The Reluctant Film Art of Woody Allen (60 page)

18. Woody Allen,
Deconstructing Harry
Fine Line Films, 1998.

19. Maureen Dowd, “Auteur as Spin Doctor,” The
New York Times,
Sunday, October 1, 1995, Section D, p. 13.

20. The identification of Gabe’s work with Allen’s is reinforced by Rain’s mother’s comment about her and her husband’s affection for Gabe’s work: “We’re tremendous fans of yours—we wish you’d still write those sad funny stories of yours.”

21. Allen’s protagonist’s first name also seems to reinforce the identification with Philip Roth, since the protagonist of one of Roth’s best-known novels,
Letting Go,
is Gabe Wallach.

22. Lahr, p. 82.

23. Baxter, p. 335.

24. Ibid., p. 292.

25. In
What Falls Away
Farrow describes the relief from the Soon-Yi scandal her being offered a part in a movie soon to begin shooting in Ireland promised: “When I couldn’t sleep, I went into the nursery to watch the children safe in slumber.

“Malignant specters of the dark night moved into familiar positions. Hounds tugged on taught leather lines, howling horrible. While the children slept, I dreamed of Ireland, awaking in gentle light: gray stone walls hemming the damp fields, sheep across the stretch of the Wicklow mountains and the glowering hills of Connemara; apples in the branches near Inistioge; oars dip the sea at Ballyhack; the blue-eyed daughters of Ballyknocken trudge to school” (p. 321).

26. Allen described the intensification of his relationship with Soon-Yi Farrow Previn in similar terms. “But you fell in love with her?” Walter Isaacson asked. “Yes, yes,” Allen responded. “My flair for drama. What can I say?” Isaacson, p. 60.

27. Fox, p. 230.

28. Terence Rafferty’s predominantly critical review of
Husbands and Wives
sees this convergence of life and art in the film as its primary liability. “What keeps you absorbed in ‘Husbands and Wives’ isn’t the power of Woody Allen’s art, and what you feel when it’s over isn’t the aesthetic pleasure of heightened understanding” (“Getting Old” [a review of
Husbands and Wives], The New Yorker,
September 21,1992, p. 104.) I don’t disagree with that judgment, although I’m arguing that the film embodies a quite deliberate skepticism about the capacity of artworks to generate “the aesthetic pleasure of heightened understanding.”

29. Woody Allen,
Mighty Aphrodite,
Miramax Films, 1995.

15. Rear Condo:
Manhattan Murder Mystery

1. Woody Allen,
September
(Orion Pictures, 1987). A major goad of the querulousness that Pauline Kael’s reviews regularly expressed toward Allen’s films is contained in Lloyd’s speech. “Of course [the universe is] morally neutral,” she objected in reviewing
September,
“Can’t Allen accept that and move on?”
(Hooked
[New York: E.P. Dutton, 1989], p. 427.) Kael could never forgive Allen’s films for repeatedly confronting what he considers to be the irresolvable existential bind which is humanity’s spiritual heritage and which she perceives as the truth of being in the world and thus only the existential precondition of dramatic narrative, not its source. “It’s a funny thing about Woody Allen,” she suggested in reviewing
Hannah and Her Sisters,
“the characters he plays learn to accept life and get on with it, but then he starts a new picture and his character is back at square one”
(Hooked,
p. 114).

2. Bjorkman, p. 245.

3. Lahr, “The Imperfectionist,” p. 71. Allen has Treva Marx (Julie Kavner), the disillusioned psychic in “Oedipus Wrecks,” articulate the pessimistic view of the idea that something beyond the senses exists: “I always have hopes; I always think that there’s more to the world than meets your eye—hidden meanings, spiritual mysteries. Nothing ever works, ever.” What works, the chapter of
New York Stories
suggests, is romantic love, the one spiritual mystery Allen’s 1990s movies consistendy, if somewhat ambivalently, affirm.

4. Lahr, p. 79.

5. As we saw in the early draft of
Bullets Over Broadway
Allen, like many artists working in dramatic narrative, signals his uncertainty about the effective communication of his purposes in films by overexplicating them. Toward the end of
Alice,
Dr. Yang very forthrightly explains what the viewer has clearly grasped about the change which has transpired in the title character in the course of the film: “I think Mrs. Tate has better idea of who she is than before she came to Dr. Yang. Who her friends are, who is husband, lover, sister, mother … what are her innermost feelings. May not know all answers, but has a better idea, no?” Woody Allen,
Alice
(Orion Pictures, 1990). Allen’s preferred ending had Alice undergoing an even greater transformation, the protagonist flying to India as she does in the released film, but remaining there to work with Mother Teresa. Anthony DeCurtis, “Woody Allen: The
Rolling Stone
Interview,” p. 49.

6. In contrast, the Dorrie/”Stardust” scene in
Stardust Memories
requires no special effects and retains much of its magic even after the viewer realizes it’s not a beautiful memory but Sandy Bates’s cinematic rendering of one.

7. Although Carlo Di Palma used a handheld camera in photographing
Manhattan Murder Mystery,
its presence is far less visually pronounced and jarring than it is in
Husbands and Wives
, reflecting the greater formal containment of the later film.

8. Philip Kemp, review of
Manhattan Murder Mystery Sound and Sense,
Vol. 2, No. 2 (February, 1994), p. 46.

9. Carroll,
Woody and His Women,
p. 299; Bjorkman, p. 257.

10. “Play It Again, Woody,”
Newsweek,
August 30, 1993, p. 53.

11. DeCurtis, p. 46.

12. Lax, p. 285.

13. DeCurtis, p. 46.

14. “Through an accident of casting,” David Denby contended in his review of
Murder Mystery
“the film has become an unintended sequel to
Annie Hall
. What if Annie had stayed in New York and married Alvy Singer? Well, its twenty years later, they’ve raised a son, and Annie still doesn’t know what to do with herself.” Review of
Manhattan Murder Mystery New York,
August 23, 1993. p. 57.

15. Bjorkman, p. 255.

16.
Wild Man Blues
(Orion Pictures, 1998).

17. Bjorkman, p. 192. Corroborating Allen’s judgment, Richard Schickel asserted, “Ambition is an essential goad to [Allen’s] sensibility. It pushes him toward the rueful resonances of those previous Brickman collaborations and toward the magical transformations of reality in
The Purple Rose of Cairo
and
Radio Days
.” “Just Funny Isn’t Enough” (review of
Manhattan Murder Mystery), Time,
August 23, 1993, p. 67.

18. Bjorkman, p. 51.

19. Trivializing issues for the sake of comedy is the most resonant critique Rain makes of Gabe Roth’s novel manuscript in
Husbands and Wives
.

20. Girgus, p. 98.

21. As Larry confronts House outside his theater, the soundtrack, as if commenting on the source of Larry’s newly discovered courage, plays Coleman Hawkins’s “Out of Nowhere.”

22. “The Outsider,”
The New Yorker,
October 23, 1993, p. 93.

23. That wealth Manhattan-style is a source of real excitement for Allen is confirmed by his telling John Lahr that he “still gets a thrill” when he sees “those families take their kids to those private schools and their chauffeurs pulling up, and see the guys in tuxedos and the women coming down, and the doormen getting them cabs” (p. 82).
Alice
is more pervaded by evidence of this “thrill” than any other Allen film until
Everyone Says I Love You,
though, significantly, Alice has delivered her children from such luxuries by the film’s end.

24. The level of Allen’s idealization of that era is reflected in his comment in an interview that “My guess is that in the Twenties and Thirties there was probably nothing to equal Manhattan ever in the history of the world.” William E. Geist, “The
Rolling Stone
Interview: Woody Allen,” p. 216.

25. Kael,
Hooked,
p. 116.

26. James M. Welsh commented on similarities between
Rear Window
and Allen’s film in his review of
Manhattan Murder Mystery Films in Review,
November/December 1993, p. 413; Mary Nichols briefly discusses the link in
Reconstructing Woody
p. 177.

27. Bjorkman, p. 256.

28. Alfred Hitchcock,
Rear Window
(Universal, 1954).

29. Rich, p. 69. In discussing
Manhattan Murder Mystery
with Stig Bjorkman, Allen alludes to a Bob Hope film,
The Great Lover,
as being similarly a “very broad comedy but also a murder mystery” (p.257).

30. Mary P. Nichols offers an effectively detailed argument that
Manhattan Murder Mystery
dramatizes Carol and Larry’s education in the proper balance between art and life: Larry learns that mysteries are part of life, not just movies, and Carol realizes that life needn’t imitate romantic films to be meaningful (p. 175).

16. That Voodoo That You Do So Well:
Mighty Aphrodite

1. Baxter, p. 418.

2. Woody Allen,
Mighty Aphrodite
(Miramax Films, 1996).

3. Nick James, review of
Mighty Aphrodite, Sound and Sense,
April, 1996, p. 49.

4. Bernhard Zimmerman,
Greek Tragedy: An Introduction,
trans. Thomas Marier (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), p. 24.

5. Bernard Knox,
Oedipus at Thebes: Sophocles’ Tragic Hero and His Time
(New York: WW. Norton, 1971), pp. 171–79.

6. Quoted in Knox, p. 47.

7. Lenny’s intervention in Linda Ash’s fate reprises the Pygmalion theme observable in Allan Felix’s relationship with Linda Christie in
Play It Again, Sam,
in Alvy Singer’s transformation of Annie Hall into a self-confident performer, and in Isaac Davis’s coaching of Tracy in the ways of sophisticated adulthood in
Manhattan
. The theme emerges again in Harry Block’s relationship with Fay Sexton in
Deconstructing Harry:
“It was Henry Higgins and Eliza Doolitde,” she admits.

8. Nichols,
Reconstructing Woody
p. 204.

9. Mia Farrow’s memoir indicates that Allen’s repudiation of genetics in
Mighty Aphrodite
is not merely a literary conceit. She recalls his responding to a visit to his parents’ apartment, “Can you believe I came from these people?”
(What Falls Away
p. 237).

10. David Denby, “Woe Unto Woody” (review of
Mighty Aphrodite), New York,
October 30, 1995, p. 109.

11. Carroll,
Woody and His Women,
p. 280.

12. Denby’s review of the
Mighty Aphrodite
used the film’s repudiation of the chorus’s bleak imperatives as an occasion to deliver a pointed lecture: “Woody Allen may want to believe that he can safely ignore his conscience, that some of his wilder flights into foolishness with adopted children are perfectly okay. In
Mighty Aphrodite,
he’s not dramatizing an obsession: he’s in the grip of one—but the roots of it are obscure and unproductive, and the movie, despite its clever frame, remains an uneasy experience” (p. 109).

13. A feminist objection to
Mighty Aphrodite
would argue that in “changing Linda’s life,” Lenny is actually bringing her in from the social oudands into containment within masculine-defined structures of family and marriage.

14. Nichols (
Reconstructing Woody
p. 209) suggests that the helicopter’s appearance may indicate that Zeus actually answers the prayers left on his answering machine, a reading at odds with my interpretation of the Greek pantheon in the film as pure projections of Lennys psychic life.

15. The reviews generally debated the effectiveness of the buoyancy of
Mighty Aphrodite,
ranging from Brian Johnson’s judgment that “in the film one of America’s great directors finally gives in to all the fans who kept asking him to stop with the art and be a comedian again. He gets the laughs, but they have a hollow ring” (
Macleans,
October 20, 1995, p. 27) to Janet Maslin’s comment that “even when it becomes unmistakably lightweight,
Mighty Aphrodite
remains witty, agile, and handsomely made” (
New York Times,
October 27, 1995, C, p. 1) to Anthony Lane’s view that “When the picture does work—most often in the scenes between Allen and Sorvino—you find yourself sighing with relief at its lightness of heart” (
The New Yorker,
October 30, 1995, p. 113).

16. Allen discussed his fondness for Jimmy Cannon columns and his childhood desire to be a sportswriter with sportswriter Ira Berkow of
The New York Times
. “From Defense to Offense”
The New York Times,
November 2, 1995, C, 1.

17. Helena Bonham-Carter, who didn’t find working with Allen gratifying, objected to the unmotivated reversal Amanda undergoes at the end of the movie, wondering “Whose fantasy am I in here?” (Baxter, p. 423). Clearly, her role was the victim of two circumstances in addition to expedient plotting: Mira Sorvino’s overwhelming presence in her Oscar-winning performance, and the fact that Bonham-Carter was in the unenviable position of being the first actress in two decades to play the romantic lead in a Woody Allen film featuring neither Mia Farrow or Diane Keaton.

18. James, p. 49; Stanley Kauffman similarly found the gag getting “heavier and heavier” until culminating in the chorus’s singing and dancing, which he characterized as “borscht belt shriek in excelsis.” “Return of a Trouble” (review
Mighty Aphrodite), New Republic,
November 27,1995, p. 29.