Woody Allen loves to make, and remake, the same story--sometimes as a comedy, sometimes as a drama, sometimes as both. Joe Queenan (and just about everybody else) likes the earlier, funnier films.
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In 1980 Woody Allen made an amusing but cynical film called Stardust Memories about a famous director who is sick of hearing his fans say, "We enjoy your films, particularly the early, funny ones." Master of understatement that he is, Allen was successful in conveying his middle-aged angst to his admirers. But he was not successful in persuading them to stop saying, "We enjoy your films, particularly the early, funny ones." The most that the folks who had been with him since Take the Money and Run were willing to do was award him a cultural Purple Heart for valor in a doomed cause (Interiors). But after the dismal failure of that 1978 hooterama, his first foray into "serious" cinema, most folks figured the guy would go back to his bread and butter, or, as he says in What's Up, Tiger Lily? to his "various breads, and various butters" for good.
But he didn't, and he hasn't. Though he occasionally makes fine, entertaining, funny movies such as Zelig and The Purple Rose of Cairo, If you take your eyes off the Woodster for five minutes he'll be right back to the suicidal interior decorators and the blind rabbis dancing with brides.
The sad fact is, those extraterrestrials in Stardust Memories had this guy pegged. "You wanna do mankind a real service?" they say. "Tell funnier jokes." You tell him, guys. What mankind needs is Howard Cosell broadcasting a live presidential assassination. What mankind does not need is a woman in a restaurant approaching Gena Rowlands to tell her that her lecture on "Ethics and Moral Responsibility" changed her life. What mankind needs are burglars being interrupted in mid-heist by a telephone call from "Name That Tune." What mankind does not need is Mariel Hemingway leaving a message on Woody's answering machine telling him that Grand Illusion is being shown on TV that evening. What mankind does need are jokes like "Don't knock masturbation; it's sex with some-one I love." And "Those who can't...teach, and those who can't teach, teach gym." What mankind does not need are lines like: "I accept your condemnation," and "Did you read my novel?"
In recent years, Allen seems to have agreed to com-promise, alleviating the Sturm und Drang of his melo-dramas like Hannah and Her Sisters and Crimes and Misdemeanors with some high-octane comic material. These hybrids are amusing, but they don't quite pull it off be-cause while the comic material rings true, the dramatic material often seems stiff, rehearsed, self-conscious, faked. Woody Allen declaring that show business is "worse than dog-eat-dog; it's dog-doesn't-return-other-dog's-phone-calls" is hilarious. Michael Caine ruminating about marriage, pro-creation, or anything is not.
The bitter truth, which has been repeated time and again by critics far wiser and better dressed than I, is that none of Woody Allen's later movies is as clever, entertaining, or memorable as the early films--_Sleeper_, Love and Death, Bananas, and Take the Money and Run--because, like Jimi Hendrix, the Ramones, and even the Beatles, the more Allen learns about his craft, the less fun he is to be around. But, with the exception of the deadly Interiors, the claustrophobic September (Interiors II), and the dreary Another Woman, all of his films are worth seeing, if only because this is the age of John Hughes, John Milius, John Candy, Jo(h)n Peters, John Belushi's brother, and various people named Adrian. Woody Allen, whatever his failings, does not make movies for morons. Most directors do. Of course, most directors are morons.
A great writer, a great comedian, a great comic actor, and a great employer of great Swedish cameramen, Woody Allen is as good a director as a person can be without being great--like Bergman or Kurosawa or Fellini or Renoir or any of those other guys who never got to work with Diane Keaton. Because his films are literate, intelligent, visually opulent, beautifully played, and filled with some of the best jokes ever ("Sex and death. Two things that come once in a lifetime. But at least after death you're not nauseous"), Woody Allen's die-hard fans have been willing to gloss over the fact that he keeps making the same movie, with the same plot lines, the same soundtrack, the same settings, the same actors, the same jokes about postcoital nausea, and the same pretentious references to Kierkegaard for 25 years.
Woody won't let you forget the geniuses whose heights he aspires to: he has long exhibited a self-conscious need to refer in his films to the work of his betters, often showing snippets of their movies in his. Why? One theory is that Woody Allen has never outgrown his formative intellectual experiences at City College and at New York University, both of which he attended for one year. That's why one can say that his movies are, in the best possible sense of the word, "sophomoric."
The humorous but superficial conversations involving Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, McLuhan, etc., that occur again and again throughout Allen's films are not really the way grown-up pretentious people talk in New York, but rather the way pretentious college kids talk every-where. (This was particularly true in the '50s and '60s when students caught anywhere in North America without a copy of Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha or The Glass Bead Game were abducted by the Weathermen, hacked to pieces, and buried in swamps.) There is no evidence that Allen has ever read the philosophers he cites, but even if he has, he certainly doesn't attempt to incorporate any of their theories into what are fundamentally commercial films. (I am certainly not suggesting that this would be a good idea.) The references are thrown out as jokes or, more often, as window dressing. This passion for the hifalutin resembles the healthy fascination with esoterica that many college students feel when they are first introduced to the great books and can stop reading Harlan Ellison. But the references have no other importance; they're simply there to create a mood of serious jejunitude and total heaviosity.
The influence of the writers, artists, and composers a student is exposed to in those first two years of college surfaces again and again in Allen's films: the Emily Dickinson verse-trading in Crimes, the Edna St. Vincent Millay volume poised on Mia Farrow's nightstand in Alice, the e.e. cummings balderdash in Hannah, the two-credit Classical Music Appreciation selections Allen uses in Crimes, Hannah, and Love and Death. The idea of having a character escape from a film (The Purple Rose of Cairo), thought by others to derive from the old Buster Keaton film Sherlock, Jr., in fact comes directly from Luigi Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author, a staple of those Introduction to Western Drama courses you get in your second year of college (maybe this is where Keaton got it, too). The scene where Allen recovers from a suicide attempt by going to see a Marx Brothers movie is a direct lift from the first part of Albert Camus' The Stranger, where the protagonist Meursault, after returning from his mother's funeral, goes to see a movie by the French Charlie Chaplin, Fernandel. (Camus' role in Western Civilization is largely to serve as a bridge over which confused teenage boys can pass from the adolescent sass of J.D. Salinger to the mature full-blooded nihilism of Franz Kafka.) Camus, like Woody, was a master of Posing the Big Questions, as if this were the same as Presenting the Big Answers. He was French, of course.
This use of other people's material as a crutch runs through-out Allen's work, from excerpting famous movies to showing photographs of landmark buildings to the incessant use of established Jazz Age classics on his soundtracks. Allen's whole obsession with George Gershwin and Benny Goodman and Artie Shaw and the rest of that crew is a trifle unsettling. Maybe he's a snob or maybe he's too cheap to hire Maurice Jarre, but after 17 virtually interchangeable soundtracks the joke is starting to wear thin. Instead of commissioning a brand-new soundtrack that would seek to evoke emotions related to the images on the screen, Allen uses enormously famous pieces of music that already have their own emotional connotations, and then seeks to hitch a ride on them. Although this may be more sophisticated than using Bon Jovi's Greatest Hits or the Best of the Temptin' Temptations, it's still cheating. It's borrowing from other people's battle-tested, well-established work to achieve artistic objectives through the loudspeakers that you're supposed to be achieving through the lens.
And it's incredibly anachronistic. A musician himself and a big-time Louis Armstrong fan, Woody Allen's most profound musical influence is probably the rhumba. (His only experiment with hip music was The Lovin' Spoonful in What's Up, Tiger Lily? The Lovin' Spoonful were never hip.) Allen is clearly one of those people who was born longing for the good old days, hearkening back to the music of an earlier, simpler era (when folks only had the Depression and the Gestapo to worry about). But unlike Martin Scorsese, who fills his films with music that was popular when he was young, Woody Allen fills his movies with music that was popular when his parents were young.
Moreover, you're not allowed to be in a Woody Allen movie unless you're the sort of person who always goes over to the turntable to put on an Art Tatum record. The rare characters who express any interest in music recorded more recently than Benny Goodman's "Stompin' at the Savoy" are treated as hopeless buffoons: Shelley Duvall as a starstruck Dylan fan in Annie Hall, Dianne Wiest as a less-than-believable punk rock enthusiast in Hannah. It's worth noting that Wiest eventually undergoes an intellectual conversion from the Duke of Earl to the Duke of Ellington, hooking up with Allen in the jazz section of Tower Records (though she's carrying a copy of "Pagliacci"), while Allen abandons Duvall in bed so he can go kill a giant spider at Diane Keaton's apartment. A fitting fate for anyone who would rather listen to Bobby Dylan than Bobby Short. Barbarian slut.
Don't get me wrong. I find Allen's films enormously appealing, and one of the reasons Allen's fans like him so much is that in his own films he gets to fire off all the snappy comebacks we wish we could uncork in real life, but never can because we don't have him as our scriptwriter--and because the people we wish to insult have tattoos. Allen, like Groucho before him, gets to mercilessly tee off on his victims, and they just have to sit there and take it. Of course, Allen's victims do not have tattoos. Like Tom Wolfe, the only other great American satirist of the past quarter-century, Allen is one of the most accomplished hypocrites of our time, earning his living by pillorying the social milieu in which he is clearly most comfortable, eviscerating people who are obviously his dinner companions.
The logical result of this two-facedness is the absurd finale in Alice, where the wealthy Mia Farrow abandons her Upper East Side penthouse life to visit Mother Teresa, then chooses to raise her kids in the slums. One anxiously awaits the moment when Moishe's Movers pull up in front of the Allen-Farrow Central Park East digs to effect their decampment to the more spiritually uplifting environs of the Lower East Side. One anxiously awaits that. One also anxiously awaits the moment when Woody and his lefty uptown buddies abandon their Park Avenue apartments, grab some baseball bats and go over to Jersey to break up a Neo-Nazi rally instead of writing scathing satirical Op-Ed pieces in The New York Times. One very anxiously waits that.
One of the greatest shocks caused by the interminable Interiors was the public's realization that Woody Allen, the Ingmar Bergman Imitator, could show such compassion for the very same people that Woody Allen, the Satirist, had torn to shreds in his earlier films. How could we have known while watching Sleeper that when Diane Keaton played an airhead poetess so dumb she had to be told that butterflies do not turn into caterpillars, she was really only rehearsing her role as a pretentious poetess in Interiors? And how could we have known when Allen was heaping abuse on self-centered artists in his early films that in Interiors he would introduce us to the dominant theme in most of his subsequent work: that the greatest torment a human being can suffer is not death or blinding or the loss of a child or leprosy or even eviction from one's co-op, but not being able to express oneself artistically.
Characters afflicted with this horrid curse include Sam Waterston, the aspiring novelist of September, and Dianne Wiest, who, in addition to being a failed actress in Hannah, is also a failed screenplay writer in that same dull movie. Then there's Woody himself as a failed documentary filmmaker in Crimes, as a frustrated TV show writer in Manhattan, and as a frustrated stand-up comic in Annie Hall. We also have a failed writer (Diane Keaton) in Manhattan, a frustrated singer (Keaton again) in Annie Hall and a failed TV writer (Farrow) in Alice. New York is in fact a city filled with failed writers, dancers and musicians, but most of them have the good grace to die or go to work for Merrill Lynch or something. In Woody's universe, they simply hang around the Museum of Modern Art and whine.
What is one to do in a world where it is so hard to achieve artistic success? Well, you can always try sleeping with your best friend's wife or lover (Play It Again, Sam_; Manhattan; A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy; September). If that doesn't work, try sleeping with your wife's sister (Interiors, Hannah and Her Sisters, Alice/i>). And if that still doesn't work, you might consider suicide (Interiors, Crimes, Hannah). Or, in a pinch, you could always take in a flick. After attempting suicide in Hannah and Her Sisters, Allen is restored to what passes for sanity by going to a Marx Brothers movie. Allen, who grew up in the 1940s, belongs to the first generation of Americans to regard films as something other than mere diversions. (This is an idea imported from France, and like most ideas imported from France, it is basically stupid.) "You've seen too many movies," Martin Landau says in Crimes and Misdemeanors. Seen too many movies? Hell, he makes too many movies--21 and counting.
The movies about movies, the quotations from movies, the parodies of movies, the obsession of characters in the movies with movies (usually The Sorrow and the Pity) make Woody Allen seem more like an archivist or a rap sampler than a director. What, after all, are his movies about? In the great films by Renoir, Fellini, Kurosawa, Bergman, Ford, Godard, and Satyajit Ray, the characters are concerned with such issues as war, fate, fascism, injustice, poverty, deceit, betrayal, and having one hell of a good time with another human being. They are not obsessed with getting to the Bleecker Street Cinema's 2:35 showing of Grand Illusion so they'll still have enough time to screw their neurotic sister-in-law before schlep-ping uptown to see the 6:45 showing of Rules of the Game at the Thalia. One of the major differences between Ingmar Bergman and Woody Allen is that Ingmar Bergman's characters have never seen Kurosawa's films.
In one sense, what we've got on our hands here are Lite Foreign Films: pretentious but witty fare leavened by pleasant music and some good jokes. In another sense, we've got the world's highest-class nostalgia act. With its sex-without-genitalia-or-even-under-wear and its lack of political conviction, the Woody Allen universe makes Fred and Ginger's look like Hiroshima. Consider Woody Allen's Manhattan. Although New York is one of the most ethnically rambunctious cities in the world, there are virtually no blacks or Hispanics in his movies, and those who do appear are maids, doormen, masseurs, convicts or Bobby Short. There's virtually no violence in Woody Allen movies: the murder in Crimes is carried off with such taste and civility it looks like Noel Coward broke in and brained Anjelica Huston; and the botched assault on Kristin Griffith in Interiors still gets my vote for Least Successful Cinematic Rape/1970-79 Division.
Attempts to deal with more serious matters are often jarring, as in the thoroughly unconvincing scene in Crimes when Allen reacts to the news that a man his sister met through the personals has tied her up and defecated on her. It is fair to say that Allen, a kindly, gentle soul, has no real appetite for unpleasantness, which is why comparisons to Bergman are so ludicrously inappropriate. Bergman is all about toads in the bread loaves, defiled virgins, flogged schoolchildren, guys in black cloaks who want to play chess. When push comes to shove, Woody Allen can never pull the trigger, which is why Broadway Danny Rose forgives the two-timing Tina Vitale; which is why Cecilia in The Purple Rose of Cairo ends up smiling at the movie screen like an idiot. The only thing Woody Allen has in common with Ingmar Bergman is Sven Nykvist.
Woody Allen's problem is that he is trying to make movies with a message when all he really has to work with is an attitude. Woody Allen's idea of serious filmmaking is to pose the big questions, then turn around and admit that he really doesn't have any answers. He has done this time and again, and he's not getting any closer to being Tolstoy. A century that has lived through Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin, and Pol Pot doesn't really need any smart-ass New York film-maker to tell it that life isn't fair. And a society with AIDS, crack babies, and institutionalized poverty could care less about women in furs who want to meet Mother Teresa.
Woody Allen is a big New York Knicks fan, but the Knicks suck, so let's finish up with an anecdote about the Chicago Bulls. Michael Jordan, captain of the Bulls, is the greatest basketball player to ever play the game, a man who can literally do anything with a round ball. Is Michael Jordan satisfied with being the world's greatest basketball player? Of course not; he wants to become golfer. Fine. But when Michael Jordan does hang up his jock and starts slicing the ball into the water trap, he shouldn't be surprised or offended when people say, "We liked you better when you played for the Bulls," or, "Go back to doing what you do best."
Woody Allen is the Michael Jordan of comedy. When he makes a funny film (this includes The Purple Rose of Cairo, Broadway Danny Rose, and Zelig) nobody does it better. When he makes the stuff with the women gazing out the windows and rearranging the minimalist vases, it's time to fetch the sand wedge. And he should stop blaming his fans for reminding him. After getting that early fix from Sleeper, Bananas, Love and Death and Take the Money and Run, we are always waiting for the robot clothiers named Ginsberg & Cohen, for the giant banana peels. We are always waiting for the one-liners about "weird and futuristic" creatures with "the body of a crab and the head of a social worker."
We are always waiting for the Woody Allen who declared that he could never get involved with any religion that advertises in Popular Mechanics, waiting for the "teleological existential atheist" who believed that "there is an intelligence to the universe, with the exception of certain parts of New Jersey." We are always waiting for the cellist in the marching band, for the convict with the soap gun trapped in a thunderstorm, for the man who observed that although "sex without love is an empty experience, as empty experiences go, it's one of the best." The Woody Allen the world needs is not the man who asks "Why are we here?" and "What is the meaning of Life?" but the one who asks, "If Christ was a carpenter, what does he charge for bookshelves?"
And will he take Diner's Club?
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Joe Queenan is a New York-based freelance writer. He wrote about "Young Gums" in our March issue.