Marions novelistic consolation reflects the notion that “for some people—and [Allen] would include himself in this category—the vicarious experience of passion through the arts may be a way to salvation, or even happiness.”
⁷
Perhaps so, but it’s difficult not to wonder whether Allen isn’t having some ironic fun at the expense of his bookish protagonist by having her be so desirous of redemption that she never doubts that a novelistic portrait reputedly inspired by her is anything less than incontrovertible evidence of a living human beings passion. Those unsympathetic with the char-acter, in fact, might argue that Marion is so inhibited that the only affirmation of passion she could ever completely credit would be one she experienced in the pages of a novel. Larry’s novel may have supplied her with the confirmation she sought of her passionate nature, in other words, or the peace she achieves may be a classic instance of desire generating fulfillment, of art confused for life.

In Marion, Allen is confronting once again the coldness in himself that he embodied dramatically through Eve in
Interiors
and Lane in
September,
and that he would revisit more comically in Harry Block, who writes a story about “a boy who can’t love” whom Harry admits is himself. As we’ve seen, Allen’s biographers have documented how incompletely Allen has resolved the penchant toward isolation he acknowledged in explaining, “I’m not social. I don’t get an enormous amount of input from the world. I wish I could, but I can’t.”
⁸
By asserting that Marion is one of his characters with whom he most closely identifies,
⁹
Allen was affirming how thoroughly she constitutes the comic Woody Allen protagonist’s flip side; consequently, we perhaps shouldn’t expect his protagonists to be much more successful in reversing their emotional frigidities. Gena Rowland’s performance, poignantly imbued with Sven Nykvist’s textured,
Autumn
Sonata-invoking autumnal cinematography, makes us care about the outcome of Marion’s self-confrontation in
Another Woman
. If the destination of her psychic journey seems a little too literary to pass as the validation of the capacity for passion she perceives it to be, the movie nonetheless affirms the spiritual significance of her trip and the capacity of human beings to use their heads—and hearts—to understand, learn, and grow through self-confrontation.

Celebrity
denies practically all of that.

Lee Simons descent into midlife crisis is provoked by a far more culturally prototypical and trivial source than is Marion’s: a high school reunion. Seeing his classmates aged, balding, and bloated (one girl he dated has now “turned into her mother” and another, whose breasts he once fondled, is six feet under) inspires in Lee highly predictable—and predictably articulated—anxieties about mortality and the time that has passed without his ever living life fully. Echoing Marions favorite Rilke poem as though filtered through “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” John Donne, and some self-help bromides, Lee unburdens himself to a psychoanalyst at the reunion: “I’ve got to change my life before it’s too late. I just turned forty—I don’t want to wake up at fifty and find I measured out my life with coffee spoons. … I don’t know what the truth is anymore, I don’t know. … One minute you’re in the lunchroom at Glenwood High, and you fucking blink and you’re forty and you blink and you can see movies on a senior citizens’ pass. Ask not for whom the bell tolls, or to put it more accurately, ask not for whom the toilet flushes.”

Whereas Marion is coolly analytical about her condition, approaching it intellectually as if it were more than a usually wrenching stimulus for philosophical contemplation, Lee is all over the place about his crisis, stammering and stuttering as he haplessly tries to articulate his plight and boomeranging from one woman to another in desperate pursuit of the only solution he (like most of Allen’s male protagonists) can imagine to mortality anxieties. “Every curve of your body,” Lee tells the supermodel (CharlizeTheron
¹⁰
) with whom he has a brief, frustrating liaison, “fulfills its promise. If the universe has any meaning, I’m looking at it.” The inefficacy of Lee’s solution to his psychic extremity is summarized in his assurance to her, “For you, I’d be willing to come down with terminal cancer.” Expecting carnality to provide salvation from death is like believing that smoking is an effective defense against emphysema.

Lee’s parodically paradigmatic midlife crisis inspires him to divorce his wife of sixteen years, Robin (Judy Davis), and the narrative of
Celebrity
alternates between tracing their divergent paths as single adults. Robin stumbles upon a television producer (Joe Mantegna) who fervently courts her while transforming his inamorata into talk show celebrity. So accustomed is Robin to things working out badly in life that she’s utterly unprepared for what a Paul Simon song characterized as “something so right”—romance without liabilities, love without deficits—that she intentionally subverts the relationship, fleeing her own wedding ceremony. Her fiancé reasserts his perfection by forgiving her this act of faithlessness, and by the movie’s final scene Robin and Tony have married. Meeting her ex-husband at the premiere of a movie, the shooting of which opens
Celebrity,
Robin explains, “You know, it’s luck, Lee. When it comes to love, it’s luck.” Her explanation echoes numerous Allen assertions that his own success has been completely a matter of luck,
¹¹
and in both their cases the assurances constitute half-truths. The woman Robin once was—a high school teacher who, somewhat improbably, seems to have taught nothing but Chaucer—would be, as Lee reminds her, horrified by the media groupie she’s become, someone who gushingly interviews celebrities in posh eateries and unself-consciously tosses off words despised by English teachers like “marvelous.” As she and Tony arrive at the premiere, an
Entertainment Tonight
clone breathlessly welcomes the attendees, confirming Robins happy existential trifecta for the nations viewers to savor and envy: “Congratulations on your show, your marriage, your pregnancy.” By Lees standards, Robin has sold herself out to popular culture, but even he has to admit that she’s happier this way. Her marriage parallels that of Fay and Larry in
Deconstructing Harry,
which validates Larry’s assertion, “I can make her happier” than can Harry, who “puts his life into [his] art” rather than into his life. More significantly, Robin hasn’t committed the mistake which redeems Harrys life and which renders Lee so desolate in the films denouement: confounding art and life.

Lee’s first serious relationship following his divorce culminates in Bonnie (Famke Janssen), a Random House editor, moving in with him. But on the night they are celebrating sharing their digs, Lee reencounters an actress (Winona Ryder) who all but wears a sign around her neck identifying her as a kamikaze woman. Lee is drawn to her attractions, of course, but her primary allure consists in his conviction that he created her. “I was wary of you,” he tells her in explaining why he didn’t follow up on their initial meeting, “be-cause I knew that you triggered some real feelings in me. So once again I fucked up, but I’m going to rectify things by not getting in any deeper [with Bonnie]—so what are you doing tomorrow?”

“Wow,” she responds to his perfervid confession, “is that you or your new novel?”

It’s the latter.

“I
know
you,” he asserts, “I’ve written about you twice. Twice you were the obscure object of desire in the books I’ve written.”

She admonishes him not to be misled, insisting, “You didn’t make me up,” but he’ll have none of that. “Why wouldn’t I know where you live?” he asks her. “You were Steffie in my first book, Louise in my second, and now you’re Nola.” The character thereafter identified as Nola has already warned him that “every guy I meet thinks he’s gonna be the one to make me faithful,” and the viewer isn’t surprised to find at the end of the movie that Lee isn’t that guy, either.

In a movie which so often seems like
Manhattan
with a migraine, Lee has made the same mistake that Isaac does in “always thinking [he’ll] be the one to make ‘em act different”
{Manhattan,
p. 262).
Celebrity’s
protagonist imitates Isaac’s error in choosing the sexy instability of Mary Wilke over the loyal, sane affection of Tracy by dumping Bonnie for Nola, an error Emmet Ray will replicate in
Sweet and Lowdown
.

In the nearly Calvinist moral economy of
Celebrity
Lee’s punishment for pursuing his novels’ plots in the streets of Manhattan thoroughly fits the crime. Shortly before Bonnie moves in with him, Lee has completed a novel, a book which he earlier proclaimed “contains every aspiration, every authentic feeling I’ve had, every idea.” As movers carry Bonnie’s possessions into his apartment, Lee tells her that he’s found someone else and asks that they terminate their one night’s cohabitation. Outraged by his incredible inconstancy, Bonnie grabs the only copy of Lees novel, fleeing with the manuscript to the docks across from Lees apartment.
¹²
Boarding a departing tourist ship bearing the name Garden State, she scatters his “every aspiration, every authentic feeling I’ve had” to the winds, forcing Lee to satisfy himself with the real life Nola now that the fictional one who prefigured her has been dispersed upon the sea. Watching its pages swirl around the retreating ship, Lee has surely fallen from his garden state.

We never learn how literarily satisfying was Lee’s novelistic depiction of Nola; we watch without surprise as the actual Nola proves thoroughly unsatisfying to Lee, the relationship collapsing a few months after it begins. And so Lee attends the premiere of the movie he watched Nicole Oliver (Melanie Griffith) shooting in the opening of
Celebrity,
where his depression is deepened by his encounter with his made-over, newly minted celebrity ex-wife. Inside the theater, the guests watch
The Liquidator,
which opens with Nicole running through an urban landscape as skywriting above her head communicates her condition: “HELP.” The image of these letters recalls the instructions Nicole’s director gave her while shooting the scene to assist her understanding of her character—instructions which provide a perfect gloss for Lee’s circumstances as he watches
The Liquidators
premiere. “You see the skywriting,” the director (Greg Mottola) prompts Nicole, “you realize that everything has gone wrong, and you can’t believe it because you thought you had it all figured out, but everything’s chaos now. So what I really want you to project is despair. What I want to feel from you is the whole human condition.” Even more eloquent testimony of the human condition as it is filtered through Lee’s despair is the four-letter word sketched against the skies, “HELP,” on which
Celebrity
closes. It’s thoroughly appropriate that a man whose downfall eventuated from his confounding of art and life would have his condition perfectly summarized by a director instructing an actress on how to play her role; even his unarticulated cry for “HELP” is intertextually mediated, nothing more than a shot in somebody else’s movie.