Second 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:
I. The Curse of the Jade Scorpion
(2001)Allen regrets his performance here
A genre-type exercise combines tasty characters and some plot complexity drawn out of a fictional use of the real phenomenon of hypnotism
Theron adds some “humid sexual presence”
II. Hollywood Ending (2002)
A difference of opinionNot that Allen claims this, but this film is NOT on a par—in intent or in effect—with his more autobio-seeming films, like Stardust Memories
Details nail the trouble with this film
Allen’s acting here is bad news
A road sign
[Edit 8/12/14. Edit 8/15/14. Edit 8/22/14.]
Starting with 2000-01, we are in
a period of Woody Allen’s films where we encounter a lot more also-rans than
otherwise. Also, viewing the films brings up a new, ironic issue: First of all,
for the past six or so months—and I am grateful for this—I believe I have
watched Allen films a greater number of times than in all the years I ever saw
them before, from 1979 to 2013 (and the reason has, in good part, been to give a
fair hearing to the films after having sidled into covering them on my blogs).
If you figure I’ve looked at about 19 of his films already this year, and if
you assume I’ve seen each three times or more, that’s 57 viewings. (And if you
ask, does this mean I’m starting to tire of Allen’s mannerisms, repeated themes
and pet phrasings of certain things, etc., well, there is some basis to agree
with that.)
For those who think that movies
in general are a frivolous way to pass time, or to have a basis for blog
writing, or who (contrarily) might say my “film critic’s” role here is laudable
or necessary enough, but that I ought to select my objects of criticism better,
I would say this: You could definitely
do worse than view the best of Woody Allen. It’s not for no reason that he’s
respected as a major filmmaker (as various critics, except those more disposed
to dismiss him, will imply). And in covering the best of his films through
about 1999 as I have, and having devoted not as much time to his lesser works
in this period, I think I’ve been judicious enough (and it’s been rewarding to
go over the good ones again). And believe me, I have other directors’ works to
cover; I don’t want him commandeering my time forever.
Starting in 2000, his films
become more dispensable for even someone in my shoes. After his family crisis
of 1992-93, one would suspect that some of the creative juice had gone out of
him, due to presumed emotional trial from the crisis, or due to old age, or
both. After his lawsuit with longtime friend and eight-year producer Jean Doumanian filed in 2001, one would suspect
he was in a kind of trouble in other ways. Was his confidence more shaken
(along with the ravages of age)? Was his getting distribution deals from whatever
studios getting harder?
For 1999’s Sweet and Lowdown, he had distributing by Sony Pictures Classics. Starting
with Small Time Crooks (2000), which
was the last of his films with a production contribution by Doumanian, he had
distribution by DreamWorks, and his association
with DreamWorks, for distribution, would continue a few years into the new
decade. By 2002, having DreamWorks as his
distributor was perhaps reminding him of the compromises-cum-pressures of
trying to please Hollywood executive mentalities.
In any event, for a
retrospective critic viewing his films today, starting with Small Time Crooks—which I remember
seeing in the theater as his first work that I’d seen in the theater in years,
and which struck me as a small-potatoes work from him—a really good film from
him gets increasingly rarer. There can be
pleasures of some level in all of the later films, but the lesser qualities of
the same make us feel that one viewing is enough. Even deciding which among this large number to view is
a little tricky: it seems like a question of, intermixed with better works, what
also-ran do we want to see (which
would usually mean, for me, watching it at least twice to review it fairly)? We
start to have the amusing thought that we should begin to take Allen’s own
existentialist kind of one-liner advice: “Life’s too short…,” one of his
characters might say; and we can finish this with, “—to spend it on too many
Woody also-rans, or even to watch some of them more than once. And some even once.”
In the interest of respecting
that life is short, I decided to skip Small
Time Crooks for blog reviewing. I hadn’t originally wanted to cover Hollywood Ending, but it turned out
useful to view, for reasons I give below (not all of which would sound
encouraging to Allen).
I. The Curse of the Jade Scorpion
(2001)
I remember seeing this in the
theater, and before this year, I believe I saw it at least once on DVD. When I
re-viewed it again this summer, I felt I knew the way this story unfolded quite
well. And as a thumbnail sketch, it seems quite promising: a sort of homage to
a 1940-or-so film, and in the screwball-comedy genre, with fancily dressed sets
(the Wikipedia article on Allen alone says it’s Allen’s most expensive
production), and with a rather familiar sort of mystery shaping its plot, you
would think this would be about as much fun as Allen’s period piece of about
seven years before, Bullets Over Broadway
(1994).
Allen regrets his performance here
Allen’s busy performance shows
him seeming to be distracted at times, especially early on. Speaking on February
6, 2006, he considered Jade Scorpion
maybe “the worst film I’ve made.” His comments are worth quoting at length:
I let down an
exceptionally gifted cast. I had Helen Hunt [as Betty Ann Fitzgerald], who is a
superb actress and comedienne. I had Dan Aykroyd [as Chris Magruder], who I
always thought was just hilarious. I had David Ogden Stiers [as magician/crook
Voltan Polgar], whom I’ve used many times and he always comes through.
Elizabeth Berkley [as an office assistant] was wonderful. And it was successful
abroad, not so successful here. […] It kills me to have a cast so gifted and
not be able to come through for them. They put their trust in me.
[…]
I think I went
wrong in playing the lead [C.W. Briggs]. I looked but I couldn’t find anyone
else who was available who had any kind of comic flair. But I was not right in
that picture. I would have been better off if I had less laughs and had a
straighter, tougher leading man. So I think I sank everybody in that picture.
And I felt it as I was seeing dailies every day. […] It was [a] period [piece]
and I didn’t have a lot of money. I was dependent on locations that Santo
[Loquasto, production designer] had made brilliantly but we couldn’t go back
and shoot in them [again] because it would have been too expensive to redo his
work. We couldn’t just simply say, “Let’s just get another actor and shoot it
over.” [Which is the sort of thing he would have done back in 1988 for Crimes and Misdemeanors.] [Eric Lax, Conversations with Woody Allen (Knopf,
2007), p. 54.]
I’ll pause and note that I can
understand his being dissatisfied with his performance. He seems a bit
distracted and off his game at times, especially in the earliest scenes, while
the insurance-office scenes are sumptuous with the set design and have numerous
actors tastefully milling around. I can understand the production constraints,
in his being unable to redo the sets and shoot again.
But aside from the flaws in his
performance, I think Allen’s character here is OK for being comic throughout
the film. In fact, I think that does a lot to make the movie humorous—that and
Helen Hunt’s sharp performance (she only comes off not quite right when his
script gives her one-liners that are a little too cumbersome for the ongoing
repartee, though she trucks them out gamely enough).
On one hand, I can understand
that, for younger viewers for whom Allen’s trademark persona starts to grate as
he gets older and his films get less brilliant, his C.W. Briggs is an acquired
taste at best. For myself, while his performance as the semi-nebbish,
street-smart, wisecracking Briggs has its flaws, it isn’t too bad for that kind
of character.
While often I seem in accord
with Leonard Maltin on what he seems to embody as film standards that conform
with what Baby Boomers hold as classics (though I would assume he has
subcontracted reviewers who contribute to his compendium, whose views may
diverge in taste among themselves at times), I differ with him on Jade Scorpion and the next, Hollywood Ending. He rates the later one
higher than the earlier one, but I would reverse the ratings. I think that if
you accept that Jade Scorpion is no
more or less than an echo of 1940s (and late 1930s) screwball comedy (and
gumshoe mysteries), it’s entertaining and generally effective enough in Allen’s
vein. If his 2000s version of his persona is not some viewers’ cup of tea, for
them this film will be that much less fun; but I think it is entertaining
enough given its parameters, even if it is a bit shallow and not worth much
more than two viewings within a given short period.
For me, Hollywood Ending is where his persona starts to really tire. The Videohound compendium really balks at
this later film, not least for Allen’s personal style. I found Hollywood Ending less ambitious in terms
of trying to ape a sort of Hollywood style—of course, while Jade Scorpion basks in period flavor,
the latter is a modern-day “meta-Hollywood” piece—and the latter film’s script,
as we’ll see, is fairly simple. And Allen, as it happens, is less distracted in
the latter film than in Jade Scorpion.
But in Hollywood Ending, he seems to
try too hard as his “neurotic Jewish player” type; with his rush of words and
hands chopping at the air when he is in beseeching mode or such, now he seems a
not-fun parody of himself, all the more for his aged personal quality’s making what
for him is a habitual type of performance more grating than ever, which would especially
be the impression for younger viewers, I think.
A genre-type exercise combines tasty characters and some plot
complexity drawn out of a fictional use of the real phenomenon of hypnotism
Jade Scorpion should be viewed as what it’s fairly obviously
presented as: light entertainment that’s modeled on old screwball comedy. Allen
plays C.W. Briggs, an investigator at a big New York insurance company who has
an earthy and streetwise way of cracking cases (he has contacts on the street
among blind beggars and toughs), who also is a bit seedy with his dating of a parade
of women in his small apartment. Betty Ann Fitzgerald, played gamely and
effectively by Helen Hunt, is a newly
hired efficiency expert at Briggs’ company who instinctively takes a strong
disliking to (with suspicion about) Briggs. This leads to verbal-wit sparks
flying between them, which is most reminiscent of screwball comedy.
A boss at the company is Chris
Magruder, played by Dan Aykroyd, who here
looks a bit like a pudgy Richard Nixon and, I think, speaks a little too
rapidly sometimes, but who is otherwise effective in his part. As it happens,
Magruder and Fitzgerald have an extramarital affair going on between them—come
on, this is Allen, and that sort of thing in his tales is almost inevitable—so
there is a smarmy sort of clandestine “office politics” between these
executives even while Fitzgerald, in her zeal to put the company on more
competitive footing, is not above finding ways to prove Briggs obsolete.
Another big thread in the plot
is what might turn some young viewers off: in celebration of an office worker’s
birthday, the lot of the familiar faces at the insurance company go to a
nightclub for a bash, where the main entertainment is a magician, Voltan
Polgar, played by David Ogden Stiers (who
was once on TV’s M*A*S*H and has
worked for Allen before, including in Mighty
Aphrodite). Polgar demonstrates his ability to put even the “volunteers”
Briggs and Fitzgerald under hypnosis—and he persuades them in that state to be
in love with one another, and gives them trigger words, a different one for
each, at which they will snap into a trance into which they will be suggestible
to the commands of a person (like Polgar) who knows what he’s doing with them.
Hypnosis is actually real—I’ve seen it demonstrated (once, at my college GWU in
about 1985), but it works only on people susceptible to it; it is also historically
part of the reason for Sigmund Freud’s developing his theory of the unconscious,
that people can show they operate mentally on a level below normal
consciousness. All this aside, whether or not it’s true people hypnotized can
be made to do what Briggs and Fitzgerald elaborately do throughout the film, it
is this story’s premise that Polgar actually is a bigger manipulator—and
crook—than he seemed in a mere entertainer’s role at the party.
Briggs and Fitzgerald retain
their susceptibility to fall into their trance when each hears his or her
specific trigger word, and Polgar phones one (and later the other) to instruct
him or her to rob jewels from local homes of the rich. Briggs is especially a
good target, since as an investigator for the insurance company with which the
victims had contracted, he knows—in fact, helped install—the security systems
of the homes he is then instructed to rob. Fitzgerald is later persuaded by
Polgar to do his bidding similarly.
A side phenomenon of all this is
that, especially for Fitzgerald, when she is in a Polgar-induced trance state,
she also becomes—in line with having been made to be in love with Briggs at the
office-mates party—enamored of Briggs when they happen to be together in
various circumstances during their peregrinations. This leads to some amusing
comedy where they can be apt to relate almost the complete opposite of how they
normally are in the office (for instance, Fitzgerald trance-style besotted with
him, and Briggs puzzled but sincerely caring).
If all this hypnosis stuff
sounds “too stupid” to you, you probably won’t like this film. But if you give
it some “willing suspension of disbelief,” the hypnosis angle makes the film
entertaining. I was able to watch this film twice this season, after having
seen it already at least twice in the past. It is a shallow work, but
definitely amusing, and visually—the budget for production is to thank for
this—it is appealing. Zhao Fei’s cinematography, first on display in Sweet
and Lowdown, lightens the mood here. Some shots and transitions between
shots are a little clumsy (e.g., not centered as well as they could be), but
overall the camerawork isn’t bad.
Theron adds some “humid sexual presence”
Charlize Theron is on hand as a sort of sultry type ([correction] how Allen characterized her part in Lax, p. 157, is "screen humidity," without the link to Lauren Bacall--I'm unsure why I remembered it this way); she is Laura
Kensington, the daughter of a wealthy family from whose home Briggs, under a
trance, has robbed some jewels. In investigating at her home under his normal-life
way of functioning as an insurance investigator, Briggs encounters her, and
some unlikely sparks of mutual interest start up between them. Allen haters
might see this as a preposterous, self-congratulatory method by which he presents
himself as an “apple of a nubile young woman’s eye”—i.e., the sort of thing
that for his detractors long ago got stale, if not distasteful, sometime after
Allen had arguably first made it “hip” in his oeuvre in Manhattan (1979). However, those more sympathetic to Allen—and
certainly his fans—will enjoy the exchanges Briggs and Kensington have, in view
of their being taken as “acceptably ludicrous” in Allen’s world when he is
doing farcical or parody work anyway.
As we find him doing here (and
in variously mixed encounters in Hollywood
Ending), a couple of instances of his repartee with a comely young woman is
filmed with each shown, face-forward, in a single-person shot, understood as facing
the other. Apparently in filming, Allen was unconfident enough in bringing off
the performances if they were done in a two-shot, especially with minimal takes
per shot, that he had each person filmed separately, so that a good series comprising
the exchange could be assembled in editing. (This isn’t always done with Theron in this film.) The result in Jade Scorpion with Theron, who gamely
portrays the rich vixen who seems undiscriminating enough to be sexually intrigued
by Briggs, is what seems like Allen doing a try at Bob Hope–type repartee
(elsewhere in the film his shoot-from-the-hip joking reminds you of Groucho
Marx), with Allen’s humor seeming at times almost campy, yet no less fun for
this.
If the exchange at Kensington’s
mansion seems unlikely, the situation when Kensington turns up at his fleabag
apartment, where ostensibly she is to have a hot date with him, complete with
hard liquor, may strike some as over the top in plausibility, but can be
rendered acceptable if you look at this film as a fun-time parody (and maybe
you temporarily imagine Briggs being played by a similar comedian able to bring
off the one-liners, maybe Billy Crystal). Of course, Allen deflates the
preposterousness of the situation, reminding us of his story’s playful premises,
when he gets a phone call, with Polgar on the line, setting him up to do
another robbery, and Allen puts on a “po-faced”/dissociated yutz’s voice and
curtails the hot date, so effective that he abruptly alienates Kensington, who’s
quite ready to leave amid her baffled surprise, and with him quietly efficient
as he prepares for his heist as if it were a banal errand.
##
Brian Markinson (I am uncertain about this Wikipedia article) plays an agreeable office colleague. Wallace Shawn, who has worked for Allen as far
back as Manhattan, is here as a
canny, mystery-solving coworker. The various actors seem generally right for
parts that are stock sorts of parts for this kind of genre.
According to the film’s
Wikipedia article, Jade Scorpion had
a $26 million budget, and made $18.9 million at the box office.
By contrast, Hollywood Ending—one of whose production
companies, according to its Wikipedia page, was the Kennedy/Marshall
Company—had a $16 million budget, and made $14+ million at the box office.
II. Hollywood Ending (2002)
A difference of opinion
Allen at times, in Lax, shows
himself not the best judge of his own work. Some of his judgments, which may
vary from those of his more warmly receiving fans, may seem a little
counterintuitive, or not their
opinions. For myself—OK, I’ll agree with him (to some extent) that Annie Hall and Manhattan are not as sophisticated as later works like Husbands and Wives. I’ll concede a
little bit that he put too much work into Crimes
and Misdemeanors, as he says in Lax (pp. 123 and/or 288), though I think
the fact he did, I think, means it has better aspects in its feeling out
subtleties than it otherwise would have (if it only stuck to the straight
drama, say).
But one opinion of Allen’s, I
don’t think many will agree with at all, and I certainly don’t.
[T]o me, that’s
[Hollywood Ending is] a very funny
movie. It was one of my most successful ones in terms of an idea that was
executed properly. […] I just thought it was such a funny idea and the whole
thing came off and I played [in] it and it was well done. I think if people had
gone to see it they would have enjoyed it. But they didn’t go to see it. [Lax,
p. 226; said in about 2005]
Now we are entering a realm
where Allen sounds like a benighted character in one of his satires. A theoretical
“homeslice” type friend of his could have said, “Woody, man, the reason
they ain’t goin’ to see this film is ’cause they read the reviews, and they heard
the word of mouth, and they thought, ‘Do I want to pay good money to see
another Woody movie this year? How good
is it?’ and the reviews and their friends who saw it told them, Stay
away. That’s why people didn’t go to see it.”
Allen makes some of the same
points (as he did on Lax, p. 226) within a lengthy set of comments on pp.
55-56:
I thought it
was quite funny. It is a funny picture with a funny idea, executed funny. I was
amusing in it. […] Téa Leoni…looked great in the picture, was great…. I was so confident [that] I took that picture to
Cannes, the first time I ever did that. […]
I went on opening night and felt, Oh, everybody’s going to love this and the
French will particularly love it because the ending teases the French. And it
was successful but nothing big—in France
So the French were the ones most
politely excusing?
This is almost good enough to
put in an Allen script, if he did a really good satire about a film director
who isn’t at all a good judge of his work.
The only statement I agree with
in that last extract is his assessment of Leoni.
I wondered if I was unfair in my
“reading” of it—after having seen it recently (on DVD) about 2+ times—when I
read his remarks. But thinking it all over, I concluded, I’m right. This film
is a turkey.
(Here’s a measure: a few days
ago, I had a weird headache in the evening. I started watching this film for
the third time, and with my headache just found the film too much to have
patience for. I stopped it after about 17 minutes. A bit later, I went to Mighty Aphrodite on videotape, which I
was partway through the fourth-or-so viewing of, and that was more like
medicine for my headache. I hope to finish my review of it soon.)
Allen reveals numerous times in
Lax that most of his films he doesn’t see again once he has seen them through
to release. He thus comments on them (to Lax) from his memories of them when
working on them, including in post-production. Maybe this film seemed to meet his desires better than usual, hence he
thought it was especially effective. But to me, it is tired in general idea, it is often so mundane in execution that
it can be rather tedious/embarrassing to watch, and Allen’s performance in
particular is often like a coarse self-parody, so grating at times that
it’s no wonder the Videohound review
spews out a comment as if he/she is dead-tired of Allen’s persona.
First, a note on its general
premises, to put you at ease….
Not that Allen claims this, but this film is NOT on a par—in intent or
in effect—with his more autobio-seeming films, like Stardust Memories
One who was only casually
interested in Allen, much less an anti-Allen movie viewer, might groan, “Oh,
not another story ‘about professional Woody.’” No, this isn’t really another
“meta-Woody” director’s kvetch that some might consider on the order of Stardust Memories or Deconstructing Harry. Stardust might have pleased us with its
Fellini-esque verve (much helped by cinematographer Gordon Willis); Deconstructing Harry with its salty
concerns might have been worth an intrigued fan’s look, even if it seemed a bit
drily complicated.
But Hollywood Ending is simpler in story, and actually is interesting
because—not really tracing a creative artist’s discontents or tortured
relations with others—it shows a director coping (comically) on set, dealing
with production details—and amateur “film-production mavens” like me might like
it for showing a lot of filmmaking behind-the-scenes minutiae (even if some of
it is stylized for effect). As far as what its profile of the director, Val
Waxman (Allen), is about, it’s actually a sort of fantastic farce—with the
director going temporarily blind while he is to start producing a film that is
to save his career, all arranged by an ex-wife (Téa Leoni). If these premises seem like this should be a
fun romp, actually, I found it to be rather patience-testing, a work whose
basic premises seemed quite intriguing while the actual fleshing out of the
story was rather dreary. And this pattern, I’m afraid, seems to characterize a
lot of Allen’s films of the past 13 years or so.
Details nail the trouble with this film
Cinematography. One of
the first things to note about this film—and I admit that not every detail I
cite here will be considered condemning by everyone—is that visually it’s
rather unusual for him, compared to all his post–Carlo Di Palma works. The
cinematographer here is Wedigo von Schultzendorff (if you speak German, which I barely
do, he has a German Wikipedia biography),
a European whom Allen got on someone’s recommendation after Haskell Wexler
started working on this film, and was dismissed for being too demanding (while
he was nice enough) (Lax, pp. 226-27). Von Schultzendorff is competent enough,
but the film has a look between Di Palma’s slightly muted look and Zhao Fei’s
more lit look; the result is a kind of TV-show quality. Add to this the fact
that some shots—not only in “on set” scenarios, but usually there—are prettied
up with background lights and rather pure colors, like “production values on
the cheap” à la a sort of Christmas-light effect, and the result is a sort of
anonymously decorated look that I don’t associate with Allen, but which might
be considered germane to a film about rather-synthetic Hollywood values.
Story set-up. The story
in some ways is almost too preposterous. Allen as Val Waxman, a storied film
director who needs a come-back (even the name Val Waxman sounds like a parody of Allen’s typically Jewish,
short-named heroes), and we initially find him relegated to filming a TV
commercial for deodorant in a cartoonish rendering of Canada, complete with
blizzard and Allen buried in a heavy parka. Back in the States, he’s met at the
door by his live-in girlfriend Lori (an aspiring actress, already with work on
the stage), played by Debra Messing (yes,
I’ll go along with Allen haters who think this pairing is too preposterous,
especially with Messing’s vapid-ditz manner in this role), and Waxman explains
he’s quit because he was fired, and what better reason to quit? The one-liners,
when they don’t work—and often they don’t in this film—are like that.
Leoni plays his ex-wife, Ellie,
who is on the Hollywood producing echelon, and has a boyfriend, film producer
Hal Yager, played by Treat Williams, who
works for a studio called Galaxie. They have a film idea, for something whose
script is titled The City that Never
Sleeps. There is a rather tedious opening scene among producers, who want a
good director for this film, and Ellie suggests her ex Waxman, he’d be great
for this…. There is grumbling about Waxman. George Hamilton plays another producer on hand, looking as he
often does like a model for a haberdashery (Coppola had him, to profit, in The Godfather Part III [1990]). Hamilton
is given one-liners (by Allen as writer) of a tired sort, such as to issue a
crushing summary of Waxman, but to quickly buffer this with “with all due
respect” or “not that there’s anything wrong with that” (more or less). These
lines fall dully like fishing ballast, not that that’s Hamilton’s fault.
Marriage issues. There is
the requisite Allen “back story” or “undergirding” of marital troubles; Ellie
early on assures her colleagues, “I can handle him [Waxman]; …I just got tired
of having to all the time.” Waxman,
for his part, on finding, or otherwise apropos of, Ellie wanting him to direct
the Never Sleeps picture, remarks
that she probably feels guilty…. (Much later in the film, Ellie mouths a
typical Allen line, that “inertia accounts for two-thirds of the marriages in America
Insider details, and good
side-character acting, add spice, amid desultory doings. Waxman gets
the assignment, with help from his agent Al Hack, played by Mark Rydell, seeming a bit in appearance like 60 Minutes’ old producer Don Hewitt.
Rydell and Leoni have two of the best-played parts in this film, but—as happens
with other lesser fare of his—Allen’s having actors give splendid performances
in middling or poor material is like seeing a skilled swimmer do her remarkable
thing in a dirty pool.
The film takes about 40 minutes
to get to the point where, in a better Allen work, the story might break for
more riotous comedy. Here, rather perfunctory scenes and desultory pacing show
Waxman being lined up to do this big-budget ($60 mill) film with a theme
supposedly close to his heart, when on the cusp of starting, he suddenly goes
psychosomatically blind. Then, circumstances forcing it, he has to direct the
film blind.
(It’s often interesting seeing
actors who hit it bigger later in films turn up in bit parts in Allen films.
Here, Fred Melamed is in a brief scene as
a production assistant; he is Sy Ableman in the Coens’ A Serious Man [2009].)
Possibilities with
female-oriented comedy come in with Waxman having arranged, despite her limited
acting chops, his girlfriend Lori to be featured in the film. The way the film
sets its absurdism up, and includes such details as with lesser-talent Lori,
would seem to be in the vein of Bullets
Over Broadway, but it doesn’t work too well here. Whereas Bullets may have had some not-entirely-desired
quiet spots amid its more genuinely well-turned craft in plot and multi-person
scenes, this film seems more consistently labored, at least for its first half.
There is a practical stratagem
that is mildly amusing: Waxman’s cinematographer, who speaks only Chinese, has
a translator, and this man is persuaded to be Waxman’s assistant, guiding him
around the set and giving him feedback on the filming work, to cover up Waxman’s
blindness (this situation actually was inspired to a degree by Allen’s fruitful
association with his three-film cinematographer Zhao Fei, who also didn’t speak
much or any English).
But this contrivance preludes
something that adds to the marital preposterousness in the story: after the
translator is removed from helping Waxman due to a more typical
production-related change in personnel, Waxman ends up arranging for ex-wife Ellie
to be his cover-up cohort and assistant on set. This is after, of course, he
has explained to her his blindness predicament and the consequent ruse.
If all this sounds like this
film is too fantastic in some ways, and synthetic in others, to make for genuinely
good satire, you’re right.
With a potential to add good comic
moments, and not quite bringing them home as such an element might in A+ Allen,
Jodie Markell plays Andrea Ford, a
reporter for a big-name New York magazine who is doing “nonfiction narrative”
coverage of the production as it unfolds. This leads to a comic moment where Waxman—tricked,
as we find, by her perfume to think she was Ellie—inadvertently reveals his big
ruse, when he is talking about a dream (which in its telling reveals the
blindness situation), not realizing his listener is really Andrea. Andrea then
gets a gasping look of surprised recognition of the facts, and moves quietly
away.
Allen’s acting here is bad news
What Videohound screamed about, and what really complicates your
feelings about Allen here, wherever you usually stand, is his often-strained
performance. If you love him (or don’t mind him) as his usual persona, here you
feel embarrassed at his performance; haters will have a field day noting
this as when he proves to be an unbearable hack, who they feel ought to trod
off peacefully to the happy hunting ground for Catskills has-beens. Especially
in scenes once he’s turned blind, not least in the first major scene, he seems
like such a degraded version of himself—with hectoring tone, cloddishly
emphasizing hands, and almost ridiculously clipped r’s—that he seems like someone doing an imitation of Allen that is meant
to be caricaturing, and still not
getting it right. If good imitation shows some respect and admiration for the
source, here Allen sounds like he can’t even imitate himself as if he loves
himself.
An earlier scene in a restaurant
where he is meeting with Ellie, where he slides abruptly between peaceable
professional consultation and spontaneously spouting out angry criticisms for
her taking up with producer Hal Yager, makes its comic premises clear. But it
seems to go on too long and Allen, with his pseudo-acting calisthenics, starts
to wear on our patience with his third or fourth slip into tearing into Hal
Yager.
Scenes where tasteful music
might be good touches—and Allen in other work seems so often to hit the mark,
with his old jazz records whose fitness might make younger viewers overlook how
old the music is—are sometimes underscored here with banal dreck. A bedroom
scene with music including strings and trumpet seems like a crappy score was
used that had third-rate Chinatown-type
music.
Allen’s hardened issue with rock
’n’ roll comes out when he visits an estranged son, who has an arch-punk
(1980s-style) look, and who has changed his name to Scumbag X. (Amusingly, his
son surmises that his dad is psychosomatically blind almost the instant Waxman
comes in the door.)
At some point, Allen in his
tired, straining voice can’t understand how or why his son, who is in a rock
band, plays the drums “loud.” News flash:
I’ve never been in a rock band, nor played the drums, but I know enough about
rock music to say that the thing about drums is, they inherently aren’t loud
unless a listener is right next to them; they typically have to be miked up.
Amplification, as for many other instruments, is what makes them “loud.” The
music as a whole, more properly speaking,
is what can be loud, and if you don’t like this, sit way in the back of the
theater, stadium, or wherever, or (better yet) wait for the concert album to
come out. Allen sounds like he was 70 in 1975 when he makes comments like this.
A situation rather late in the
film where Waxman is being taught how to negotiate walking in a room that in
the near future is to have film execs, so he can get to the right furniture
without revealing he’s blind, is rather tedious, and helped by discretionary
editing. It’s the sort of thing that Peter Sellers would have had a ball with.
Here, the routine seems tired.
Waxman’s sight suddenly comes
back when he is seated in Central Park (in a
pretty shot) with Ellie. This is scored to what sounds like sappy (or imitation)
Gershwin.
The plot rounds off when Hal
Yager wonders if Ellie had fallen back in love with Waxman, and Ellie confesses she thought she
never really stopped loving him.
A kiss Waxman gets from Ellie
just before they ride off in a car might disgust the Allen haters who feel his
casting partnerships with pretty actresses is worse than self-congratulatory
and atrocious, and leaves us (aside from the sexual issues) wondering: if this
film was meant to deliver a lot of ironies about Hollywood, why didn’t it work
better? It so often seemed tired and not quite clearing the creative
pole-vaulting bar. If its tiredness was part of the point, even this didn’t
seem to work as it should.
A strange effort from Allen, all
the stranger for his thinking (in Lax) it worked so well. If one wanted to do a
feature-length parody of “a typical Allen movie”—which I would be warm to, with
all respect for him—one could almost sample from some of his clunkers, but I
have a feeling this clunker has too
much deadwood to use for a good parody.
A road sign
Hollywood Ending is probably not the worst Allen would do. But
unfortunately in the new millennium, Allen’s not being “the man for the new hour” seemed to flow forward in this
film, undeniably.
Whether his lawsuit against Doumanian
(2001-02) was sapping his creative enthusiasm in making this film, in some ways
he would sink lower with his next outing, Anything
Else (2003). This latter, in 2002, was actually in production (with him
findable on a New York street
His strategic move to the
closer, cozier story of the next film makes us speculate—whether or not he
shared this view—that he vaguely suspected that his performance (both as actor
and director) in Hollywood was as if
he was paddling around preposterously
like a quacking wooden duck, and thus he had the intuitive good sense to
break for more promising pastures, to aim for a golden homecoming, and see if
he could reconstitute the old glorious, two-person chemistry and bittersweet
story arc of his audience-favorite NYC-centric romance films (like Annie Hall and Manhattan). (This maybe was coupled with by his reflection on the
meaning of the 9/11 attacks to shape the new film.)
If he tried to aim for what
should have been a golden egg, the result was, after his long, prolific career,
one of the stinkiest egg-farts he would produce.
Next: Film check: Woody's (occasional) self-parody still has charms:
Anything Else (2003)
