A visually stylistic treat, but
with a tired script
In a sub-series: Backtracking thru the Woodland
Fifteenth in a series: Post–Soviet
Union Adventure, Days of Clintons Past: A
recollection of cultural ephemera of the 1990s*
[*Note: Slight quibble: This
film was released right around the time of the dissolution of the S.U.]
It [making Shadows and Fog] fulfilled that desire that keeps me working, that
keeps me in the film business. I do all my films for my own personal reasons,
and I hope that people will like them and I’m always gratified when I hear they
do. But if they don’t, there’s nothing I can do about that[,] because I don’t
set out to make them for approval—I like approval, but I don’t make them for
approval.
—Woody Allen, in Eric Lax, Conversations with Woody Allen (Knopf,
2007), p. 127 (speaking in February
2006)
Subsections below:
A story of intrigue and social imposition comes with a sort of ominous
tone; an all-star cast is grafted to this
Two plotlines stretch a story beyond mere portentous groping through
dark streets
The assorted-candy actor appearances mean a roster helps describe the
film
Other character actors add to the stew
How serious need Allen have been here? Problems of varying the artistic
seriousness vis-à-vis the real-world correlates
[Edit 3/12/15. Edits 3/19/15.]
This film is worth a look for
true fans of Woody Allen, but it has serious problems on a number of levels. It
is most interesting visually; in
fact, Allen’s longtime cinematographer by that point, Carlo Di Palma, won an award in Italy for his camerawork here
(Lax, p. 127). And, finding it
visually tasty even on second viewing, I would almost say it’s worth putting
on—on a desultory Saturday afternoon, maybe—with the sound off, just to savor
the unfolding visuals. But then you might wonder, what story goes with the
pictures to let them make more sense? And you put the sound on, and are
disappointed, especially if your taste for Allen is limited.
This film is noted as his
tribute to German Expressionists of the 1920s and ’30s, such as silent-film
director F. W. Murnau (his most famous
film is Nosferatu [1924]). The
Wikipedia article on Shadows and Fog also suggests it’s a tribute to the
world-class writer Franz Kafka; but having
cut my teeth on Kafka as among the first adult literature I savored as a
17-year-old, I would say this: (1) Allen is the only mainstream
director/writer/comedy expert who could (or even would have wanted to) pull off
some kind of adept film tribute to
Kafka, but (2) the problem with Shadows
and Fog is, with Allen’s following what was fairly much a formula for him
in those days (when he worked amicably enough with Orion Studios), his version
here of Kafka is so slight and watered-down that it almost seems not worth it
for him to have done.
That is, his character Max
Kleinman—some kind of servile, status-conscious functionary at a local business
in what seems a rather cloistered, grim, riverside, stony old town in
Mitteleuropa—is descended on one foggy night by a group of vigilantes (who are
local townsmen) who are on the trail of a serial strangler. (The police are no
longer effective in the case, apparently.) They want Kleinman’s participation,
and for him to be part of the unspecified “plan”….
But before long, Kleinman is
wandering alone around the town, occasionally visiting others, not sure of what
the “plan” is or what his role in it is, and feeling eminently unsuited for (or
un-warm to) his role. Here, Allen is doing the kind of comically excuse-making,
nervous nebbish that he could do in his sleep. For us Allen fans, his nebbish
usually isn’t hard to take, but there is not much of a story here to go with it.
A story of intrigue and social imposition comes with a sort of ominous
tone; an all-star cast is grafted to this
His Kleinman’s being roped into
the demanding task of finding a serial killer—who, of course, could also arbitrarily
come after him—has (arguably) echoes
of Kafka’s The Trial, with its
renowned premise of a social process snaring someone in as controlling a manner
as it is mysterious and (almost) irrational. Also, maybe this film has a bit of
Kafka’s short story “The Metamorphosis” with its parable-like narrative of
profound, debilitating transformation.
But Shadows and Fog is fairly weak Kafka—because, in a way, no one does
Kafka like Kafka, and more to the point, Kafkaesque stories have a grimmer
point to make than it seems this
story’s ambition to make, apart from unspooling some of Allen’s pet remarks
about love, death, and the like. (If one were to reduce what is peculiarly
Kafka to an almost logical proposition, it is, “You are handled as if you have
no rights whatever, or as if you don’t deserve to have rights.”)
More shallowly, this film seems
in good part, in its peripatetic story, not just a chance to get in some nice,
horror-ready visuals (which are its highlight), but to have a ton of actors briefly
turn up in bit parts. In fact, this film seems like an early example of Allen’s
films (1994-2000) under producer Jean Doumanian,
where the point seemed to be, more often than not, to fit in as many
famous-name actors as possible, almost as if to cover up a weak story.
Also, this film contains many
Allen lines or concepts—arrayed almost like confetti in this script—that sum
his philosophy about various aspects of life (which we know is mostly quite
pessimistic). These lines we will recognize very well after having viewed (as I have, anyway) most of his decades of films
for the past year. If we didn’t love him when he’s at his best, in viewing Shadows we might burst out in guffaws at
how many of these lines, posturing here, fall like deadwood in this film.
To put it differently: These
sorts of lines, while we can have fun picking them out as if in a game, here
sound like inscriptions for Chinese fortune cookies that were written by
someone in a bad mood.
Two plotlines stretch a story beyond mere portentous groping through
dark streets
Shadows and Fog, in an Allen tradition, braids two plotlines (which
are here rather loose and circumstantial), including two (roughly speaking)
“constellations” of people: Kleinman and his more button-down, European-burgher
world; and the motley microcosm of a traveling circus, in which the most focus
is on a sword swallower named Irmy, played by Allen’s 1982-92 standby, Mia Farrow. Kleinman and Irmy will eventually
wander the streets together.
The circus subplot. Irmy
is initially paired with a steady significant other named Paul (John Malkovich, looking young), who performs in the
circus as a clown (most recently, he had trouble getting laughs from the crowd).
Irmy and Paul have a (not entirely fatal) relationship problem, and part of
their problem is the unresolved question of when to have children. Paul opines
at one point something Allenesque (which he presents in mildly debating style,
not necessarily as a defiant position) to the effect that a family is death to
the artist.
(Allen’s production team’s work
at creating a murky atmosphere here is very good. For one thing, the sound
editing is tasteful enough that, in the first circus sequence, you can hear
peepers making noise in the background [peepers are young frogs that live in
wetlands or swamps, and usually make their noise in the spring]. Meanwhile, you
tend not to ask yourself: where, exactly, is this circus, which seems so close
to a town that seems rather like Prague?)
After Paul’s affair with another
circus performer is discovered by Irmy, for a time Irmy wanders through the
film alone similarly to Allen’s Kleinman. Irmy has her own little odyssey,
including a dalliance, at a brothel where she is taken in for shelter; her
horizon-widening dalliance is with an arrogant college student, Jack (John
Cusack [URL 1; from now on, numerous links to stars’ names will be in a numbered
end-note format]). Jack seems to have the moral-boundary-testing, Dostoyevskian
inclinations of Allen’s lead character Chris for his later Match Point (2005).
The sex-themed plot eddies.
Later in Shadows, with rather forced
Allenesque irony, Paul and Jack, both in desultory wandering mode, run into
each other at a bar; and Jack reveals to Paul (without Paul’s indicating he
knows who Jack is talking about) that he, Jack, had had sex with Irmy that was
unusually fulfilling to her. (IMO, the brothel and Jack components of the film
are among the most expendable; Allen has written on sex and its complications
many times before [and also after], and actually in arguably boring ways that
are better than seen here.)
As it happens, there are two specifically
brothel-set scenes (they are the only place we see, for example, Jodie Foster
[URL 2], on whom more below); and even the first, introductory one of these
scenes—with an expected-fun situation of women talking confidentially in
earthy, hearty ways—wears thin on subsequent viewings, rather fast.
Irmy and Kleinman’s temporary
partnership. As I hinted, the two of Irmy and Kleinman, in their
peregrinations in the dark night streets, become allied and walk together for a
time (you would be right to imagine that Allen and Farrow work up a decent
enough chemistry here, as was inevitable in 1991 after their now-decade-long
partnership in films; as it happens, this was the next-to-last film Farrow performed
in with Allen). Still later, Irmy parts amicably with Kleinman and reconciles
with Malkovich’s Paul; her and Paul’s rapprochement is inspired and sealed by an
orphaned infant they find on the street that Irmy impels herself and Paul to adopt,
informally, their own.
Kleinman finds a new career home.
As it happens, Allen’s Kleinman, whom we think might be done in by the serial
strangler (who, as indications online of this film will readily say, stands for
anthropomorphosized Death), is ultimately able to evade/foil him in the fanciful
environment of the circus. He has aid from a magician, Armstad (?; it also
sounds like Olmsted, and the Wikipedia article spells it Armstead), played by
Kenneth Mars [URL 3] (died 2011), who here is using something of the same Germanic-plus-cerebral-infarct
accent as that of the wildly comical inspector (with the half-dysfunctional
artificial arm) in Young Frankenstein
(1974). If that sounds as if Shadows
has collapsed into complete camp, Mars’ shtick actually works fairly well here,
and it’s pleasant to see Mars doing his old-time thing again.
(At one point, Mars in his
lilting Germanic voice says to Kleinman, “Sooner or later we must put on the
grey hat of compromise!”—one of Allen’s better figures of speech, and Allen
adapts it, to better effect, in the subsequent Husbands and Wives [1992].)
After being somewhat under Mars/Armstad’s
wing, and realizing his life is completely in the tank, Kleinman decides to
join the circus to practice magic, which he has admitted is a little
sideline/hobby of his.
The assorted-candy actor appearances mean a roster helps describe the
film
So, amid this plotline and the
various visually tempting scenes we enter, among personages we have, not
necessarily in the order in which they appear:
* Madonna [URL 4]—yes, the
veteran music star—plays the circus performer with whom Malkovich/Paul, early
on, has a temporary dalliance. (Madonna is OK
here. If you remember, as was loudly enough said when she made her movie debut
in Desperately Seeking Susan [1985],
she is not an actor; she reads lines,
doesn’t act them; but still, that
works well enough here.)
* Donald Pleasance [URL 5] (died
1995), a sturdy British veteran of horror (and other) films—as the voice of
wary Commonwealth rationality among dark, threatening doings—has a couple short
but memorable scenes as some kind of man of science; he is referred to in the
film as a “doctor,” but I thought at first he was a coroner. He is eventually killed
by the strangler, in a sort of Frankenstein
moment.
* Lily Tomlin [URL 6], Kathy
Bates [URL 7] (looking younger than today’s seasoned Earth mother), Jodie
Foster (!!; this was the same year she appeared in Jonathan Demme’s renowned The Silence of the Lambs [1991]), and Anne
Lange [URL 8] are on hand as prostitutes in a bordello of sorts. Tomlin first
encounters Irmy on the street, and Tomlin kindly brings her to the bordello. A
bit later, Allen rigs up a situation where the camera is roving around the
table while the various “working girls” are chatting about a range of things
(Foster opines at one point that the love that lasts the longest is unrequited
love, an Allen type of line that is less dreary in one or more of his other
films where it appears). This roving-camera deal is similar to the famous
restaurant scene in Hannah and Her
Sisters (1986), where the three sisters, about two-thirds of the way
through the film, are talking, and Barbara Hershey’s character pauses with
affected conscience…. But this roving-camera thing in Shadows is both clumsily done technically and not apt to do much to
improve a tiredly-written scene.
In the bordello, Irmy is
somewhat like a naif “lined up for an awakening,” rather like Janice in The Rocky Horror Picture Show, as brought
to the doorstep of a possible new, mind-changing area of the world and life.
Eventually a set of men come into the bordello, almost as if its MO, for
maximum efficiency, is to have the couplings operate all at once, like some
kind of orgy (but with couples in separate rooms, one would assume). Among the
arriving johns is (no pun intended) John Cusack, as Jack, who takes a fancy to Irmy,
and he eventually persuades her to bed with him for $700 (he has to work his
way up to the price; she is understandably shy about doing prostitution). This
money then becomes something of a Hitchcockian Macguffin for Allen to wind into
some later plot details.
(Another Macguffin is a
cordial-drink glass Allen swipes from a police station, which can be mistakenly
used as “evidence” that he, and not the serial killer, killed Donald
Pleasance’s doctor….)
* Jack—along with some of the
prostitutes—actually gets the chance to deliver some of the more banal lines in
this film, as I hinted earlier. In the scene I mentioned where Paul and Jack
cross paths in a bar, one of Cusack’s lines is about the way he and Irmy had a
wonderful time, and that evidently Jack serviced Irmy in a way that her “clown”
of a boyfriend apparently hadn’t been, which of course leads to the comic point
where Paul recognizes which female Jack is talking about. Then when Jack
observes that after their fling, he had no more urge for her, and this showed
that their (more exactly, his) passion was an example of lust more than love. (This
reading is not the exact words, but Cusack’s formulation is an Allen
throwaway—I think its earliest instance, or a derivation, is in A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy [1982],
and the cumulation of Allen’s characters’ throughout several films dropping
this general line means, for me, it grows in being tiring each time I hear it.)
In this same scene, before the
recognition of who did what with Irmy, Paul remarks that women are “All we’ll
ever know of heaven,” which is something of a paraphrase of a line from, I
think, Albert Camus, which Allen also alludes to more explicitly in, I think, Anything Else (2003), and/or some other
of his films. Without missing a beat in Shadows,
Cusack/Jack takes the banality here a little further with, “And all we need
know of hell.” (We in the audience shift awkwardly in our seat, maybe.)
Cusack/Jack further seems to
parodize Allen when, presumably as a “thoughtful student,” he remarks, apropos
of his earlier comment “There’s no point to anything,” “Somehow my blood always
said ‘Live, live.’ And I always listened to my blood.” Allen himself makes roughly
the same point, in a real-life interview, in Lax p. 124 (in February 2006)
regarding Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989) and/or Match Point. While this may be a decent enough philosophic point
offered in the right context with the right tone, here it sounds like a rather
fatuous college student dribbling pessimism that is not borne out by his
experience, who could be advised, “With all due respect, I think maybe you
could use a stop at the student mental-health center.”
Other character actors add to the stew
* Josef Sommer [URL 9], who
plays the heavy (the corrupt police director) in Witness (1985), is on hand here as a priest who is only too willing
to take some of the $700 that Irmy has elected to give away to charity.
So many other actors turn up,
often half in the shadows, that you would barely notice them.
* Fred Gwynne [URL 10] (died
1993), a couple years from his tasty turn as the judge in My Cousin Vinny (1993), is one of the burghers on the street (or in
a doorway) confronting Kleinman.
* David Ogden Stiers [URL 11] is
briefly on hand in an early scene, but at least he’s given the benefit of a
full, sharp focus on his distinctive face. And he delivers his limited lines
with enough portentousness to complement Allen’s film—which film maybe, during
production, Ogden Stiers felt (as might have Allen) was a bit of a burlesque as
well as a good-faith homage.
* Wallace Shawn [URL 12] (why
not? He was free one day during production) makes an equally fleeting, and
similarly situated, appearance. Here, his lines are so few—and unmemorable—that
he adds to what seems his truly fun reputation among Allen’s films: we might
not remember what spelled-out specifics there were to his character or his part
of the given plot, but we remember his being in a given Allen film (Manhattan, The Curse of the Jade Scorpion,
Melinda and Melinda) by virtue of his crumpled Cabbage Patch Kid face and
collegial speaking tone. “Oh, yeah, Wallace Shawn was in that film. I don’t
know what he did, but he was there, and livened his scene up!”
* Philip Bosco [URL 13], who had
been in Allen’s estimable Another Woman
(1988), is here as Mr. Paulsen, who is Kleinman’s boss, whom Kleinman finds
acts like a peeping tom on the street.
* Julie Kavner [URL 14], a help
to Allen in several films (including Hannah
and Her Sisters [1986] and Radio Days
[1987]) appears in a brief sequence, in her home, as Alma, a woman Allen has
spurned (here’s another dusty Allen joke: the day Kleinman and Alma were to get
married, Kleinman took an interest in—had an affair with, in a closet—Alma’s
sister at the last minute, while Alma was waiting at the altar). Kavner
delivers the juice in giving Kleinman a good tongue-lashing as she chases him
out of her home, not giving him the quarter he seeks. This works well enough for
the film as farce, but it seems like the kind of scene Allen and Kavner could
do in their sleep. (It also seems like an old, second-rate radio skit.)
##
A lot of this stuff—for the
average viewer, not an Allenophile—is like some entertainment you had at the
Nevele hotel way back when, when Lainie Kazan was the headliner in the
supper-club venue; and you know you saw her, and you had fun, but you really
can’t remember much of what was in the show afterward. And you didn’t even have
that much to drink, either.
Which brings up….
How serious need Allen have been here? Problems of varying the artistic
seriousness vis-à-vis the real-world correlates
Near the film’s end, Mars’
hamming around with his accent really seems to put into perspective what this
film should be taken as, just a spell of goofing around, rather than anything
too serious; and I think most of the actors knew Shadows was no serious dish of super-heavy themes. And yet this
fact is such that it actually puts into relief something else about the film
that is, perhaps, inadvisable: specifically, as exampled in a sequence where
something possibly “heavier than usual is going on,” a sort of thing that
reflects an artistic problem that can dog Allen through a wider array of his
works.
In the example, Kleinman happens
upon a scene where a family, by name Mintz, is being rounded up rather
ominously; someone explains they are being handled as “undesirables.” Kleinman
responds anxiously, in the family’s defense, by saying that the father does “quality
circumcisions—I’ve seen his work!”
One suspects that the situation
of “undesirables” is something of an allusion to Nazi-style rounding up of Jews
(and/or, to stretch a historical reference, pogroms against Jews in Russia), though
the situation here, as to specifics, is quite watered down by comparison. Now,
of course, there are historical circumstances of 1991 that qualify what
criticism can be made here: Orion Pictures may, in general, have wanted Allen
to stay away from too-heavy subjects; and the times were (un-gravely) such
that, as the film was being made, the Soviet Union hadn’t even dissolved yet
(while the charged-but-short Persian Gulf war had happened early in the year),
never mind that what would happen in the Balkans was a few years off (in the
mid-1990s). And never mind that what would happen on September 11, 2001 was a
decade off; or today, the festering mess in the Ukraine
or in the Middle East….
Allen has not been one to shy
from acknowledging, even lamenting, the colder, harder realities of twentieth-century
politics and history in his films. For instance, in Annie Hall (1977) his character Alvy takes Annie to showings of the
film The Sorrow and the Pity (which
is not specifically about the Holocaust); and in Manhattan (1979), Allen’s character Isaac grittily enthuses about
wanting to go after some neo-Nazis demonstrating locally, with bricks and bats,
which he notes are more effective than written satire about the same in The New York Times.
(Sidebar:
Speaking of The New York Times, did
you see that obituary of a law professor named Monroe Freedman, in the March 4,
2015, issue [p. A19]? One thing that intrigued me about Freedman’s provocative
approach to the area of practicing-lawyer ethics, in which he apparently did
pioneering work, is that he held that a lawyer should be so dedicated to the
defense of a criminal defendant that Freedman would even condone the lawyer’s
allowing the defendant’s lying on the stand: “Though lawyers should advise
clients not to commit perjury, Professor Freedman wrote, if it became clear
that the client was going to [lie] anyway—or already had—the lawyer’s
overriding obligation was to remain silent.” Really? Once again, it seems, in
the U.S., criminal defendants can have more rights in the U.S. than other citizens
[including law-abiding], such as those swept up as defendants in a frivolous
civil lawsuit, in which perjury was committed [I speak from personal experience
on this latter]. I was reminded, by this idea of Freedman’s, of an epigraph in
Robert Conquest’s The Great Terror: A Reassessment
[Oxford Univ. Press, 1990], on p. 71: “ ‘In what did his fascism show
itself?’ ‘His fascism showed itself when he said that in a situation like the
present we must resort to the use of every possible means.’ ” [typographical format
slightly changed; credited by Conquest as an exchange between Andrey Vyshinsky,
prosecuting attorney in the Stalinist show trials, and Grigori Zinoviev, one of
the defendants, at the August 1936 trial])
Of course, post–World War II
American literature, and other verbal art, has gone in all sorts of directions,
with varying levels of edifying effects, on issues like the Holocaust, and the
social instability in Europe than preceded it.
Joseph Heller has been commonly enough characterized as influenced by Kafka in Catch-22, in his depiction (in some
ways, fancifully to make a moral point, about 55 years ago) of a U.S. Army that
not only can do egregiously clumsy or bad-faith jobs in the handling of bombing
tasks (cf. the Vietnam War), but is rife with status lust and petty office
politics that echoed, per Heller’s authorial intentions, the white-collar
culture of the 1950s U.S. (That is, his novel suggested, creatively of course,
that petty white-collar office politics of the 1950s type was already rampant
within the wartime Army in the mid-1940s.) Late in the novel, things get more
Kafkaesque as frivolous-seeming investigations (and worse) are done of the exquisitely
sincere chaplain and others, deliberately commenting on McCarthyist abuses
going on in the early 1950s.
By the time I was in college in
the early 1980s, it was easy enough to appreciate Kafka as a seminal writer
whose work, in its peculiarity, somehow cognized the worst perversions of
political life in the twentieth century. Nevertheless, a certain type of comedy
that might derive from Kafka, even while skewing to the lighter side, was well
understood to not merely make
unjustified light of Kafka in his darker implications. In fact, it was honoring
of Kafka if one could grumble in a more banal situation such as to say, “That
workplace is like some Kafkaesque nightmare. Or like the North Korean
government.” Listeners need not quibble with what you knew of Kafka; they might
only question whether you were exaggerating a bit in comparing the workplace to
such dark literary conceptualization. (Or, on the other hand, they might say
you didn’t go far enough.)
For Allen, the problem hasn’t
been that people wouldn’t have known what Kafka was about (this may have been
truer of 1991 than today, where young people might think “Kafka” was the name
of some fantasy creature, with purple hands and yellow horns), or what the idea
of rounding up of “undesirables” might usually connote (as in a history class).
It’s that Allen’s joke might not work because it’s either (1) being too
lukewarm a joke or (2) not going far enough to depict the darker possibilities
of what he’s talking about, in this case the understated “rounding up of
undesirables.”
In sum, is this vignette of Allen’s (about the Mintzes) some kind of
Mitteleuropa nightmare (not un-germane to a Kafkaesque story) that should be
looked at as more serious than Allen seems to be making it? Or, if it’s not
meant to be so serious, what does Allen mean by bringing up such a thing here,
at all? Is Shadows and Fog merely
about a serial strangler (who artistically stands for Death), or also about
social instability and, possibly, ominous war clouds? How much is it merely a “religious” story about death, versus (also) a
political story?
In short, Allen in fashioning a
generally light comedy with Shadows
may have made this film trivial, or rather starkly flawed, by having it import
cultural baggage without doing more to open it up and be more healthily solemn
about what’s in it. The film on its surface seems to deal with dark societal
developments in a Mitteleuropa swathed in forboding, when actually the story is
closer to a tough, foggy night in the West Village.
##
A similar problem elsewhere may
bring the point home: Allen inserts a storyline or trope in one film that he is
being quite socially responsible about, but then he is being more facetious or
off-hand in using the same sort of trope in another film, sometimes one that
closely succeeds it. This can be seen in the point his John Cusack character passionately
makes to Chazz Palminteri’s Cheech in Bullets
over Broadway (1994) about the moral depravity of the latter’s killing
someone. Bullets overall is largely a
satire or farce. But Allen very sensitively and responsibly handled—in a sober
drama—the theme of calculated, premeditated murder in Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989). A few years later, presumably in his
assiduous struggle to come up with a viable story for Bullets (especially in the wake of his 1992-93 family problems), he
seemed to take the same theme and be a little “too light” with it. (Maybe it
isn’t quite so light, for this.)
This way that Allen can, in the
larger corpus of his work, go “all over the place,” in tone/seriousness and
effectiveness, with his wide variety of stories, I will try to discuss more
fully when I summarize him, appreciatively, as a writer.
##
