The Reluctant Film Art of Woody Allen (61 page)

19. Quoted in Fox,
Woody: Movies from Manhattan,
p. 254.

20. Julian Fox’s description, p. 254.

21. Anthony Lane expressed similar admiration for Sorvino’s overpowering of the scene: “As you would expect, Allen crams the scene with aghast twitches and breathy comeback, but for once we don’t even look at his side of the frame; Sorvino is too much fun to miss…. Sorvino’s control of the movie is almost embarrassing; she makes everyone else look lisdess and indifferent to life.” “Scarlet Women” (review of
Mighty Aphrodite), The New Yorker,
p. 113.

17. And What a Perfect Plot:
Everyone Says I Love You
and
Zelig

1. Gado,
The Passion of Ingmar Bergman,
p. 183.

2. John Baxter suggests two sources for the egalitarian musicale that is
Everyone Says I Love You
are Jacques Demy’s
La Parapluies de Cherbourg
and
Les Demoiselles de Rochefort. Woody Allen: A Biography
p. 427.

3. David Denby, “Amateur Hour” (review of
Everyone Says I Love You), New York,
December 9, 1996, p. 72.

4. Quoted in Sarah Blacher Cohen, “Jewish Literary Comediennes,” in
Comic Relief Humor in Contemporary American Literature,
ed. Sarah Blacher Cohen (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978), p. 185.

5. Woody Allen,
Everyone Says I Love You
(Miramax Films, 1996).

6. In her memoir, Mia Farrow suggests that her meditations on the strangeness of living on top of other people in apartments and the presence of a therapist in the apartment next door to hers inspired Allen to evolve the eavesdropping plot used in
Another Woman. What Falls Away
p. 245.

7. It’s possible that, were Von a more substantial character, viewers might have objected more to the film’s endorsement of the invasion of her privacy which facilitates these comic moments; as they stand, these scenes constitute Allen’s mapping of the difference between soulmates constructed in comedy as opposed to the darker convergences of
doppelgangers
in the dramatic narrative of
Another Woman
.

8. Von’s rejection of Joe repeats a pattern in Allen’s films which Richard Freadman noted in
Play It Again, Sam:
Allan Felix has “helped Linda to achieve a stage of maturation that signals his own emotional dispensability … symbolically and sadly, the volatile Jew has enriched the Gentile world to a point where it no longer needs him. Linda leaves and returns to Dick.” “Love Among the Stereotypes, or Why Woody’s Women Leave,” p. 114.

9. Woody Allen,
Play It Again, Sam
(Paramount Pictures, 1972).

10. Richard Schickel, “They Sorta Got Rhythm” (review of
Everyone Says I Love You), Time,
December 9, 1996, p. 82.

11. Pauline Kael, “Charmer” (review of
The Purple Rose of Cairo)
in
State ofthe Art
(New York, E.P. Dutton, 1985), p. 337.

12. Perhaps it is the equivocal mood of the dance scene that accounts for reviewers’ remarkably polarized responses to this moment and to the film’s success at romantically transporting the viewer. For Denby, the actors’ want of musical comedy skills means that “there’s no exhilaration, no release” for the audience; Lisa Schwarzbaum perceived the film as “melancholia disguised as a romantic fantasia” such that “this celebration of love and good fortune doesn’t seem very festive at all” (“Woody Sings!”
Entertainment Weekly,
December 20, 1996, p. 70). Stanley Kauffmann, perhaps the world’s least enthusiastic Woody Allen moviegoer since John Simon retired, found the song and dance of the film “sometimes frenetic, sometimes poignant, always enjoyable” (
The New Republic,
November 11,1996, p. 40); David Ansen suggested that “Hawn’s flying through the air feels more theoretical than exhilarating”
(Newsweek,
December 9, 1996, p. 58); Peter Travers described that scene as “a trick done with wires, but Allen’s warm touch transforms it into romantic sorcery. At captivating moments like this,
Everyone Says I Love You
proves the musical can still cut it as sublime entertainment”
(Rolling Stone,
February 20, 1997, p. 74).

13. Michael Hirschorn, “Woody Sings!”
New York,
September 9, 1996, p. 53.

14. Todd McCarthy, “Tin Pan Allen” (review of
Everyone Says I Love You), Premiere,
January, 1997, p. 46.

15. Hirschorn, p. 50.

16. John Lahr, “The Imperfectionist,” p. 70.

17. Janet Maslin, “When Everyone Sings, Just for the Joy of It,”
The New York Times,
Friday, December 6, 1996, III, p. 1.

18. Woody Allen, “Zelig,” in
Three Films of Woody Allen
(New York: Vintage Books, 1987), p. 76.

19. Irwin Yalom’s novel,
When Nietszche Wept
(New York: Basic Books, 1992), uses the same dynamic: in order to coerce Friedrich Nietzsche into confronting his despair, Joseph Breuer convinces him that it is the psychologist’s own despair that their sessions are seeking to remedy.

20. Jay Martins
Who Am I This Time?: Uncovering the Fictive Personality
(New York:WW. Norton, 1988) addresses at length the contemporary psychological phenomenon of fab-ricated selves as they have been manifested in literature, film and American culture; the work briefly discusses Allen’s
Zelig
(pp. 88–90).

21. Daniel Green, “The Comedian’s Dilemma,”
Literature/Film Quarterly
Fall, 1991, p. 74.

22. Bellow has Arthur Sammler provide a rationale for Zelig-like behavior, one accompanied by a moralism incompatible with Allen’s depiction of the human chameleon, who imitates in order to be liked and to gain acceptance by others. “Better, thought Sammler, to accept the inevitability of imitation and then imitate good things. The ancients had this right. Greatness without models? Inconceivable. One could not be the thing itself—Reality. One must be satisfied with the symbols. Make it the object of imitation to seek and release the high qualities. Make peace, therefore, with intermediacy and representation. Otherwise, the individual must be the failure he now sees and knows himself to be.”
Mr. Sammler’s Planet
(New York: Viking Press, 1970), p. 149.

23. Lahr, p, 82.

24. Jacobs, p. 146.

25. John Updike, “More Love in the Western World” (review of
Love Declaredly
Denis de Rougemont), in Assorted Prose (New York: Knopf, 1965), p. 299.

18. How We Choose to Distort It:
Deconstructing Harry

Epigraph quoted in McCann,
Woody Allen: New Yorker,
p. 209.

1. William E. Geist, “The
Rolling Stone
Interview: Woody Allen,” p. 211.

2. Bjorkman, p. 103.

3. Even in this one-liner of a short story plot Allen reasserts the
Zelig
moral: Harvey’s transformation of himself into Mandel Birnbaum results in self-erasure.

4. Harrys characters, although more broadly comic, anticipate the loathsome cultural caricatures of Allen’s 1999 film,
Celebrity,
a movie whose unrelenting bitterness might be interpreted as the necessary culmination of Allen’s having written his protagonist out of the romantic closure of
Everyone Says I Love You
and his satire of art-as-redemption in
Deconstructing Harry
.

5. Lest Allen be taken as exaggerating the magnitude of public condemnations of artists like Harry in the movie, consider Samuel H. Dresners description of Allen and the Jewish viewers who have admired his films: “Allen has contributed mightily to the whole perverse pursuit to the depths of human infamy…. The silence of Jews to Allen’s attack on their most prized possession, family morality, his celebration of their death through intermarriage, and his demeaning of those with religious commitment is a betrayal both of the Jewish faith and of the Jewish people. In failing to repudiate the perverse behavior advocated by Allen in his writings and his films, his Jewish audience has forsaken fundamental Jewish values: the sanctity of marriage and the significance of the family.” “Woody Allen and the Jews,”
Midstream,
December, 1992, p. 23, rpt in
Perspectives on Woody Allen,
p. 197.

6. The majority of the 1990s Allen films which depict the Allen protagonist as being in some sense attenuated or withdrawn from life end in rebirths: Larry
(Murder Mystery)
and Lenny
(Mighty Aphrodite)
spark regenerations of their marriages, and David Shayne
(Bullets)
rejects the theater in favor of marriage and family. The darkest of the decade’s films,
Husbands and Wives,
and the sunniest,
Everyone Says I Love You,
leave the Allen protagonist unattached and dismal, as do
Celebrity
and
Sweet and Lowdown
.

7. David Ansen noted the influence of
Wild Strawberries
on
Deconstructing Harry
in his review of Christmas 1997 releases. “Season of the Grinch” (review of
Deconstructing Harry), Newsweek,
December 22, 1997, p. 85.

8. Harry’s two enthusiasms converge in a conversation he has with Cookie Williams, an African-American prostitute. “You know what a black hole is?” he asks her; “Yeah,” she replies, “that’s how I make my living.”

9. Borg’s revisitings of his past in Bergman’s film precisely anticipate Allen’s favorite mode of flashback: in the work of both filmmakers, the character remembering the event is physically present in it, sometimes—as in Borg’s meeting with his fiancée, Sara, or Judah’s appearance at his father’s seder in
Crimes and Misdemeanors
—being able to converse with those occupying the memory.

10. The script’s consciousness of its own art/life duplicities is signaled not only through the blurring of Harry’s stories and his experiences, but also in his assurance to Fay that “You fell in love with my work—that’s a different thing … But this is not a book. We’re not characters in a fictional thing.”

11. The prospect of “growing up” is particularly threatening to Harry because doing so probably means sacrificing what he values most in the world: his attractiveness to women. “Because of my immaturity,” he tells a friend, “I have a boyish quality which works for me [with women].”

12. The incessant “whining” of Allen’s protagonists which Woodyphobes often cite as a primary objection to his movies is precisely this kind of unrelenting narcissistic self-affirmation: it’s the individual self’s unyielding, insistent demand that exterior reality respond to its endless demands of “I want,” and constitutes his strongest link to the Jewish American literary tradition. Compare the declaration of Stanley Elkin’s Push the Bully: “I didn’t make myself. I probably can’t save myself, but maybe that’s the only need I don’t have. I taste my lack and that’s how I win—by having nothing to lose. It’s not good enough. I want and I want and I will die wanting. …” “A Poetics for Bullies” in
Criers & Kibitzers, Kibitzers & Criers
(New York: Random House, 1966), p. 216.

13. Harrys elevator journey into Hell is, like the plot of
Manhattan Murder Mystery,
a vestige of the original Allen/Brickman
Annie Hall
script, including a reprise of the department store-like annunciation of its circles as he descends.
Annie Hall
script: “layer five: organized crime, fascist dictators, and people who don’t appreciate oral sex” (Rosenblum and Karen, p. 280);
Deconstructing Harry:
“Floor six: right wing extremists, serial killers, lawyers who appear on television.”

14. Frank Gado finds the same Oedipal tension underlying
Wild Strawberries,
quoting Bergman’s acknowledgment of his hatred for his father. “Only after overcoming [that hatred],” Bergman argued, “could I, without forcing myself to, talk with him and see that he was a poor old man whom I could take pity on and feel sympathy for.” Gado,
The Passion of Ingmar Bergman,
p. 224.

15. “Anhedonia” may have been scrapped as the title
of Annie Hall,
but the condition is seldom absent from the psychological makeups of Allen’s protagonists. “For a guy who makes a lot of funny movies,” Daisy tells Sandy Bates, “You’re kind if depressive, you know?”
(Stardust Memories,
p. 351).

16.
The Purple Rose of Cairo,
p. 440.

17. Allen’s choice of a song to soundtrack this scene is truly inspired: as the incipiently unblocked Harry walks in to the celebration, an orchestra is playing “[If They Asked Me] I Could Write a Book.”

18. Adam Gopnik’s excellent essay on Allen, “The Outsider,” makes much of Allen’s adoption of Modernist canons: “Just when the
Partisan Review
hierarchy of values, which placed high modernism above all other modes and traditions, was disappearing for good, Woody chose to become the last apostle. He went serious” (p. 90). As I’ve tried to indicate in these pages, the Woody Allen films I’m delineating often present Modernist aesthetic values as possible sources of affirmation, only to—as in
Deconstructing Harry
—register serious concluding reservations about their validity.

19. John Barth, “Lost in the Funhouse,” in
Lost In the Funhouse: Fiction for Print, Tape, Live Voice
(New York: Doubleday, 1968), p. 97.

20. Allen’s dissent from the idea that producing children alters this basic human condition is implied in Harry’s neglecting to mention that, in addition to a hooker and corpse, he’s brought his son to his old school.

21. Lahr, “The Imperfectionist,” p. 74.

22. John Updike, “Van Loves Ada, Ada Loves Van,” in
Picked-Up Pieces
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1975), p. 202.

23. Barbara Kopple, director,
Wild Man Blues
(Fine Line Films, 1997).

19. From the Neck Up:
Another Woman
and
Celebrity