Also fits this series:
“We’ll always have Woody”: A look at Woody Allen films
*The term spiritual gets used by different people in different ways, ranging
from addressing someone (or an attitude) oriented to religious concerns defined
in traditional ways, to someone (or an attitude) oriented to idealistic,
intellectual endeavor (as opposed to materialistic concerns). Here, the idea is
to reflect Allen’s character’s concern for a relatively debauched or deprived
woman whose quality of life that he feels could and should be improved in a
fundamentally significant way.
Subsections below:
Not a bad entry in the Doumanian series
A relatively humdrum setup shows some standard Allen moves, but this
phase is short
To come in a future entry:
The Greek chorus gets lighter and more fun as the film kicks into gear,
and Linda Ash enters the picture
How dumb is Linda Ash? Not like you might think
Sage words from Sorvino, in recent years
Not a bad entry in the Doumanian series
By the time you reach this film if you’re marching through Woody Allen’s oeuvre, you know you’re no longer in his best run
of films. This wasn’t on my short list of 1990s Allen films to cover, but once
I managed to get a copy of the film (End
note), I was actually surprised to discover the fun aspects of it. I mean,
it’s by no means great Allen, but it
manages to squeak out, through its one hour and 37 minutes, a good fistful of
fun (even with some of what seem the inevitable Jean Doumanian era touches, like stock show-bizzy ingredients
that Allen wouldn’t have been quick to adopt in the past—such as a musical
number at the end—and an increasing presence of colorful—curse-word—language
that was not typical of Allen before).
And it has an interesting, even
downright enlivening, performance by Mira Sorvino,
whom this film apparently launched as a star in its day. I mean, in this larky
story she isn’t Meryl Streep–great, but she still gives a good performance—for
this, she did win an Oscar as Best Supporting Actress—and her part/performance
actually makes the film. In fact, if it wasn’t for this, the film would be a
whimsical item, with some developing fun with its Greek chorus, but overall a somewhat
flat addition to Allen’s body of work, which by 1995 over 25+ years was pretty
voluminous already.
I will start this review here,
and will follow this up with a fuller treatment within coming weeks. Since I now own the VHS tape I got from the library,
there’s no time constraint.
Allen in Eric Lax, Conversations with Woody Allen (Knopf,
2007), talks about having wanted to do a film with a Greek chorus (good grief,
plenty of us have all kinds of wishes—a certain kind of car, achieving a
certain level of art, or making more money—but Allen had that kind of wish!). He combined this with an itch he had to write
on a man’s discovering the mother of his adopted child…and presto, the basic
structure of this story was born. (Lax, pp. 49-50)
A relatively humdrum setup shows some standard Allen moves, but this
phase is short
The first 18 or so minutes of
the film is essentially setup. If this type of stuff weren’t limited to setup
but characterized the whole film, Aphrodite
would seem a pretty dreary “also-ran” exercise of Allen’s. We start with
Allen’s character Lenny Weinrib, a sports writer, with three other people at a Manhattan café table, and
they are talking typical Allen adult characters’ talk in such a setting. Lenny
had had a first wife, who hadn’t wanted a child, and he has a current
wife, Amanda (played by Helena Bonham Carter), and Amanda—present in the
conversation—hadn’t wanted a child…but now, in a welcome enough idea, she does, though the possibility of adoption also comes up….
By now, the cinematography by
Carlo Di Palma is familiar, and on the
dull side. Colors, as usual, “warmish” and abetted by the deep-focus approach,
seem a bit flat; and here, among the four characters at the round table in the
café, the second male of the two couples has his back to the camera almost the
entire time (which film students would say goes to the issue of blocking, and
how here, this male actor seems completely disserved by how the blocking
excludes him from being shown clearly within from the long take). Di Palma, as
usual, accommodates the shifting focus of the conversation with gentle pannings
or such of the camera, while by now Allen is all about master shots, not many
little close-ups to different characters’ points of view.
There are other scenes, including
an element of marital troubles that seem to precondition Lenny and Amanda’s
adopting a child (actually, the potential of an extramarital affair between Amanda and her boss at an art gallery runs through a fair amount of the film, independent of the adoption-related concerns) . They have trouble having sex at one point, though this seems a definite precondition for Lenny's wanting to find out about the identity of the birth mother. All the
familial-issue setup seems (at least sometimes) like warmed-over (or out-take
quality) types of situations from Husbands
and Wives. On first viewing of all this stuff, we can be generous enough in
allowing it; Allen’s familiar cityscape couples with their issues have a
certain charm (and all the more today, when we see this alternative to the
fantasy-and-Spandex films so prevalent today, we understand how, when Allen’s
screenplays and actors still get Oscar nods, this seems to be at least a sort
of Academy protest vote against the prevalence of “cotton candy for the mind”
that fill the cineplexes as much as a vote for
Allen’s talent/achievement).
Soon, the couple has a
delightful baby boy, adopted from a mother who had just given him up. Weinrib
and Amanda debate (sometimes amusingly) over names. There is a scene with gifts
accumulating at Christmas (my mistake; on third viewing, it seems a birthday party for the boy, Max).
The familial “dark
clouds on the horizon,” comprising the plotline of Amanda having some kind of
affair, not entirely unknown to Lenny, with her boss at the gallery, Jerry Bender (actor
Peter Weller), certainly motivates some of Lenny's actions, though it seems a little "heavy weather" compared to what, in much of the rest of the film, seems playful enough. This aspect, early on, seems almost tiresome—Allen seems to have
a giant “idea jar” in his office loaded with little scraps of paper, 90 percent
of which have to do with an extramarital affair.
But this all leads—inexorably,
or (alternatively) as a matter of fateful hubris, Allen would want to say
(which the presence of a commenting chorus helps convey)—to Weinrib’s becoming
set on finding out his son Max’s birth mother. This is because Max is so smart,
there must be something stellarly talented about the mother, or some such hypothesis.
And when Weinrib finally meets the mother, the film is full tilt into how much
fun it can be.
I will continue this review in
the future.
End note.
Actually, I got the VHS tape
free from a library in Morris County, N.J., that was discarding it and its
other VHS tapes—one little blessing of the massive cultural shift of moving on
from such previous givens as “your father’s digital technology.”
