Movie break (Quick Vu/Summer Lite): An intelligence-respecting stalker film: One Hour Photo (2002)

Robin Williams displays his quiet-dramatic chops here, in an ironic horror story

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

Subsections below:

Appearances become deceiving about the main characters

A look at details shows the craftwork and influence

Sy is put into deviant action by a stain on the perfect image he has beheld

A level of family integrity is a consolation, which Sy doesn’t have

What about Sy threatening his boss?

Sy is probably the saddest victim here

[Edit 8/21/14.]
 

I saw this film in the theater. I thought it was bit slight and truncated when I saw it then; but in reviewing it this past week—and I had considered doing it even before the death of Robin Williams—I am struck by a few things: it is a subtle, intelligent horror film whose details count to a high degree; it is a good example of Williams doing simple drama, and he turns out to be the most sympathetic character here; and, especially in style, it is a surprisingly derivative film, such as of such landmarks as Psycho (1960) and The Shining (1980)—but is still interesting despite its lack of originality (on a technical level).

Seymour (“Sy”) Parrish (Williams) is a quiet, conscientious, slightly obsessive photo-development worker in a drop-off facility in a large discount store, meant to echo Wal-Mart but called SaveMart. He seems to dote on favorite customers, such as the Yorkin family, whose young mother Nina (Connie Nielsen) usually comes in, typically with her son Jake (Dylan Smith). We eventually find, about 18 minutes into the film, that Sy is no ordinary photo-development worker: he has a huge trove of copies of photos of his customers—actually, primarily of the Yorkin family—on his living room wall in his anonymous, sparsely furnished apartment.

We thus have a story of a stalker; but of what sort, we might be uncertain, which keeps us hooked into the film with its well-handled suspense. I don’t want to give too much away, because I think it’s worth seeing for those new to it—even if the technology that is one of its subjects, the widespread consumer use and development of film-type snapshots, has (amazingly, to me) become outmoded. But this story could, today, be transmuted into something about Internet stalking, with maybe someone collecting an electronic trove of hundreds of photos from someone “dear’s” various online roosts (Facebook, Twitter, etc.).

The film is very stylized, and it seems well planned by its writer/director—Mark Romanek, who has had a career in music videos (the color scheming, if nothing else, suggests this)—as a comment on materialistic, depersonalizing society (especially in the SaveMart store), as well as a comment on our society’s placing static image (and the associated sexiness/cuteness) above the more ambiguous, interrelated, and dynamic aspects of life. The craft with which this film is made helps make it worth seeing twice (which I did this month, and with my original viewing in, it would seem, 2002, that makes it three times, though I think that’s enough for me).

Appearances become deceiving about the main characters

And though Sy is presented, from almost the first shot (and from his periodic, calm narration that shows him to be something of a philosopher about his work), as a sort of amusement-stirring geek, with Williams’ hair cut short, thinning on top, and colored a sort of weird blond, Sy turns out to be—even while we wonder and worry what he will do under scary pressure—the most sympathetic character. This is not only because the worst violence he resorts to—which I think it OK to reveal—involves his wielding a hunting knife, while not even drawing blood with it; it’s also because the lonely, obsessive Sy—despite the well-tooled looks that people give to or about him, well depicting the social signs of alienation of this man—somehow earns our sympathy, and seems the most well-rounded person here emotionally, while the “lovely” family he devotes such attention to ends up seeming rather two-dimensional and less lovely than their photos might suggest —and while his less-pleasant, hard-ass boss (Gary Cole) seems pretty consistently the semi-stereotype he is.

In fact, what is funny—and is especially striking with Mrs. Yorkin, who often looks to us like a model (with weirdly “stylish” hair that looks it was lazily barretted up in the morning)—is that the snapshots of the family make them seem so artificially attractive and almost fake, that it would seem (from the director’s angle) that serenity is implied by their looking like models. But we find—again, probably per the director’s calculated intent—that they are rather emotionally shallow (except, in a sense, for the kid), and there is, of course, also a “dark secret” buried in the family’s life—an extramarital affair conducted by the slightly frumpy-looking husband.

A look at details shows the craftwork and influence

There are a number of Kubrickian touches in this film. The tracking shots, perhaps with a person framed geometrically in a receding hallway or the like, seem right out of The Shining, along with zooming shots, and a general way of presenting Sy in repose, like a nice/quiet version of Jack Torrance. What is more interesting here is the way director Romanek fashions, here and there, a refined social-cue way of setting off Sy, and showing where “normal” people stand regarding him and otherwise (which isn’t entirely to their credit).

On a more appealing, visceral level, the way a child can have an intuitive, trusting attitude more than “wised-up” adults is used with young son Jake, notably early in the film, when he reveals plaintively to his mother he’s sad for “someone” who doesn’t have any friends, etc., and his mother elicits from him that that person is Sy. Later, with Jake well involved with peers and coach on a sports field, and Sy more ominously seated (alone) in bleachers like a casual, cheering fan who’s just happened to stop by, Jake shows a more skepticism-tinged puzzlement at Sy.

(There is also a sort of Spielbergian touch, when the Yorkin parents are fighting—over money—and we find a one-person shot of Jake overhearing them, a little sadly.)

For a more adults-only measure of the subtle ways that “the presence of an eccentric” are handled, notice how Sy, when he meets up with Mrs. Yorkin at the mall food court, has a way of being aware of social boundaries, moving charily/shyly with his food tray, yet still skirting the social boundaries a bit by moving to be near her; and she is on the phone, and, courteous to him, curtails the conversation (by the way, I think she says something that reveals she might be suspicious of her husband having an affair, which Sy doesn’t seem to hear). She makes peaceable conversation with Sy, and they both acknowledge the coincidence of running into one another, even while Sy is more aware there is less than real coincidence than it seems.

All this stuff sets up a sense in us of, “What is Sy eventually going to do? Is he going to go postal?”

The film gives, overall, a rather shallow story, and to some extent is more an exercise in technique than something freighted with great social insights and themes. But, today, it does seem apropos, in terms of average people’s paranoia—such as about mass-shooters—being more “of the time,” which is an unfortunate development but still in need of ameliorating social recognition.

What makes this film especially interesting is that, as it turns out, Sy is less of a danger than the early building of suspense-via-character-actions may suggest. And we can infer from things we can see, once we know the score more, that part of the reason for Sy’s alienation, and the crises that erupt, is his position in society—a more global Gestalt, where how he is regarded, and accommodated (or not), helps create the problem that he ends up presenting, in his desperation, in more sensational fashion. We become less sympathetic to the Yorkins when we find that not only are they cheerful but shallow upscale types, who (to Sy’s quirky disillusionment) can have an extramarital affair like any other family, and their emotional life only gets richer when they confront an emergency, rather than just enjoy the “happy middle-class life” that is shown in their almost-too-idealized photos.

Sy is put into deviant action by a stain on the perfect image he has beheld

As I just hinted, the extramarital affair within the Yorkin family is such that it becomes an “inevitable trigger”: Sy has been fired by his boss for a laundry list of “infractions” that individually don’t seem like too big a deal (or, item by item, are things that could be mitigated if the boss really wanted to keep Sy on staff--except for, arguably, Sy's having made copies of a customer's photos for himself, which his boss doesn't fully know about). Then Sy is initially sent reeling into a bit of not-hard-to-understand instability by his firing. But then he coolly investigates and discovers the affair (partly by checking a photo on his living room wall), and then the conclusive discovery has a sort of shattering effect on him. But it also places him on track, with his steely self-control and canniness, to confront the ones having the affair.

It’s almost as if for the perfect family to be an apple of his eye with a bit of horrid rot inside it, he must chastise (or purge) the rot in no uncertain terms, as a way of restoring justice to the area of the world to which he’s become a loving witness.

One obvious irony, of course, is that, for Sy, this family that seemed so perfect in photos is not always perfect in action. But more notably and subtly, the adulterers (Mr. Yorkin and Maya Burson [Erin Daniels]), once Sy has “cornered” them, only really seem to have a rich emotional life when they (especially the dynamo of a company-owning father) are faced—in a rather helpless situation—with a stark threat of violence.

A level of family integrity is a consolation, which Sy doesn’t have

Another irony is that, as Sy seems hard to understand, even though (before the threat of violence just mentioned) Nina (Mrs.) Yorkin is tipped off about the adultery (by Sy), she still maintains some family harmony at dinner, showing the way family connections can provide a guideline, consolation, and bulwark against chaos even when there is a “snake” of wrongdoing in its midst. This consolation/bulwark is something Sy, sadly, doesn’t have in his life. Mrs. Yorkin even shows “how much she has in her family” by claiming in emergency-charged tones on the phone, during a moment of near-panic, that she knows her husband is screwing Maya Burson, but the other person on the phone should just try to get him on the phone anyway. So family connection trumps something ostensibly undermining it even there.

(Notice that this happens in a family that, today more than 10 years ago, many would decry as—in their looks and in their home—hopelessly shallow and as burnished and almost-unbelievable as a glossy layout in an upscale lifestyle magazine. The father is able to support what lifestyle they have from his owning, at a moderately young age, his own business—where the woman with whom he has the affair also works.)

But there is something a little fake about Nina Yorkin’s staunch tone here, as if it’s from a rather corny TV action movie.

What about Sy threatening his boss?

It’s a vignette that maybe takes the portrait of Sy a little darker than Romanek otherwise tends to provide overall, when—after having left his job on its last day—Sy takes a series of photos of his boss’s daughter (playing in her backyard), and like an early version of motion pictures—as the boss finds himself—when you flip through the photos quickly from front to back, you see an effect like someone is zooming in on the girl.

Today, if a parent got a set of photos like this, no one would blame him or her for calling the police. Why does Sy do this, when he seems decent enough so much of the time? One could suppose that maybe he wants to get caught once he has come to terms, per his own lights, with Will Yorkin and Maya Burson, but it’s unclear is this really is his motivation.

Sy is probably the saddest victim here

And we find late in the film—not to give away too much—that Sy is as obsessive, and photo-conscious, as he is because he himself, as he claims (we don’t see proof), has been subjected to abuse as a child involving photography by his father. Viewers should compare what he says to the main investigating police officer (Eriq La Salle) with what Sy subjected Mr. Yorkin and Maya Burson to in the hotel room.

And thus, Sy seems “totally gone weird” in the police interrogation room, which is sterile white, with his arraying before him, like a bunch of solitaire cards, photos he took at the hotel of the climax of the story, odd photos of random sights in his hotel room. This is something a little kid or an eccentric might do. But instead of seeming like the creeping-out Norman Bates at the end of Psycho, who is wrapped in a blanket in a police holding cell with his thoughts voiced in a Mrs. Bates old-woman’s manner, we actually feel for Sy in his own police-station anticlimax. He seems, to adapt a line from King Lear, “more sinned against than sinning.” This film ends up decrying not so much the depredations of a stalker in the form of Sy Parrish, as it does the victimization of a guy like Sy, not least by the image-conscious and depersonalizing nature of modern American society.

And what helped bring this off is Williams’ quiet, competent, winning acting.

Movie break (Summer Lite): Woody turns out Hollywood-acknowledging fare: The Curse of the Jade Scorpion (2001) and Hollywood Ending (2002)

My varied views on these also-rans is pretty much the opposite of Allen’s varied views, with one worth a look, the other not really

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 opinion
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
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,” with Waxman rejoining that love accounts for the other third.)

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 during shooting) while the lawsuit was wrapping up. I could actually be very sympathetic to Allen if his anxiety (or whatever) tied to the lawsuit helps explains his boring performances in Hollywood Ending and Anything Else. It would help explain, though it might not allow us to like the films better.

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)

A bibliography to clear up confusion, and to dispel some darkness

It came to my attention there is information online that may confuse people about what books of mine that I’ve talked about that do, or could, come from Bootstrap Editorial Services, my informally established publishing-related service (with trade name locally registered in 1998). Other information on my books is more scattered. [Edit below 4/2/15. Edits 5/11/15. Edit 1/19/16. Edit 8/28/16.]

So, to keep it simple:

The novel A Transient is out of print. It has an ISBN (10-digit form, 0-9674300-0-3) and is noted in the U.S. Copyright Office as being copyrighted 1988 and 1999. I’ve considered doing a new edition of it, with added material, but this is not specifically in the works right now.

The novel The Folder Hunt has an ISBN (13-digit form, 978-0-9674300-1-0) and the release date of June 2012. Some promotional information on it is here. (A blog entry from May 2012 on it is here.) As I said some weeks ago here, under the subhead “Caveat about another book,” a WordPress pdf, dated March 1, 2014, that alleges to contain the book is not mine and is, to all appearances, fraudulent. [Update 5/11/15: The same can be said about any other supposed pdfs for The Folder Hunt you see in search results, whatever their date.] The book is not in such a state as can be in one pdf—because of mechanicals that contribute to its production and the fact it has been advertised as print-only from the beginning (and is print-on-demand).

The short novel Professional Help, which has been listed in Google Books, is currently not available. A statement about it was posted in June 2012.

The book on the 2007-2010 lawsuit Bauer v. Glatzer et al., which has an early title Second Thoughts and another title for a later version, The Representative, has been made available online as a public service. A version can be seen here. (For a blog entry on the lawsuit, see here. For a pdf of the court decision involving me, see here. Note two errors in the decision: the judge says I had a blog, which wasn’t true in 2008 or before; and she refers to the Turf v. Bergen Record case as from 1955, when it was from 1995.)

I made a statement on the memoir The Temps; this book is not thereby announced as available, in full, at any foreseeable time to the public. Parts may be made available, including in not-far-off months.

As for the project The Revenant, this has a release date of June 2015 as included in a BowkerLink listing. Some information on it is included in the announcement on The Temps just noted, and also here. Further information on it will be released when appropriate, and the book may be available in parts depending on consumer interest. [Update 4/2/15: The release date of The Revenant has been postponed to a date uncertain in 2016. Update 1/19/16: BowkerLink information had inadvertently included a release date of Jan. 1, 2016, when I had only meant it to be "2016." This has been changed to Dec. 31, 2016, in view of the fact that the actual release date for 2016 is still uncertain, and may be changed again. Update 8/28/16: Publication of this book has been canceled. Further information is to come.]

People who want further information on the above books, with an eye to purchase or serious requests for more information, may contact me at bootstrp@warwick.net (“bootstrap” without the “a”) or write P.O. Box 146, New Milford, NY 10959.

Movie break (Summer Lite): Woody’s take on a dedicated jazz artist with a slovenly personal life: Sweet and Lowdown (1999)

Tenth in a series: Post–Soviet Union Adventure, Days of Clintons Past: A recollection of cultural ephemera of the 1990s

Also fits this series:

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

Subsections below:

A few factors heighten this film’s appeal
A tour de force of acting fills out the central rogue
Passing details: faces familiar to you, and a location not alien to me
For a modern “Emmet Ray,” check out Clapton’s autobio—not as a focus of comedy
 

[An adaptation of this entry may be available in a non-blog form some months from now.]

This film represents something of a sea change for Woody Allen’s producing team and circumstances, and results in an interesting fact: With his frequent or constant associates of (especially) Carlo Di Palma as cinematographer, Susan E. Morse as film editor, Santo Loquasto with production design, his films tended (by the mid-1990s) to have a bit of a distant look—almost like a play being performed on a stage, which in a sense they were. With his verbiage-heavy scripts and his favoring master shots to get scenes done—and with his director’s conceptualization of “mounting” a film (cf. how he described producing Match Point in Eric Lax, Conversations with Woody Allen [Knopf, 2007], p. 252)—it’s no wonder his films tended to look (at times) like filmed plays, through about 1997, whether his fans liked this or not.

In 1996, presumably the year that Deconstructing Harry was produced, Allen used Carlo Di Palma for the last time. He used cinematographer Sven Nykvist for Celebrity (1998) (which was in black-and-white). Also, Celebrity was the last film for which he had the services of editor Susan Morse.

By 1999, changes included use of a new editor, Alisa Lepselter, who would remain his film editor through today. Also, maybe more noticeably to viewers, he would start a practice, maybe due to sheer circumstance beyond his full control, of using a changing series of cinematographers. For 1999’s Sweet and Lowdown, this was Zhao Fei, who would be with him through three films.

As it happened, though this film came within the series produced by Jean Doumanian (see my reviews of Bullets Over Broadway on my other blog and of Mighty Aphrodite on this blog for some information on her), it marks, perhaps, something of a sea change in this way: while, from now on, his films are hit or miss, when they hit, they can have a direct, almost intuitive appeal, and with a feel as if they aren’t a typical Allen film, compared to the style he set up in the long period (1986-97) in which he mostly used cinematographer Di Palma.

 

A few factors heighten this film’s appeal

The visual look of this film is one thing that makes it unusually appealing, viscerally attractive, for a film of Allen’s of the 1990s.

Two other factors that contribute to this include the casual, earthy story—the script is derived from an old screenplay of Allen’s called The Jazz Baby (see Lax, p. 128), first done in the early 1970s when Allen was asked by United Artists for a film to follow Take the Money and Run (1969), and he offered the not-load-of-jokes Jazz Baby—which, as it happened, shocked the execs at UA, who expected another comic romp from him. Instead, he amenably wrote Bananas (Lax p. 336).

Though he reworked the old Jazz Baby script for production in presumably 1998, this story, it seems to me, has hallmarks of his early-1970s work, a sort of peripatetic nature and casual, “hip” quality that may remind us of Bananas (1971) and Sleeper (1973). Actually, this quality coheres with what I think is a fault of this film, too, that the story seems to wander after a while, which is one flaw highlighted in such a review as Leonard Maltin’s.

To put it another way: this film seems to succeed in terms of conveying an unadulterated enthusiasm for a kind of music and the time in which it was in ferment, and there are lots of nice little ideas (for specific exchanges, or vignettes), but the eventual drift of the story doesn’t make it quite as successful as Zelig or Broadway Danny Rose, with which (in Allen’s oeuvre) it could easily be compared.

 

A tour de force of acting fills out the central rogue

The last factor that makes this film appeal coheres with the fact that, wandering or not, it offers a character study, and this is immeasurably aided by the performance of Sean Penn as jazz guitarist Emmet Ray, for which he won an Oscar in a leading role for the 1999 season. In fact, Sean’s performance is the one thing that makes us consistently come back to this film for another look, along with the tasty period-piece details.

Penn is like Jack Nicholson, whose grasp of the acting craft is shown in his (Nicholson’s) remarking in DVD comments for the Nancy Meyers-directed Something’s Gotta Give (2003) that, not meant to be a trivial truism, film is an art form centered on motion. Given the factor of motion, a good actor fills each moment with something of interest. And Penn, for his part, knows this. No matter how slovenly a character Emmet Ray is, and no matter how homely Penn himself may seem, what grips our attention is Penn’s way of giving his character life at every moment. There is no dull spell where he is just standing disengaged.

Whether there was a real jazz guitarist named Emmet Ray is unclear. The film departs from Allen’s usual initial-titles style by including printed titles, before anything else, limited to conveying supposed facts about Ray, as if he had been real. Google doesn’t seem able to say whether Ray was real, but that may not mean he wasn’t. Allen, partly as if to give the film a trademark touch, turns up as the first of several talking heads (à la Zelig [1983]), and with his own comments starting rather banal, he speaks as if Ray was one of the greatest guitarists of his time (as well as being a “funny” character)—while the very best jazz guitarist is Django Reinhardt. The latter, definitely a real person, is importantly alluded to in this film (as a sort-of-competitor and idol for Ray), including in a supposed appearance in an anecdote (though this, per the film’s own fictional conceits, may have been apocryphal). The talking heads even include Nat Hentoff, who was profiled in a New York Times article in late June of this year. Such a touch seems to convey Ray was real. But was he?

It may not matter, because the character study that is the film—of flaws, foibles, career stumbles, and all—seems worthwhile for savoring in its own right. Ray appears to have been a cad in most ways—he was a kleptomaniac, he was financially irresponsible, and he was terrible with women, making this latter point clear in no unsubtle way (with remarks like [or similar to] “I love ’em and leave ’em”). His treatment of the mute girlfriend Hattie, played by Samantha Morton, in the one other lengthy and laudable performance in this film, is so reprehensible late in their association that we would feel bad for her no matter how unredeeming she might strike us in other ways.

But Penn makes Ray interesting to see in action—not least for his performance on his catch-as-catch-can times on stage, where Ray seems most reliably to prove himself a worthwhile human being (if only in that intermittent way). Penn, as I’ve suggested, is so interesting an actor to watch that he could probably make a gripping thespian exercise out of sitting on a toilet. We follow where his Ray is headed even as the film’s story starts to ramble.

As it happens, it is finally some narrated “telling not showing” by Allen and another commenter that relates that, in some remote, vaguely documented reaches of the 1930s, Ray finally got to be, if only briefly, as good as Django Reinhardt—though this coincided with a suggested downturn in his life, and hence it’s possible Ray only ascended to this level in proportion to his personal suffering’s increased, which is a correlation not uncommon among artists.

 

Passing details: faces familiar to you, and a location not alien to me

Actors in bit parts: A series of familiar faces pass through in this film, including as a sort of shady manager or such Anthony LaPaglia, who would turn up as a TV actor playing a Mafioso named Little Caesar in Analyze That (2002). (As I said regarding Bullets Over Broadway, actors in minor parts who would later feature in Mafia works through the mid-2000s—including Analyze This [1999] and cable TV’s The Sopranos—pass through Allen’s films of this period, including a few—playing gym workers—in Mighty Aphrodite.)

John Waters, the film director of shock works like Pink Flamingos (1972), turns up briefly in Sweet and Lowdown as a manager of sorts for Ray.

A bit of trivia on a location: I thought this film was set in the New York City area, though the Wikipedia article on it says the fictional setting was Chicago and California (while Lax, p. 207, notes the additional fictional locales of New York and Atlantic City); of course, given Allen’s likely production parameters, the film was shot in New York and New Jersey. But one ironic outcome of its relatively confined shooting location is this: In a situation where Emmet, after having undergone a bender involving use of some smokable drug, ends up in a camping-like area, and needs a taxi to get home (which seems to end up costing him about $900), he orients himself to location in his bedroom by picking up a brochure and reading “East Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania,” or “Stroudsburg” (mentioned later). These two towns, in fact (yes, there is an East Stroudsburg and another without the “East”), are on the eastern edge of Pennsylvania, toward the north, and a little over an hour from where I live, and I’ve been there. And there are resort amenities there.

I had originally thought Emmet had been transported to East Stroudsburg after a night of partying “too hard” in the New York area. But to analyze the likely production situation and infer the rationale for a story detail: If Allen had meant the story location prior to the campground scene to be in Chicago or New York, I don’t know; but much more likely, he might have had to mention East Stroudsburg as the result of a producing deal, insofar as he was allowed to film at a campground there. Then, whether the resultant fictional conceit is that Emmet was mysteriously (when not in full control of his senses) transported from Chicago all the way to East Stroudsburg, I’m not fully sure. If so, that would explain the $900 taxi tab (in 1930s dollars).

##

For a modern “Emmet Ray,” check out Clapton’s autobio—not as a focus of comedy

This film features some played guitar music, and it’s nice for this. Penn even pretends to play guitar along with pre-recorded music, and is better at faking this than many actors are. Having played a guitar for 30+ years (1977-2009) myself (I reserve further comment on this—I’m like a lot of us in this way: there are many who play a guitar only passably, not great), I can say Penn looks pretty good here, but you can tell he’s faking it when the particular patch of music you hear would be further up on the guitar neck than where his fingers are. And also, with some figures you hear played, his fingering is, temporarily, not quite right. But these are minor quibbles: the music offered in the film (some is played on an acoustic guitar amplified with a specially inserted “pickup,” though in the film the acoustic guitar is shown unamplified) is fine to listen to.

For a book on a great guitarist that has its own charms despite the occasionally dissolute nature of his life, check out Clapton: The Autobiography by blues-rock guitarist Eric Clapton (Broadway Books, 2007). Of the three great electric guitarists who came out of the 1960s group the Yardbirds—the others are Jimmy Page and Jeff Beck—Clapton has been most the blues purist.

In his autobio, in accessible enough prose (that he wrote himself), Clapton recounts his life, not dwelling on anything in too much detail, with chapters segmented according to the phases of his career rock fans know so well: his participation in the groups John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, the Yardbirds, Cream, and Blind Faith; and his solo years, including his somewhat lengthy period in the early 1970s of having been (allegedly) idle due to addiction issues. I read this book a few years ago, everything except the final chapter or so, which is on his most recent life.

The reason for my not finishing was at least partly the general nature of this book: like many recovering addicts, Clapton has a way of making his life seem the way Garry Wills has described St. Augustine with respect to the latter’s Confessions (or Testimony as Wills offered as a new title in a book Wills wrote on that ancient text): the story is more interesting when the addict is suffering, and becomes distinctly less interesting when the person has found God, or whatever other level on which he has obtained a relief from his addiction based on a profound altering of personality and priorities. I was struck by how, as he recounts it, in his addiction years Clapton seemed to be a failure in just about every way except in his guitar playing, which latter condition, of course, is how his fans primarily knew him at the height of his fame in the 1960s and 1970s. Even his close romantic attachments were ruined by his addictions (to drugs and alcohol). I wouldn’t want to strongly second-guess his reading of himself, but I’ve wondered if he isn’t a little hard on himself regarding his addiction years.

In any event, when Clapton gets to his most recent, “recovered” life, his talk about himself and his life struck me as about as exciting as watching an old man use a table saw. He may be content and able to raise a young child in a stable home post-recovery, but as an artist—at least as  his autobio reflects—he seems to have gotten well past his peak. I liked his playing at the 12-12-12 concert in December 2012—it was among the very few “really rocking” moments in what I saw in that on TV. Now I hear he’s planning to retire, apparently in part because of physical ailments. That’s his prerogative, and we have his old recordings to enjoy from when he was at his peak.