Movie break: Woody, Stateside, does a high-tech Norman Lear show: Whatever Works (2009)

Evan Rachel Wood’s performance is the only real acting here, one saving grace to an otherwise also-ran film

Eighth in a series: Post-9/11 Blues, Internet-infected Brave New World: A revisiting of 2001-10 pop (and political) culture

Also fits this series:

“We’ll always have Woody”: A look at Woody Allen films

Subsections below:

As a character study, rather disappointing

The young-female element is more wackily amusing than potentially scandalous

Other aspects: New York locale, the issue of meaning, Clarkson’s light, Boris’s good night

For Allen fans, worth a look. For those casually interested in Allen, a possible disappointment. For Allen haters, red meat.

This was Woody Allen’s first film made in the U.S. after the four he’d done in Europe starting with Match Point (2005), which was filmed in summer 2004. (Whatever Works is also given financial help from the distribution/sales firm Wild Bunch, which helped with his previous two films.) WW is noted as based on, or derived from, a script he’d written in the 1970s (Videohound suggests this, but I also seem to recall hearing about that when it came out), and its jokes of a broad and rather uproarious sort are like his work of that time (though, as a whole, this script is second-rate compared to his best work of the time).

To a large extent WW is a culture-clash story, trading in part on the philosophic dichotomy between an atheistic, scientific New Yorker and a Southern family that had had fundamentalist religious sensibilities (this  is shucked off, for different reasons by the different members) and a cartoonish naivete. WW was derided, at least by some, as third-rate Woody when it came out, and Larry David’s part—which some took, I think, as a bald substitute for what would have been Allen’s part—seems like a concentrated version of Allenesque pessimism and smart-mouthing. But I found the film better than I might have expected—I laughed several times (as I didn’t do this with the previous Vicky Cristina Barcelona [2008])—and it doesn’t cause (at least for me) the wincing-or-forgiving-amusement spurred by occasional lapses into self-parody that Anything Else (2003) does. But it’s still a comedown within the string of films Allen has done since about 2001.

I think it could be considered a self-conscious/self-distilling work of Allen’s, not quite the self-parody of the 2003 film, but definitely best taken in by Allen fans, maybe worth a look (but risky) for casual Allen followers, and definitely evoking a loud raspberry from Allen haters.  (End note 1.)

As a character study, rather disappointing

I think the worst feature of this film is David’s part, which apparently marketing types would have felt would sell this film to young audiences (or they thought the presence of David would, if not the part). To me, his part is a static, noisemaking cardboard cutout.

David plays Boris Yelnikov [sp?], a self-failed (so to speak) physics professor, who didn’t quite get a Nobel Prize he was nominated for for his work in quantum mechanics. He now lives a sort of retiring, bohemian life in Manhattan, jawboning with friends at streetside cafes and teaching kids chess (and insulting them—none too subtly—if they didn’t meet his standards). There are regular remarks by various characters, including the credulous echoing by a young female, as if the man is a genius; but to me, the larger picture makes him look like a crackpot who incurs the “gracious decorating” of his dung-pile life with the flower of the assessment of “genius.”

As a whole, Boris doesn’t really entertain me (after the first watch); or I should say that his character “as a person” is a bore. Some of his acerbic remarks still elicit laughs after the first watching due to the relentless attack of David’s smart mouth, his sustained moxie, with the late-night-TV flavor of the shtick.

But aside from the comedy, what is this character supposed to be about? Self-absorption (not as if of Allen) that seems extreme even for an Allen film? Is he a variation on (not only Allen’s mechanism) the “last sane man”? To me, Boris is a bitter self-induced failure who might redeem himself at times with humor and interesting insights, but sometimes he sounds like a two-dimensional sort that is hackneyed even by late-night-TV standards. (A more mature Allen would have taken some of the same spiel and made the person into an obvious focus of satire. Is that, by the way, what Allen is doing here?)

As I suggested, David—who, as the solo figure pictured on the DVD, must have seemed a good marketing angle for this film, from his famed work on TV’s Curb Your Enthusiasm (where I believe he appeared on camera), and Seinfeld earlier (where he was co-writer behind the scenes).

It turns out that Allen’s post-2001 films sometimes seem to hearken back—whether intentionally, I don’t know—to some of his most popular older films, the way late Rolling Stones songs might recall songs from their 1968-72 height. So, for instance, Anything Else had quite a few echoes of Annie Hall (1977) (in a way that lovers of the older film might want to disaffiliate from it). Whatever Works seems to echo Manhattan (1979), but in a narrow and not entirely helpful way. (And as I hope to come to soon, Allen’s next, 2010 film seems to echo, a bit, Hannah and Her Sisters [1986].)

The thing that makes the beloved Manhattan perhaps most arresting in its story, especially for today’s viewers (not least those not enamored of Allen), is the relationship between Isaac Davis (Allen) and a 17-year-old student, Tracy (Mariel Hemingway). (See my review of Manhattan here for details.) Interestingly, among what makes Manhattan look thinner as a story today—while of course its photography and its detail-level reflection of concerns of its times mark it as a good cultural artifact of its era—is that Isaac Davis seems to learn a little something, as an “epiphany,” in what passes for his odyssey in the story (the character of Yale is another male there who “has to learn”); but this epiphany seems to amount to little more than, as Tracy tells him near the very end, he needs to trust people more. This is definitely a smaller story of self-discovery than Allen’s Alvy Singer undergoes in Annie Hall.

Well, Whatever Works seems to take this very small story idea—which seemed to thinly work in Manhattan—and run with it in 2009. Boris starts to get a little more health to his emotional life by taking up with—indeed, marrying—Melody; but with this coat-hanger of a story idea, the film is fleshed out with two-dimensional character depiction, sophomoric concepts, and humor that might tickle our funny bone in a pinch, but ultimately leaves us feeling that this was a 1970s story, second-rate by Allen standards, that should have stayed in his steamer trunk. For instance, in Manhattan, the philosophic look, in passing, at the dark wonders of the universe—amid which, per Allen, love is a tiny, hopeful flicker—that was related in the planetarium scene gives way to, in Whatever Works, Boris’s doled-out passing remarks that even cynical young crazies in their first year of college wouldn’t utter without eliciting rolling eyes from peers. (A more pointed exchange near the end of Manhattan, with Isaac upbraiding Yale about his needing to act with more honor, next to a skeleton of an ancient ape, also doesn’t have improved correlates in WW.)

That is, David delivers the character’s steady stream of pessimistic philosophic pronouncements, jaundiced social comments, insults (his use of cretin is pretty liberal), and the like in a way that seems like a willing parody Allen might do of his late-1970s characters’ less-nice moments (it also seems like a more earnestly embraced, and potentially tiresome, distillation of same). The net result is a hacking out of bilious comments like a nasty cat spewing a train of hairballs, the content of which not-rarely can make us laugh—sometimes despite ourselves—as we can enjoy at the hand of an opinion-monster who is the proverbial stopped clock that is right for a moment twice a day. (End note 2)

In the annals of creative literature, Boris may be helpfully compared to the character of Joy, who renamed herself Hulga, in the Flannery O’Connor story “Good Country People.” Hulga comes from a rural Southern family, and gotten (out of the local area, I believe) an advanced education (in philosophy), and now, partly crippled, makes the most of her potential for indicating a sort of intellectually arch viewpoint coupled with proto-self-pity with her artificial leg. This leads her not only to have an ugly new name but, I think consciously, to maximize the ugly sounds her artificial leg can make when she walks around the house.

The young-female element is more wackily amusing than potentially scandalous

In WW, ending up on Boris’s doorstep is a young female in a soiled school-logo coat, a Southern-raised runaway named Melody St. Ann Celestine (the name is about as smart, by today’s standards, as focusing on terms of debate, as the script does, like “secular humanism,” which hasn’t really been relevant since Jerry Falwell was riding high 30 years ago). Boris grudgingly takes her in. There are humorous clash-moments related to cultural background and to Boris’s supposed vaunted intelligence compared to her naïve simplicity. The two eventually get married. A year passes, as narrated, and more plot developments ensue, particularly when Melody’s parents turn up on her doorstep in a true coincidental style that is among the things that mark this script as a sort of episode of a Norman Lear show, just high-tech in a movie way.

It’s a measure of this situation that Evan Rachel Wood, as Melody, presents the only acting job worth watching here. It’s interesting seeing her almost seamlessly deliver a character that fits the premises of the story, as if she felt that good acting counted for Allen. Wood, like a mini–Meryl Streep, is notable in her emotional range (and, when apropos, accents) in Thirteen (2003) (where she first came to big notice in movies), and later works like The King of California (2007), Across the Universe (2007) (here she even sings), and The Wrestler (2008), among other films. Apropos of Whatever Works, Wood even commented at some point around 2009 that the film was “old-school” Allen, or such, and that she was surprised that, during production, Allen allowed her only to do a few takes, and she apparently concluded from watching the film that he was really going after a natural/artless sort of acting style.

Actually, she needn’t worry; I think her acting is fine here. Usually, the adequate performances Allen gets from actors are good enough; it’s the writing that really commands what is sought in his work, and no one actor need go to Meryl Streep lengths, usually, to bring home what is valuable in the story.

When you find yourself admiring, in Wood, the sheer acting effort being put into a part that Allen haters would say is the prime focus of what makes this film objectionable, then you know you have (as Allen has written it) a weird film. But I think people are missing the point if they feel that the May–December romance here is what centrally marks this film as a true stinker.

Wood manages—even with occasional stupid sex-related lines she has—to give her role enough of an artless sweetness that it tends to dispel some of the unseemliness that her position in the drama might have in the eyes of some. Lest you feel this is another Allen story that, quite hinkily, has a much-too-old-for-her man coupling with a much-too-young-for-him woman, I think what saves this film from that assessment is that the pairing is so ridiculous, because the comedy is broad enough and just wacky, that we are more taken up with the culture-clash stuff; and some of the jokes are resonant enough in their broad way that they tend to clear the air in this film of “tacky sexual-inadvisableness,” or however you want to phrase it.

Other aspects: New York locale, the issue of meaning, Clarkson’s light, Boris’s good night

The return to New York. This is a sort of return-to-New York for Allen that has him re-partnered with his old colleague Santo Loquasto for set design, and familiar street scenes—and even mini-scenes peppered with Allen’s favorite rooty-toot ragtime-type music, culled from his apparent Greenwich Village–derived records. As a result, the film has the potential of being seen as another gross self-parody (if not self-indulgence), on the order of Anything Else. But I don’t think it comes across that badly.

The theme of Allen’s “faith.” The question of Allen’s religious questions—yes, what I would call what others would dismiss as his tic-like atheism—is one feature of this film that leads me to group it with his following offering, You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger (2010). This latter film I am also viewing and am actually more eager to write on in some depth than I am on Whatever Works. Both films—actually, a lot of Allen’s work does this—address the theme of love coming grace-like into the life of someone who otherwise, especially due to advancing age, is dealing with the frightful prospect of the end of life, and/or the aspect of “meaninglessness and violence” in the universe (the sort of thing Boris, clangingly, remarks on). It is almost by coincidence that these films seem “of a piece” in doing this, not only because they were apparently written many years apart. Whatever Works is pretty sophomoric in how it handles this theme; the 2010 film, despite its also-ran qualities, is more subtle, judicious, and “for adults” than the former film, and how it is this way, I am eager to turn to. (Actually, if Allen is aiming to pillory fundamentalist types in WW, I think Boris’s stock pessimism sounds about as cartoonish, so you wonder whether the film had best be regarded as a satire of anyone who thinks in very dogmatic terms, whether affirming God or not.)

Other main performances. As another measure of Whatever Works, Patricia Clarkson turns up on Boris’s doorstep as Melody’s mom—effusive with the likes of ‘thank goodness, [she] has found her’—Clarkson who does a sensitive turn in Allen’s immediately previous film, Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008). Clarkson, of course, is almost hammy here, as the script requires, but still adds some amount of sophistication to her role.

When Ed Begley, Jr., finally appears as Melody’s fundamentalist dad, he is even more of a two-dimensional character. It’s typical of this film that before long at all, he is revealing that his issue regarding sex is that he’s really gay, and he reveals this to a man, also gay, in a New York bar. So the two will become a couple. (This wouldn’t be out of place in TV’s 2 Broke Girls.)

Clarkson, incidentally, who has a long career in indie pictures (as is her reputation, apparently), and who appeared in The Station Agent (2003; reviewed by me in early 2012 on this blog), is Sadie Burke (I think the name is) in All the King’s Men (2006), a film starring Sean Penn as an ambitious politician in Robert Penn Warren’s novel, modeled on Louisiana’s 1930s governor Huey Long. Interestingly, in a cast in the 2006 film that even has James Gandolfini as a Deep Southerner, Clarkson sounds the least as if from Louisiana (while other actors may be hamming it up a bit with the accents)—yet Louisiana is where she’s from in real life. I viewed King’s Men this summer and considered doing a review, but held off.

Boris “falls for” someone new. Boris finds true love when, for the second time in his life, he jumps out the window (the first time explains the stagy limp David gives him). He lands on a woman on the sidewalk below, who ends up taking a fancy to him, and, well…in a brief story-edited transition, he is with his new wife, and there is a homey New Year’s celebration at film’s end.

Presto—a note of hope at the end of a pessimism-drenched film.

##

Tasteful cinematography is by Harris Savides, another production worker new to Allen. He died in 2012, I find.

End note 1.

Depending on the level of sophistication on which one considers a film, some might dismiss WW as nihilistic trash—you know, along the lines of “Allen seems to say ‘whatever works’ is all right, hence if marrying someone half your age is your bag, go with it.” But to me this is roughly the same sort of unappreciative criticism as those make of John Lennon’s song “Whatever Gets You Through the Night” (1974), as if all that was about was embracing any old thing as if there are no values. Lennon’s song, from what he said in some interview, took off from some snippet of the exhortation of a preacher he saw once on TV (he was big on getting inspiration from the fizz and flash of TV); and given his solo work’s focus on issues of despair central to the individual, usually with an eye to authenticity in life, his song could be considered a look at dealing with late-night despair, though as it happens, he makes it into an ironically bright-sounding clarion call of sorts, with the rousing vocals including harmonies from Elton John. This means a mash-up of tones, of course, but it is not all simply an embrace of godless hedonism. Somewhat similarly, Allen’s Whatever Works—with the title phrase repeated a little too often in the script—could be considered to have a philosophy of stoic pragmatism, not totally-devoid-of-values narcissism.

End note 2.

By the way, I may sound, with this point, as if my hypothetical ID card that affirms I “live in the New York metropolitan area” should be revoked, but I can’t say much with precision about David in terms of what all he’s done, or how good he is; I’ve certainly read a fair amount about him and his two main shows, just mentioned. But I never watched (except for a snippet, I think) Curb Your Enthusiasm, and I only watched one episode of Seinfeld. Seeing him in this film, I can affirm he fits out the part of the sour-mouth/canny New Yorker well enough, and I can see how he fits the taste of today’s “hip-oisie” the way Allen did about 30-35 years ago, though Allen was younger then than David is now. But aside from this, I can’t say much more than that his acting chops here appeal, or not, based on whether you find his character amusing, which I can imagine swaths of the U.S. not doing.

Movie break (Summer Lite*): A portrait of two women being wobbly: Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008)

A smooth summer-romance tale eyes our rational side versus the charms and rocky road of our erotic side

Seventh in a series: Post-9/11 Blues, Internet-infected Brave New World: A revisiting of 2001-10 pop (and political) culture

Also fits this series:

“We’ll always have Woody”: A look at Woody Allen films

*The last entry in my “Summer Lite” series for this year.

Subsections below:

A fictional distribution-deal meeting

An initial quick summing

The especially Spanish side of the character constellation

Hall’s Vicky as a story linchpin and gauge of the film’s virtues

Cristina as more of a libertine

Clarkson’s Judy, and final notes

[Edits 9/13/14. Edits 9/15/14.]
.

If you followed my account of how Woody Allen lined up a producing deal (and distribution deal) for his drama Cassandra’s Dream (2007) (see this review-part, in the second subsection, “A project whose money almost wasn’t there”), you know this deal broke an impasse regarding CD, and also apparently opened up doors to him for distribution of future works. His three films through Whatever Works (2009), which followed Vicky Cristina Barcelona, would have a distribution deal through the French film-distribution/sales firm Wild Bunch.

Also, Whatever Works would be lined up with Sony Pictures Classics as that film’s distributor in the U.S. However the earlier (Wild Bunch) distribution deal lead to the later (Sony), Allen would be “sitting pretty” in being distributed by Sony Pictures Classics in the U.S. until today. Of course, one could argue that his films have tended to be more consistently commercial since about 2008.

I started watching Vicky Cristina Barcelona (hereafter, VCB) when I was still dealing with Cassandra’s Dream, the latter of which I was rather fond of. On first watching—and I saw VCB, as accidents would have it, in separated, partial sessions—I wasn’t that bowled over by it. On second watching—and often Allen films tend to grow on you with repeat viewings—I liked it better, but I definitely found it to be more shallow and casual than the preceding film. (On a level, this different quality is obvious, but I’ll explore further the deeper nature of this.)

Since I first wrote a version of the preceding paragraph, I’ve seen VCB about three and a half times, and I would say it is fine for a certain kind of mood/personality/audience in a way that Cassandra’s Dream almost seems to require the opposite mood/personality/audience. Once quickie measure would be to say that CD may best be watched if you had a cup of coffee first, and won’t be depressed by a tough look at troubled motivation; and VCB can be savored if you’re feeling the loosening effects of wine (assuming you like wine; I don’t, so much).

A fictional distribution-deal meeting

Not that the shallowness of VCB is all a bad thing. Sometimes we need a mere diversion. But VCB led me to imagine a long set of “desiderata” given to Allen in the sort of “general conception” meeting he might have had (not that this is realistic for him) with his new distribution/producing-money partners (Allen is present, in this imagined scene, with his longtime casting agent Juliet Taylor):

We’ll distribute Cassandra, no problem [says the head distribution honcho, in neat power suit, but seeming slightly as if holding his nose a bit at the prospect]. But next we want something sexier, lighter.

We want a day at the beach, a vacation [in a friendlier but firm voice, says the nicely-suited other guy with him]. We want a sunny look, a warm-climate location, people strolling in summer clothes. The big hook: two American girls in Spain for the summer, you know?

A smart one and a wild one [says the first]. We know you, you like philosophy. So one is the bookish sort. [Woody thinks, remembering his dog-eared copy of The Birth of Tragedy, The Apollonian one.] Keeps her head, or tries hard to, when the sex shit starts happening. She’s in Spain to work on her thesis [the honcho stifles a slight laugh, as if he’s just described a hopelessly quaint foreign-culture practice]. Looks like—you know, is really pretty with a nice smile and with the right photography, but looks like a cross between Shelley Duvall and Penny from Lost in Space.

[Juliet Taylor, on a laptop, has just Googled someone, shows her to Allen: Rebecca Hall. Allen gives Taylor the thumbs up.]

The other one is the nut. She follows immediately, genuinely intrigued, when a determined Lothario propositions them. [Woody: The Dionysian one.] Undeniably sexy. And blonde. Our deal has this playing on Spanish TV as one of several markets, so we want a blonde that will have the Latin guys howling at the moon. And full, sensual lips. She can utter now and then, “I don’t know what I want.” [Woody adds silently to the line: “But I know what I don’t want.”]

In terms of looks, give her a sort of unreal, platinum-blonde hair color.

[Allen has written on his yellow legal pad, “Scarlett. Advise on hair.” This time Taylor, looking at his note, gives him the thumbs up.]

And two Spanish-speaking stars. For the Lothario, Javier Bardem is perfect. Hot right now. Can do “in control, charming, not overbearing.” And Penélope Cruz. She’ll play a madwoman who can look great in a photo shoot but also tear it up with a hissy-cat, rattle-mouth blast of fury.

We’ll have some Spanish-speaking. You provide English subtitles, and we’ll switch the situation for the Spanish market. Spanish subtitles for the English talk, and remove the Spanish subtitles.

You can do a little of your philosophy—you know, “Life is full of pain,” “Love is transient,” but keep it limited. Toss it off when you can, with a tedious voiceover narrator. We want—we want this to be slathered with suntan lotion, a hazy vacation. Sex, sunny look, and with the hugger-mugger in a bedroom, like it’s a telenovela at times. Some mate-switching [Allen is thinking he’ll dive back into the story pools and atmospheres of A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy and Husbands and Wives]—and can you do a three-way? [This last said by Mr. Distribution rather low, as if with some hesitation/caution.] [Allen shrugs, nods.] I mean not graphic, but suggestive enough. [Woody thinks: A red-lit darkroom scene. And in another incident: Sex on a kitchen floor, with pot on stove about to boil over.]

We want sexy, sexy, don’t-think-a-lot, but not Jersey Shore stupid.

Can you deliver?

Woody delivers.

An initial quick summing

As you might expect, I didn’t like this film as much as (after I deciphered some of its talk) Cassandra’s Dream. But it undeniably has its charms and smart elements. According to its Wikipedia article, it won 25 out of 56 nominations for awards. Penélope Cruz won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar (which I more-or-less remember from when it happened), along with the BAFTA award for best supporting actress. In the Golden Globes area, Bardem, Hall, and Cruz were nominated for best actor, best actress, and best supporting actress respectively; none won, but the film won best film (comedy or musical) in those awards.

Incidentally, as a good measure of how I took this film, I didn’t laugh out loud much at all, but generally I found it charming and interesting. I think as a comedy it was on the subtle (and sometimes wan) side, whereas Whatever Works (2009), which in most ways is inferior work, made me laugh a lot more (and when I review the latter, we’ll see why). I think the best way to sum up VCB is to remember the old saying, “Life is tragic for those who think, and comic for those who feel.” Maybe for thinkers, VCB is charming entertainment but not apt to elicit guffaws; but for feelers, maybe they find it more laugh-out-loud funny.

It seems among the better offerings of Allen’s late period, but is by no means as great as his best older work. I found myself slotting it into interpretive categories, in terms of Allen’s oeuvre. It seems more similar, than to any of Allen’s other films, to Husbands and Wives (1992), in terms of its multi-level analysis of love and its “nosy look” at shifting erotic liaisons between people (and its narration element, which viewers might find, here, a little cumbersome at times); and to A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy (1982), in terms of its delving into a “love story” that also relates  to sunny conditions, natural (or “sensuously cultural”) surroundings, and a sort of almost-mythologizing way of looking at love. The latter aspect includes the film’s term-paper-like, often narrated talk along the lines of, for instance, (1) how Vicky is “grounded and realistic, and understood the beauty of commitment,” and valued her fiancé because he was decent and professionally well-off, while her best friend Cristina seems to go through love affairs like a kind of drifter, and as a sort of principle, she accepted “suffering as a result of deep passion.” (2) There is a reference to Cristina’s “tragic, romantic, free-thinking view of life,” while she regards American culture as puritanical and materialistic.

The story-ball really gets rolling when Juan Antonio Gonzalo (Barden), a bohemian and painter who is known among locals who schmooze in a reception to have had a messy divorce, approaches Vicky and Cristina, two twenty-somethings in Spain for a creative summer (Vicky is doing a thesis on Catalan cultural identity, in which she was initiated by her admiration for the architect Gaudi and for the painter Joan Miro), while they sit at their table. (By the way, they are hosted, and housed, in Spain by a friend of Cristina’s family’s, named Judy, played by Patricia Clarkson.)

Juan Antonio propositions them, in a suave, patient way—with Vicky, per character, reacting more or less along the lines of propriety and indignation, and Cristina eventually persuaded to take him up on his offer to fly them to Oviedo for a weekend of cultural appreciation and a sexual encounter. If all this sounds rather preposterous and/or pulpy, I think the proposition scene is one of the best-developed scenes in the film, and is truly amusing. But some might not like the often more-short-episode embracing of novelty that follows.

The especially Spanish side of the character constellation

Then, among the three main, young women of this story, there is Maria Elena, played by Cruz, who is some kind of artist whose swervings into episodes of acute mental illness have apparently led to her divorce from Juan Antonio and to her occasional hospitalization. She is the focus of other concise meditations by the narrator and in-film characters related to love, such as her view that the only truly romantic love is the unfulfilled kind. Maria Elena haunts Juan Antonio, and he refers to her as a kind of touchstone even while serenading these two Americans, while not trying to approach them merely as abstractions who primarily remind him of his ex-wife.

Maria Elena in person only arrives on the scene more than halfway through the film, and of course, Cruz playing her, speaking in both Spanish and English, cuts an impressive figure. Slight of build but poised enough when she speaks English, Cruz comes across as both distinctive in action and able to look sharp as in a photo shoot of her that (in VCB) takes place at one point: she seems here like something that an artist working for an ad agency would ink out, with hair, brows, and eyes all dark, as an “archetypal model-beautiful Latina.”

I think if you’ve read this far and you were wondering if you would like this film, you would have decided by now. The premises aside, the film is charming for its travelogue look at Spain (Barcelona, Oviedo, and Aviles, per the film’s Wikipedia article), with beautiful photography of locations both specific (Juan Antonio’s father’s country house, with an elderly Spanish man playing the father, a poet who refuses to publish his poems) and more tourist-destination-type (for instance, a majestic building designed by Gaudi). I forgot to mention that VCB reminds me a lot of Alexander Payne’s Sideways (2004), in terms of conveying a sense of sunny climes, lovelorn and love-besotted traipsing around, and the fun of drinking wine, etc., so it functions in Allen’s oeuvre somewhat as Sideways does for Payne’s: as a concession to the partiers, the summer animals, the beer-swilling frat boys and sorority girls, among us (and hence as a kind of cash cow for the producer/distributor types who want to balance that, balance-sheet-wise, against the more “acquired-taste” offerings among the auteur's other works).

Also, this film hinges, for its plot and some of its values, on what some may consider the stereotype of the Latin lover and the Latin wildwoman (or crazywoman); that said, Bardem and Cruz give their characters realistic dimensions and shadings, and I understand that Allen may have hewed to semi-stereotypes to make this film marketable to American audiences (who might use as “hooks” the more uncomplimentary ways Bardem’s and Cruz’s characters may be interpreted) and to Spanish-speaking audiences (for whom these characters would fit more acceptably into a sort of telenovela framework). In any event, what makes the film work is largely not a sense of stereotyped character; for Americans, what might make it a little stilted or clunky is that, aside from its occasionally trite-sounding narration, a sort of schematizing way it has of piecing out its sub-themes regarding love. (In this latter regard, it may be no more stultified or schematic than Cassandra’s Dream is in its cool, more unified way.)

Hall’s Vicky as a story linchpin and gauge of the film’s virtues

One of several measures for me of this film is how Rebecca Hall does. I think it’s interesting she was nominated (and didn’t win) as lead actress for one set of awards (Golden Globes), though Cruz won in her category for two others (Oscars and BAFTA). I think that overwhelmingly Hall has the bigger role here, in terms of her percentage of the story and having more emotional notes to hit. But when I first saw the film, I thought she was uncomfortable in her part, several times. I thought this was due more to how the role was written (and maybe due to hasty production) than to how much she could have gotten her acting chops around it. But as I saw the film again, I felt more that she articulated the role generally pretty well.

With her authoritative eyes and facial proportions that are not altogether classically beautiful but still quite attractive, Hall seems perfect for a serious, brainy grad student. In this regard, she seems, in Allen’s work, like an heir to Diane Keaton’s capacity when the latter worked in Allen’s orbit most as an intellectually centered sort, rather than more of a female stereotype of some sort. Hall also, in VCB, generally handles well the little emotional shifts that are required by the script’s precise (if occasionally pulpy) moments.

This said, I think where VCB is most apt to “come apart at the seams” is in Hall’s role as Vicky. And on repeated viewings, though overall I warmed to Hall’s filling the role, I still felt that Vicky was a puzzling sort. Granted, she holds the flag for Allen of rationality working valiantly to hold its own—and the sense of loyalty to a marriage in which a woman has marched well along into—in the face of the siren call of a sexual entreaty from “an undeniably tempting man.” What happens next follows the patterns we’ve seen in Allen elsewhere, the troubles of conscience, the jealousies or other senses of slight, and so on as a result of “the heart wanting what it wants” and thus its leading its owner to sexual affairs, dropping one mate for another (even if for one “crazy” night), etc., etc.

What I found less than believable was how Vicky would confess some of her confusions—i.e., thoughts related to being drawn to another male (due to a tryst) while having committed to another (fiancé Doug [Chris Messina])—to the likes of Juan Antonio or—even stranger to me—to another male, Ben, whom she’d just met as a fellow student who in one passing situation “hits on” her. This even while, quite clearly, she’s generally moving along—and indicating as much—into the long-term constraints, blessings, and expectations of marriage.

For someone so smart as Vicky—and not that a smart person can’t have stumbles along the strait-and-narrow path in this regard, as Allen often depicts—I found it “out of character” that she could seem like such a wobbly clod in this way--i.e., in her talking about her new developments to newly-men met. As an indication, a sample line of hers, roughly paraphrased, shows an Allenesque tangle: to Ben, of all passing liaisons, she remarks on how a new guy she met (Juan Antonio), who moved her so much, is now attracted to her best friend, even while she, Vicky, got married (by this point) to the guy she “wanted.” At another point, she says to Juan Antonio (before her Spain-side marriage to Doug, I think), “We [Juan Antonio and herself] had this irrational weekend and now I don’t know where I am.”

If Vicky was concerned (as her expressions of conscience suggest) about her divided loyalties and the like, why spell such things out to the man (especially the self-assured Juan Antonio, who in one scene even gives her slightly meddlesome feedback on her fiancé) who had caused the roiled waters? Why not just primly keep away from him? (Maybe I’m just old-fashioned.)

But of course, the story, for its aims of color and variety, needs her thoughts to be revealed—we would get this via an omniscient narrator relating thoughts in a print potboiler—but Allen has them come out as I just described. In short, this aspect didn’t sell me entirely on Vicky; it suggested her weakness, I thought.

Cristina as more of a libertine

As for Cristina (Scarlett Johansson)—whose claim to fame early in the film is that she had made a 12-minute film, which she directed and starred in—the way she’s a sort of seeker and artistic wanderer seemed both credible in its way and beside the point, the latter aspect in that Vicky’s odyssey is the more important one in this story. But as an element of the story, Cristina provides the more-empty variety that those seeking mere titillation would like more. (At one point she says she wants a more “counterintuitive” love, to which some of us might send her off with a wry, “Have fun!”)

She is the sort of person my mother would characteristically say “needs a good kick in the ass.”

I won’t talk much about the plot developments and scenes when Maria Elena is on hand, which overall are more—more than the more-cerebral Vicky stuff—obvious, slightly sensational, and not present for depth or after-film adult discussion over dinner or drinks. What ultimately ends up happening is that, first, there is the relatively “spiritual” premise to Cristina, Maria Elena, and Juan’s mutual involvement being about Juan Antonio’s and Marie Elena’s developing Cristina’s artistic side as a photographer. (Allen in both this film and in Whatever Works notes the superiority, on a level, of an old-fashioned film camera, not a digital camera—and here I am about as old-fashioned as he is.) Also, they become a sexual threesome, which includes a red-tinted darkroom scene as I was not merely joking about in the fictional planning meeting described above.

Some “mythical” overlay gets put on this relationship, such as when Maria Elena tells Cristina that she was the missing ingredient that her, Maria Elena’s, relationship with Juan Antonio lacked, and now it added a “tint” that “makes the picture beautiful” or such. This while, in their working lives, Cristina works with her photography, and Maria Elena, re-installed in Juan Antonio’s household, paints new paintings with abandon, as does he—all in a sort of grad-student’s (or college student’s) summer fever dream.

Then, at summer’s end, Cristina has to leave the Juan Antonio household, and go back home. The narrator has told us she started having thought supervene over feeling, and…. Her spirit was crying for leaving, to adapt a Led Zeppelin line. This turn leads Maria Elena to be furious; “Chronic dissatisfaction, that’s what you are,” she tells her. (With Cristina gone, the old fight-furies start between Juan Antonio and Maria Elena, and she dramatically leaves his house, again.)

In yet another novel twist, when Vicky is with Juan Antonio in yet another inadvisable move of hers, Maria Elena appears, in a crazy state again, and accidentally shoots Vicky, who has to explain this development (with a cover story) to Doug when the married couple is to return to the U.S.

I didn’t spoil this film for you. A lot of its pleasure is in beholding its developments in sunny scenes and with pleasant Spanish-guitar music. It’s not very conceptually demanding, unless you had to relate it to a term paper on love on deadline.

Clarkson’s Judy, and final notes

Patricia Clarkson adds some adult color as Judy, including in a scene where Vicky catches her having an adulterous kiss with a man not her husband, and then Judy emotionally confesses her momentary issue to Vicky. Judy will always remain with her husband, but on a level the old love has gone.

##

You can understand how Allen’s films get increasingly characterized by critics in recent years as being “his” type of work, as if he as a very adult-level writer can’t shut up, even as he approaches 80, and so yet another combination of his style of themes is out for our consideration, usually not so good as his old/best, but still providing a pleasure that so few noted films offer today. Maybe we can say that when Allen dies, the 1970s will finally be dead, and that will be a shame.

[Added 9/15/14: The cinematographer for VCB was Javier Aguirresarobe, and the European-based production company was Mediapro, which would work with Allen again.] 

What’s coming for fall 2014

In case you’re thinking it’s taking a while for me to get some new instances of meaty blog entries going here, believe me, it won’t be long. And one series (on some family themes) that I am working on will tend to do three things:

* put things in strong, intriguing terms;

* take things in a bit of a new direction; and

* hopefully round-up and round-out my ongoing trickling of themes in a way that will make my still-being-unfolded stories a little more focused, and not only serve my own personal-story needs but also be—at least in some passing way—relevant to some current events we all are talking about.

Subsections below:

A family series coming; and consideration of the personality of a lawyer

A lesser series on “the lesser ways of lawyers” was on my planning board already

A “man on the make” helps root relevance to my “lawyer type” series

Keeping the focus clear and realistic

A family series coming; and consideration of the personality of a lawyer

A series will start with a history of my father’s family (especially his parents, Karl and Gertrude Ludwig) and move in the direction of my talking about Alan L., my most provocative roommate ever (the linking of these two sets, family and Alan, is fairly coincidental on one level and, on another level, offers quite a stark juxtaposition, in terms of values). The latter subtopic of Alan, as it happens, will also relate to the 30-year reunion planned for this month at my college, GWU—and the Alan aspect will also touch on the following thematic ground.

I want to look at bit—if we were to probe empirically and with hearty curiosity and some bafflement—at the sort of personality that makes a lawyer. Now, we can probably all agree that there are all kinds of personalities among lawyers; but when you’re young and in college, some of your peers that are dead-set on becoming lawyers may be controversial among peers, or arouse strong reactions among them; and I think they are among a certain type that ends up going into the law field: sure of themselves and their sense of right (or, specifically relevant to law, of “justice”), and also—rather ironically—seemingly rather limited in their ability (whether by capacity or, I think more often, simple willingness) to really learn about a wide range of things in the world, whether the highly various and subtle aspects of human personality, or a lot of how the business world (especially the small-scale type) operates, whether this latter is borderline-dishonest or not, or whether—especially—it is about the sheer prodigiousness and pain of trying to scrape up a living out of nothing, which lawyers with their enormous fees, their being helpfully buttressed by a “legal-system infrastructure,” and their personal sense of entitlement seem as ignorant about, and indifferent to, as can possibly be.

Alan L. was one example of a “young lawyer-diamond-in-the-rough” personality, I think; but interestingly, there was another person I later lived with, a housemate actually, Dean “Wrigley” (the surname is a pseudonym), who was a difficult personality for different reasons, and who was in law school when I lived in a house with him and two other housemates. (To clarify: Alan and I were roommates at GWU for three semesters, from fall 1980 to fall 1981; Dean and I were housemates in Arlington, Virginia, from May 1984 through February 1986.)

Dean was notorious in his law school (that at GWU, which law school at the time was called the National Law Center, and now is called something like the George Washington University School of Law) for being a quirky sort of personality (the notoriety was not only among students but with at least one professor). And his ways tended to make people closely involved with him to, among other things, question whether he should really become a lawyer. To put it another way: A.V., another housemate of mine in the same milieu, who had a critical view of Wrigley from a sort of warmhearted religious perspective (and A.V. and I wrote songs together, in off-hours, when I was still apt to write music with my guitar), says that since he himself (A.V.) had become a lawyer—he and Wrigley were in the same law class at GWU—he occasionally encounters, in his professional peregrinations, the kind of lawyer he calls a “Wrigley.” Because Dean had pause-giving traits you could find in others.

In a way, it makes sense for me—when it comes to criticizing personality types among lawyers, and when it comes to recounting anecdotes and general lessons from my experience—to focus on Wrigley more than on Alan L., because—for one thing—it could be said Wrigley was definitely more pathological than Alan L. But as it happens, Alan L. will be a fond focus for me, and—as I think seems an OK plan for now—I will draw some implications about lawyer personalities from Alan (as long as I have entries focusing on him), and—when I can, and as I can do tastefully and in the right context, and without much conceptual difficulty—I will talk about Wrigley (who, as it happened, didn’t quite bother me as he did his law-school peers).

A lesser series on “the lesser ways of lawyers” was on my planning board already

All this being said, I don’t want to imply, or plot out for myself, a lot of blog talk about “lawyers as personalities” as if I know a lot about the legal field. Truth is, I think I know a fair amount of legal stuff, but this is as a layperson, and as among a lot of practical and pragmatic bits and pieces, in a very catch-as-catch-can way, not at all in a schooled way. (I have represented myself legally, not that I was trying to prove anything in a “wiseass” way but simply because of limited money, on three levels: local, state, and federal.) (And meanwhile, I still think one of the best career decisions I ever made was not to go to law school.)

In fact, I thought of starting pretty soon an occasional series, but in the form of “sidebar comments” that are appended to more-normal blog entries, under the banner of “Off the Scales: A comment series on excesses in the U.S. legal profession,” which would comprise, clearly, comments from a layperson, on various issues either from my own experience or from things I’ve seen in the news. I can try to make this stuff as incisive as I can and entertaining. Meanwhile—partly for the reason that I don’t want it to seem as if it’s from someone actually licensed to practice in the legal field—I would limit it to being “sidebar” stuff.

So, I will have entries coming related to family themes and an old roommate, and on topics related to the legal field as witnessed by a layperson. And this isn’t all I plan to write on. But there is one relevant reason I want to focus on legal stuff, and especially the personality of the lawyer—as “limited and precious” as that latter area might be, coming from me—as I move along with my blog work.

A “man on the make” helps root relevance to my “lawyer type” series

Chris Christie is increasingly making big footsteps in the news, and if you live in New Jersey and read the main state newspaper (The Star-Ledger) that covers his doings, you realize there is an increasing drumbeat (not that everyone in the media is enthusiastic about this; far from it) in the direction of his running for president. I have held off saying a lot about him here (except in such an entry as here), because so many other people, with more professionally buttressed and more incisive means to measure him, have covered him resonantly in the media.

I also realize that my talking much about him might be taken as “me speaking as a Democrat,” which I realize is likely to shade the view of some because of my series of entries on local Democratic activities last year, starting with this. But I don’t want to seem as if, in talking about Christie this season, I would be merely taking pot shots as a Democrat.

My focus on Christie would be a little more fundamental. When I see him doing his thing in the public eye in recent months, I think to myself (with some guardedness about wanting to go too far with this), “I know this type….” He’s a little younger than I, and there are some things about his personality style—which can be grating in ways—that cohere with the specifically “lawyer types” I’ve been witness to over the past 30 or so years. (And let us be clear: the types of personalities I am talking about are such as are seen among practicing lawyers, not law professors. I would hope that people who follow my blogs know the large and important difference between these two professional categories.)

What is it about such a person, besides sheer ego, that makes him want to become president? This, of course, is a big question, with a big answer (and variable in relation to different types—because such a person isn’t stamped from the same general mold). I would not aim to have a big or final answer. Nor would I want to cast such doubts on Mr. Christie himself—whether or not these doubts seem “merely another distant, quaint county heard from”—as to hinder his ability to run for president (at least, not yet).

But people could well wonder, What is it about such a personality that allows him to reach for the stars and run for president? (Especially when, as some critics might say, one particular such fellow’s track record as a state governor doesn’t offer a lot of positive to run on, not least considering the second downgrade in bond-rating for his state by Fitch [I think it is] this year.)

Keeping the focus clear and realistic

Some of Christie I saw in Dean Wrigley, I think. And some of Christie was in Alan L. I do not hope to be definitive about any of these people in discussion about them. But I am interested in making some observations that resonate, that elicit further thought and discussion.

Because for some onlookers, the idea that such people could run for president—even be elected as such—could be regarded as about as likely as having elephants fly. And the really scary thing is, sometimes these elephants really do end up flying, and it takes a lot of other people—supporters—believing in them and working for them to make it happen, despite lots of factual matters (and legally buttressed suspicions) that may be “in the record” that would seem to argue against this. (For one thing, could such a hale fellow have the “right stuff” to stand up to—and not merely with braggadocio and a puffed chest—an overseas, lizard-eyed, military-employing power monger?)

What about these “presidential types” allows others to believe in them?