Also fits this series:
“We’ll always have Woody”: A look at Woody Allen films
[Edit 4/22/14.]
Subsections below:
The film takes a cue from Allen’s story “The Kugelmass Episode”
The place of Purple Rose in Allen’s
history
Technical aspects show us interesting values and craft; some criticism
Farrow’s character adds juice; a summing up
I have seen this film only twice: once, in 1985, when it was in the
theater, and once just this month (March 2014), when I had to return it quickly
because of a short lending-time (due to the system of varying lengths of
lending times from the library system I often use—too complicated to explain
further here).
I apparently saw it in the spring
of that year, probably at a theater in Washington,
D.C., and that was a period when,
roughly speaking, things were no longer quite as rosy as the spring I graduated
(1984). I have recalled little enough of Purple
Rose from 1985 that I would have said until recently that I couldn’t say
much about it, not that I had disliked it. But some images and brief situations
in it came back to me as I watched it this winter.
Perhaps the most distinctive
image—most memorable to me on re-viewing, and perhaps most pleasantly startling
to new viewers—is also what encapsulates the theme of the film: a character
(Tom Baxter) from a black-and-white late-1930s semi-genre feature emerges from the screen (he is played by Jeff Daniels,
and is an earnest naif of an archeologist, in hokey pith helmet) and comes to
meet and be a spontaneous consort of sorts with a rather sad woman in the
audience, a Depression era housewife, unappreciated by her loutish husband, and
played by a rather poignant Mia Farrow.
This film is intelligently
written—with various funny lines anchored by the fantasy/reality premise just
suggested—and its techno aspects (with both B&W imagery and somewhat melancholy
color, the latter for real life) are well done. (The cinematographer was Gordon Willis, in his last film for Allen. By the
way, Stuart Wurtzel debuts here as Allen’s
production designer; Mel Bourne, present for many of his previous films, had
left his fold.) This film captures a number of Woody Allen’s attributes in a
rather neat and carefully enough articulated package without, I think, being a
terribly prepossessing work.
The film takes a cue from Allen’s story “The Kugelmass Episode”
The theme of a fictional
character and a “real person” meeting up and joining forces in some activity or
set of adventures is actually something Allen wrote on in a short story titled
“The Kugelmass Episode.” This was originally published in the 1970s in that
major venue for respectable short fiction, The
New Yorker; it was later included in Allen’s collection Side Effects, published by Random House
in 1980 (this was the third of Allen’s books of collected small items). (In
this regard, Allen proves to have been, by 1980, taken seriously by editors for
his fictional and other belletristic work in the way his late-1970s films
suggested he wanted to be taken. He also can be considered similar to humorist
S. J. Perelman, who wrote both for
respectable-enough literary publishers and for the movies, such as one or more
films by the Marx Brothers.)
“Kugelmass” is written—as short
stories best are—with a bare-bones “factual” approach and pared-down dialogue.
Allan provides a readily Jewish-dialect way of speaking among the characters
(it reads somewhat like a boiled-down version of Joseph Heller in shtik mode, a la parts of Good as Gold and much of God Knows); it thus gets its situation
and humor across to the gut readily. The plot mainly involves a man, with an
unhappy marriage, seeking solace via the (to us, amazingly simplistic)
contraption already built by another man, where, if you go inside a
simple-looking wooden box and the man does something control-related, the
passenger inside is transported to a fictional locale/story of choice. The important
ingredient: throw in the book with the desired story—in this case, Gustave Flaubert’s
Madame Bovary (a ratty paperback will
do). Poof! You’re back in 19th-century France with Madame Bovary. (And
professors in the present day will start noticing a new character in the novel
they hadn’t seen before.) I would suggest you seek out and take in this
readable story, and it would help you digest Purple Rose better.
Also, the idea of a mixture of
the fiction-related world and reality shapes a much later film by Allen, Midnight in Paris (2011), where the
mixing (as I understand it; I haven’t seen the film) is between a “real person”
and authors of major fiction, in Paris. For this, Allen won an Oscar for Best
Original Screenplay, while it was nominated for other Oscars.
I guess you could say that,
regarding the trope of a real person meeting a fictional (or fiction-making)
personage as a story’s “web of premises,” among the notable, prolific U.S. directors
(with a strong bent at writing, not in producing huge-budget epics), if any is
good at this sort of thing, Allen is (or at least he’s published or released
noteworthy work under the premise several times).
The place of Purple Rose in Allen’s
history
In 1985, though Allen probably
couldn’t know where his career would be going in 20 years, he was already
cresting with, if he wasn’t already past, his strongest (or at least most
original) films. (Of course, his mentality at the time, as for any creative
person, would likely not have been
that he was clearly at or past his peak; he probably was of the mind to be
thinking of what his next work would be, and what chances he could scout up to
get it made and released. You’re only as good as your next chance.)
Some notable films of his were
still to come, but fans and critics who feel he generally fell off in quality
after Hannah and Her Sisters (1986)
or Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989) may
well say that Purple Rose was, at
best, one of the train of works (not
the best) in his “major phase.” (As it turns out, it is one of the three of his
films that he said, within the past several years, had come closest to his
original vision for them. The other two are Stardust
Memories [1980] and Match Point
[2005].)
Purple Rose contains an obvious element of nostalgia, not a mawkish
sort; it does raise the more serious-minded question of what might happen to
someone if he or she got too lost in fantasy, even if in the Depression era,
when a grim lower-middle-class life left few options for “getting away to a
better world” other than the local movie house, where “champagne comedies” (or
whatever term it was that Allen has used in comment on this film) were for the
enjoying.
But the film seems also to look
toward his later years when he would weave a work rigorously evocative of a
past era, especially some bygone time of the 20th century (such as Bullets Over Broadway or The Curse of the Jade Scorpion), and he
would play with some clichés or standardized tropes within that time and set of
values, or more or less celebrate what he views as laudable but long-gone social
and cultural values. Another way to put it, maybe: with such films, he looks at
what the old days (or average folks’ dreams or struggles from then) could maybe
tell us (or allow us to appreciate) about life today, especially what good we’re
missing.
Technical aspects show us interesting values and craft; some criticism
Purple Rose has a neatness and charm shaped by its premises that
don’t mean it is an especially gripping film, in its overall story. It is
compact, just enough apt to follow implications in its comical plot to serve
its premises, but is not especially drawn out per ideas as a two-hour,
exquisitely richly imagined film might be. Among those who might prefer it among Allen’s less satiric work are today’s
fantasy/sci-fi lovers, who might savor its way of developing a story’s “body”
and details from imaginative premises. (One line I wrote down from it tends to
show what the writing tries to do with the story premises: “What good is
perfect [i.e., Mia’s character’s view of Tom Baxter] if a man’s not real?”)
Among the numerous characters/actors
in this film, there is Danny Aiello as the
loutish husband of the leading female in real, full-colored life, Mia’s
character; there is Edward Herrmann,
present within the B&W film (among miscellaneous other characters) as a
tall, dashing gentleman you could picture striding elegantly in late-’30s films;
and in the B&W film, there is a female, played I believe by the actress Zoe Caldwell, who as the B&W actress is playing an elderly, stately countess [?]; the actress now, with the film stopped, is in a kind of unexpected repose.
You see, because of Tom Baxter’s
defection, the film has come to a long halt on the screen where Mia’s character
has watched, and the numerous B&W characters are idling beyond the flat
boundary of the movie screen, complaining, interacting with the astonished full-color
audience, etc., like live, discomposed actors on a stage, pending a resolution
of Tox Baxter’s having defected. The arch dowager type (played by Zoe
Caldwell), among the fictional actors on the B&W screen, has the tartest
lines to offer at times, like any old person who generally doesn’t care how
tactful she is anymore and, for the present moment, doesn’t care for the
inconvenience.
One of the concerns I have about
a movie like this—which I wasn’t able to view enough times this year to get a
full measure of—is that, with a sci-fi type premise like a mixing of two
worlds, the problem can easily be that, as much as it opens up story
possibilities to you (and as Allen does you can wring humor out of it), there
also may be implications you don’t consider or don’t handle well enough. For
instance, in Purple Rose, it turns
out (from what passing characters say), in semi-response to what has happened
in Mia’s character’s location, that several theaters in different locations
across the country have the same film come to a halt, and as part of this, there
are different types of defection or “going on strike” by the B&W film’s
actors, or such. The whole phenomenon is obviously becoming a nationwide
crisis, hence the bigwigs in the film studio powwow nervously to come up with a
solution. There’s a business threat posed by this, of course.
The logical problem I see with
this is, why are the films in other cities having “breakdowns in normal
functioning” when the only film that had initially this, where Farrow’s
character was, was in direct, “magical” response to the woman’s losing herself
in the world of the film? Were there analogous “other-life wishers” in these
other locations that triggered the breakdowns there? I seem to recall this
wasn’t the case. If not, why were the other films going screwy in some sort of sympathy with the one at
hand? There is obviously some possibility here for authorial comment on the way
sheer distribution of pop-culture product is a dimension in how the
fantasy/reality issue for viewers may play out or be assessed, but I don’t know
how well Allen’s story squares with this. (Again, a further viewing may modify
my criticisms here.)
Meanwhile, it is a good touch to
include the plot element of the actor (Gil Shepherd, which turns out to be his
stage name) who is behind the defected fictional character Tom Baxter, also
played by Daniels, getting involved in the mix, and with Farrow’s character
(with her picking the fruit of what this means for her in the story). Both Tom
and Gil are in certain scenes together. (Amusingly, at one point Allen even has
Gil reveal his own real name to Mia’s character, something like Herman
Bardabeedee [sp?].)
As Allen has said, once he had
this element of the actor getting involved as he wrote the script, the whole
story came together.
Farrow’s character adds juice; a summing up
Apart from my qualms about the
fantasy structure, I think Farrow’s performance here is nice; it is one of her
best for Allen, and her award nominations for it (mentioned near the end of my review of Broadway Danny Rose) attest to this. When I view Farrow in
several of Allen’s films, as first struck me rather strongly in A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy (see my review here), I saw glimmers in her
of the character of Rosemary Woodhouse, of the Roman Polanski film Rosemary’s Baby (see my 2013 review here).
Farrow is an actress of rather
limited range, I think (that is, in her serious roles); she’s apt to show some of the same styles of
self-expression across characters, in a way that makes them definitely more
similar than different. She’s quite nice for a certain type of character,
especially of the dream-chasing waif, of which her Rosemary Woodhouse is
perhaps the most vivid example. Purple Rose is concocted, I think, to
cater to her strengths in this regard. She is a key feature that makes this
film touch us. Aside from her, Purple
Rose might seem a mere genre exercise, or a rather dry technical tour de
force.
Interestingly, Allen shows he
makes a warm place for family involvement and group creativity in this film, to
the extent he has Mia’s sister Stephanie Farrow portray a coworker in the diner at which she works (Stephanie was also in
Allen’s Zelig [1983]). And in the end
credits, it is noted her sister Prudence Farrow (the inspiration for The
Beatles’ 1968 song “Dear Prudence”) is listed as being in the art/production
department, or such.
And we find that, in Allen’s Hannah and Her Sisters (1986), even
Farrow’s mother is a character with screen time in a number of scenes;
meanwhile, there are bit parts in Hannah
for some of who would later comprise the huge brood of children, adopted and
otherwise, for whom Farrow would be the mother and home provider.
##
I did appreciate how Purple Rose was wrought, more in 2014
than I did in 1985, which may reflect in part my being more mature (as a person
and writer, perhaps). But the one viewing I did this year didn’t bowl me over.
If I saw it again, maybe I could say more with analytical enthusiasm. The
Leonard Maltin compendium gives Danny
Rose three stars and Purple Rose three and a half, while the Videohound
compendium (generally reflecting a younger audience demographic) reverses
the ratings.
On these two films, I would
agree more with Videohound, in part
because Danny Rose, with its earthy
premises and characters and more standard Allen comedy—especially in this day of scams uncovered behind every
other door—seems (in story structure as well as in its content premises) just
to jibe with today’s reality more (if that isn’t a “current-time-based” way to
criticize a work), or (from a more abstract viewpoint) it makes its points less
coyly.
