Wooden Allen, Or Made in Manhattan
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CHAPTER 14 WOODEN ALLEN, OR MADE IN MANHATTAN I am frequently asked why I don’t write about the films of Woody Allen. Here’s my answer. Woody Allen used to be a funny guy. Then he became a serious artist, or thought he did at any rate. His first screen “drama,” Interiors (1978), was an embarrassing episode in Allen’s career, to be followed by such others as September (1987), Another Woman (1988), and Alice (1990). Interiors represented a feeble struggle to escape from his more authentic self, an incredible concession to the snobbish misgiving that comedy is an inferior art—something which doubtless would be news to figures as diverse as Aristophanes and Molière, Charlie Chaplin and Billy Wilder. Prior to this film, Allen had exercised a welcome talent for parody and a shrewd recognition of the clichés by which many American urbanites live, even though he never allowed his comedic talent to develop much beyond the gag-and-skit stage of Take the Money and Run (1969), Bananas (1971), Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Sex … But Were Afraid to Ask (1972), Sleeper (1973), and Love and Death (1975). These films, of course, take their genesis from his comic writing for television in the 1950s. As a showman, Allen certainly has developed a professional eye when choosing a cinematographer, a lively ear for the musical score, and a refined taste in actresses (such as Barbara Hershey). Not in actors, however: witness his casting of himself in the leading roles of his comic and semi-comic movies, which a better actor (such as Dustin Hoffman) would make even wittier, along with his exclusion of himself from his utterly serious films, where he could perhaps do some humorous good! As for the oft-made remark about what a competent director Allen has become, all that I can say is, with his bankroll and artistic support system, I too could become a competent director after so many pictures. To echo André Bazin on auteurs, competent director, yes, but of what? He certainly didn’t help his cause with such a narcissistic meditation on the filmmaking experience as Stardust Memories (1980), a rip-off of Fellini’s 8½ (1963), even as the comic fantasy of the vastly overrated Purple Rose of Cairo (1985) is lifted in reverse form from Buster Keaton’s Sherlock, Jr. (1924). And to say that he has resolved his artistic dilemma or division by striking a balance between the solemn and the funny in movies like Annie Hall (1977), Manhattan (1979), Hannah and Her Sisters (1986), even Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989) and Husbands and Wives (1992), is to miss the extent to which such pictures fail as genuine tragicomedy. 143 Chapter 14 Rather than combining the serious and the comic into a unique new form, they just irresolutely lay the two elements side by side, or overemphasize one at the expense of the other, against the backdrop of culturally rich, culturally hip, psychically neurotic New York, which these films expect to do the real work of “meaning” for them. In movies like these, Allen is continually sending love letters to himself and to that province of provinces, Manhattan, and I for one don’t enjoy reading other people’s mail. A woman once told me that I should see Hannah and Her Sisters with someone I love. I don’t know what she could have meant by this exhortation, given the film’s solipsism, and I’m glad I didn’t see it with her … But, some people will say, those artsy Europeans, especially the French, love Woody Allen. Yes, well, they loved Samuel Fuller and Don Siegel not so long ago, and look where that got us. Europeans think that Americans (read: New Yorkers) are fabulously nutty at the same time that they believe America (read: New York) is wonderfully glamorous. That’s why they love Woody Allen, Manhattan diarist. New Yorkers and all who aspire to be New Yorkers like Annie Hall, Manhattan, and Hannah and Her Sisters (among other Woody vehicles) because these films congratulate them on their choice of city in which to live, and because these people think that Allen is the cinema’s answer to drama’s Chekhov: serious, comic, and deliciously melancholy, all wrapped up in the same tidy little package. One, just one, difference between Allen and Chekhov (it’s difficult to write their names in the same sentence) is that the latter had some distance on himself and life, to put it mildly. Irony played a large part in his art, as did his knowledge of the theatrical tradition that had immediately preceded him. Allen loves himself and New York so much, he’s nostalgic about both before the fact, to the point of making it and his own person the real subject of his films. And the very first time he thought about tradition, he tried to imitate Ingmar Bergman, the result being the disastrous Interiors. This picture reveals not only a comedian’s betrayal of his comic self, but also a filmmaker’s mistaken assumption that one can create great art by consciously setting out to do so, according to this or that recipe, instead of intuitively using artistic means to capture for all eternity an image or idea of humanity. According to the biography of Allen by Lee Guthrie (which, significantly, was withdrawn from distribution shortly after the opening of Interiors), the comedian once admitted that although he admired the films of Bergman, they could only be a bad influence on his work, “because they’re so antithetical to laughter” (100). He went on to explain that Bergman interested him more than any other filmmaker, owing to “the consummate marriage of technique, theatricality, and themes that are both personally important to me and have gigantic size—death, the meaning of life, the question of religious faith” (75). In other words, Allen was impressed by the austerity of Bergman’s style and by what he reads as the master’s tragic view of life. So impressed that, in a later declaration, he was prepared to throw previous caution to the wind and reach for just those “gigantic” themes, which he was now translating as “more personal” than those of his contemporaries. From the same source, we get the following statement: “I’m not sure any American filmmaker 144.