Reconstructing Woody

LANCE MANNION HAS A TERRIFIC POST (and interesting discussion going) about Woody Allen's oeuvre on the occasion of the release of Match Point. I haven't seen Match Point yet. Nor have I seen Celebrity, Melinda and Melinda, or Everyone Says I Love You. I've seen all the others, most of them I've seen many, many times. Let me say that despite whatever personal problems he may or may not have, Woody Allen is so brilliant, such a commanding master of his craft, that he makes directing look easy, so easy in fact that I think we viewers have a tendency to denigrate his slightest movies (Midsummer's Night Sex Comedy, for example) too brusquely. When Woody's gone we'll realize how phenomenal he was.

     What's interesting is how divided opinion is on his movies. Lance chooses his favorite Woody movies and those that he hates. It's a testament to the range of Allen's pictures that my list would be almost a complete inverse of Lance's.

Here's Lance's top five:

Annie Hall
Love and Death
Manhattan
Crimes and Misdemeanors
Hannah and Her Sisters

     I have no problems with Annie Hall and Manhattan. They probably are his two best movies. Manhattan in particular is dazzling to watch--with almost a perverse shoving of action into the edges of the 16:9 screen, or even off the screen altogether. And the sequence in the old planetarium is stunning.

     But I think Hannah and Her Sisters is overrated. It's good. Great cast. Excellent character development. But it feels to me like a guy picking an choosing characters, plots and dilemmas from a bunch of old movies he's made and sticking them all together in a new one.

     Crimes and Misdemeanors I like very much, but I have to mark it down more than a little for leaden heavy handedness. Sam Waterson, as the rabbi losing his sight and finally dancing blindly at the end, is just so blatant and stilted as a piece of symbolism that it wouldn't get past a film school professor.

     And Love and Death--Allen's parody of 19th century Russian fiction--to me is a movie that hasn't aged well. I told my 14 year old daughter, who is a film buff and working through a bunch of old Woody flicks, that she didn't even need to bother with it and in fact probably wouldn't get 70% of the jokes. A movie for comp lit majors only.

     Lance also praises The Purple Rose of Cairo and Sweet and Lowdown, two critically acclaimed Allen pictures that I thought were not very good. Sweet and Lowdown in particular was a disappointment given the star (Sean Penn) and the theme (creative insecurity). I got to the end of that movie and wondered why anyone bothered to make it. For me it's in there with Interiors and Another Woman. Actually, I liked Another Woman better

     I do agree with Lance about Deconstructing Harry--maybe Allen's darkest picture and a brilliant one--and Oedipus Wrecks from New York Stories. But among the movies he hates is Alice, one of my favorite Woody flicks, and, I think one of the greatest pieces of American magical realism ever in any medium (and better than Allen's other works in the genre The Purple Rose of Cairo and Zelig) in part because Mia Farrow's performance is fabulous but mostly because the development of her character has real weight as opposed to typical film character development found in the likes of Zelig, development that is merely formal, a device to allow the movie to proceed from beginning to end.

     Finally Lance exempts all the early zany comedies. That's understandable. Few critics would allow that a zany comedy can ever make a great movie, in part because everything in a zany comedy is formal. Character depth, character development, dramatic situations just aren't relevant. (Think about all those great Marx Brothers movies. They all have romantic subplots, and human motives--Groucho wants Margaret Dumont's money--but these are pro forma devices in which to hang gags.)

     But I think Allen's early zany comedies remain his most watchable and influential movies. As a mock documentary Take the Money and Run set the standard ("The men were served one hot meal a day--a bowl of steam"). As a post modern enterprise What's Up Tiger Lily was a radical endeavor. And Bananas, I think, remains Woody's greatest movie, not only because the zany comedy is brilliant, not only because of the consistently hilarious political humor (a rarity for Allen), but also because of the core humanity in the relationship between Fielding Melish and Nancy ("Oh my god, I knew something was missing"). (BTW, I think Hollywood Ending is Allen's funniest movie since the early days.)

     If I were to make a list of Woody Allen must-see movies it would look like this:

Bananas
Take the Money and Run
Annie Hall
Manhattan
Stardust Memories
Alice
Deconstructing Harry

With Crimes and Misdemeanors as a flawed masterpiece perhaps to be supplanted by Match Point, which from most accounts is a rewrite of the first movie's themes.

Comments

[Lance Mannion]

Oh yeah? Oh yeah? Well, the only thing I have to say to you, Chervokas, is...

I'm going to have to watch Alice again. You've got me thinking.

I don't remember Waterson in C and M anywheres near as much as Alan Alda's ebullient egomaniac and Woody's pathetic jealousy of him. That's the closest Allen came to a real acting job before Harry. I read that he had Elliot Gould signed to play Harry but he had to drop out and Allen stepped in very late in the game.

I didn't exactly exempt the zany comedies, as refuse to rate them. They have their own special place in my heart.

[Lance Mannion]

PS. Great title for the post!

[chervokas]

Well, you DID call the zany comedies "apprentice works" and "amateurish."!

What it seems everyone agrees on is the troika of Annie Hall, Manhattan, and Stardust Memories, and after that, Deconstructing Harry.

And, I still submit, the zany comedies

[chervokas]

I'm alone it seems in prefering Alice to the other magical realist movies (Purple Rose, Zelig). But that's okay. I'm right and everybody else is wrong. Hee hee!

[sean]

I haven't thought about Allen seriously in years because he's been throwing away the remainder of his "talent" on Celebrity, Melinda and Melinda and Everyone Says I Love You, and other confections like Don't Drink The Water, and Manhattan Murder Mystery, Mighty Aphrodite (stop me when you've heard enough), since oh, about 1990.
Though he's always been funny, he's always had a smug sense of his own superiority (which of course doesn't matter until it begins to taint the work, which it has for years), most of his Serious and Important work (you mentioned Hannah And Her Sisters, and the heavy handed aspects of Crimes and Misdemeanors)has a self-inflated pomposity, and he's never quite gotten over his Bergman fixation/obsession, (Oedipus Wrecks was at least a comic reprieve from that), even going so far as hiring Bergman's cinematographer Sven Nykvist to shoot four films that any capable DP could've done.
That said I agree with you about his early movies: Bananas is not only irreverent, and almost improvisational(in many ways the movie feels unscripted) but has a warmth that finally surprises.
I have yet to see Match Point, but I suppose I will eventually. There's too much life in current cinema to care much about Woody's

[Brouhaha]

I'll never forget Sleeper and Bananas, but that's probably just me.

You say "With Crimes and Misdemeanors as a flawed masterpiece perhaps to be supplanted by Match Point, which from most accounts is a rewrite of the first movie's themes."

Calling it a simple "rewrite" is a very innocuous interpretation, Jason... Instead, I have speculated that the highly unusual repetition of this dark theme of unpunished murder is nothing less than Woody's secret confession in front of millions of moviegoers:

http://brouhaha.blogs.com/brouhaha/2006/01/woody_could_he_.html

Whom did Woody' kill? ;-)

[chervokas]

Sean- I'm not really a film buff. I never fell in love w/ the medium the way believers do so I can't speak to what is or isn't broadly interesting in film today (other than the fact that documentaries seem to be the new rock and roll. I have some old friends who are prominent documentarians and they definitely are in the sweet spot).

But I am an American arts and culture buff, and I am a big Woody fan. Like I said in my post, I think Woody Allen is so good, and he makes it look so easy, and, in addition, he makes movies so often, that we tend to undervalue even his confections.

I think something happens w/ mature artist in all media. After the breakthroughs of their youth, their work seems to drift through stages--repeating old work, trying on genres (I think about those Neil Young albums in the 1980s, and about all those little Woody genre pix), and finally settling into a mature style and approach that inevitably lacks the fire of the early work, but is rewarding on it's own terms, w/o comparison to the artist's own earlier work or contemporary work by younger artists. (It didn't happen to Beethoven, but he may be one of the exceptions.)

Both the marketplace and fans, in a perpetual quest for new kicks, tend to marginalize this mature work. I've been trying, in recent years, not to give into the temptation to value novelty above most other artistic virtues and its allowed me to think about latter day work of the greats (Dylan's Love & Theft comes to mind) with a greater appreciation.

That said, obviously Allen's best work is concentrated in the late 70s/early 80s, and really excellent mature work has been thinner. Still, Alice and Deconstructing Harry are both great. I really love Hollywood Ending. I wouldn't call it great, but it's freakin' hilarious. And perhaps I'm too hard on Hannah...(and similarly others on Match Point)....Hannah was a good movie and I disliked it only because I was so familiar w/ previous work on similar themes. But if an artist revisits a theme, but does it better, deeper, and w/ greater artistic elegance the second time around, is that such a sin? That's a question I ask myself.

[chervokas]

Hee hee--very funny, who did Woody kill....maybe he was the real killer that OJ has been searching for all these years!

[Stevelman]

And never has a comic been more ripped off without footnote then Allen: as much as everybody loves "Curb your Enthusiasm," you may as well attribute Larry's half-man half-nebbish schtick to "the school of Woody Allen" in the same way art pupils copied their masters. As much as I laughed out loud to Larry David's NY Times editorial on Brokeback Mountain, he might as well have signed it "Woody Allen." Same for Richard Lewis by the way. For fans of comedy and Woody Allen, check out his earlier stand up records to see how it all started with clear homage to Lenny Bruce.

[Stevelman]

This has prompted me to think about my favorite Woody movie, and though I don't have an immediate answer, my favorite scene would have to be from "Manhattan" where Woody takes stock of those things that make life worth living. Baseball, the crabs at Sam Wo's, Ingmar Bergman movies, and finally Tracy's face (I missed a few). Clearly not so funny as "How much for this copy of "orgasm" this man wants to buy a copy!" and not so intellectual as later work, but this is what I would watch again if I saw it while flipping channels.
P.S.Chervokas, do you remember sitting through an all day Allen festival at the "New Yorker" on W. 91st about 27 years ago?

[daveminnj]

indulgent, that's the word i'm looking for.
woody allen has been limiting and circumscribing his actors now for close to 20 years. firing quirky ones- michael keaton, emily lloyd- and insisting on toneless, characterless performances from great ones-claire bloom, william hurt,liam neeson-
or insisting on annoying woody allen impressions from fine young actors who have
elsewhere given much more-john cusack, kenneth branaugh.

i think it is not a coincidence that his most watchable movies of the last 20 years
came when he actually let the actors breathe- dianne wiest in hannah, myra sorvino in mighty aphrodite, judy davis in everything.

i always wondered how jim morrison would have turned out if he hadn't died young.
this may seem counterintuitive, but i think he would have landed in the same midlife funk as allen, never quite getting beyond his philosophical insights and self-congratulations from the late 60s.

even the great directors need a shot of oxygen occasionally. when i think of john
huston's greatest last movies, i hate to think of woody allen,in contrast, suffocating in self-absorption.

[chervokas]

Shtevel--of course I remember the Woody festival at the NYer. First time I saw a bunch of those movies including Love & Death, Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex, and perhaps Sleeper.

You're right about Woody's comedy. In America there's this great comic tradition of presenting ethnic caricatures in performance as a way of mediating identity....so you had in the 19th century the yankee peddler, or the Davy Crockett frontiersman (that gave way to the hillbilly in the 20th century), and of course the blackface minstrel....and in the 20th century you had this group of Jewish performers who presented another identity--Jolson, Groucho, and finally Woody Allen.

BTW, great to see you commenting.

[chervokas]

Dave-

Two things I find amazing about the reactions to Woody Allen's work. First, there's no concensus about what is good about him. You and many others like Hannah or Aphrodite for their performances. I hated Myra Sorvino in Aphrodite and thought Hannah was warmed over Woodyisms. (Tho' I agree w/ you that Woody's push to make every performer speak like he does is a distraction or worse.)

The second interesting thing is how much anger seems to exist towards Allen. He's self-absorbed, he's pseudo-intellectual, etc. Martin Scorsese has had a similar career path, w/ a string of great movies in the 1970s and early 1980s and a string of bad movies or flawed good movies since then. But he doesn't inspire the same kind of anger.

[daveminnj]

a very good point you make about scorcese. you're
right. but,scorcese was merely great;
allen was great and beloved; therefore the rage toward allen is much like that of a spurned lover. with scorcese, it's mostly irritation and disappointment. same sense of
smug dismissiveness towards a changing culture- but with scorcese- who really cares?

[dooflow]

A couple weigh ins-first-we are familiar with Woody. Everyone calls him Woody. It doesn't carry the weight of Godard, Bergman, or new hacks like Tarintino & Aaronofsky. Peter Jackson is Peter Jackson. Not Peter, or Jackson. Woody is the fun uncle who taught us to pull fingers. We called him Woody and we called everyone else Uncle Altman, Uncle Roeg, etc. We mature, we still love him, but he never grew up, and we tsk at his attempts.
Second, and this is what will always taint Woody, is that i believe he believes that there is nothing new that can be done in cinema. Hannah & Her Sisters is great until you get older and see the opening of Fanny & Alexander, and realize how much lesser Woody's versin is. Decon. Harry is his new wave film. Jittery camera & jump cuts. You see that in most of his post Annie Hall movies. It was his early comedies that felt fresh & new & they still do even as they feel dated. It's not an anxiety of influence (Sean Penn as a director), or joy of influence (Hartley, Tarantino, Eli Roth), it's giving in, surrendering. I love Woody, and the only film I will never watch again is Shadows & Fog, but I find this a depressing feature of all his late cinema. Also, Alice rocks.

[chervokas]

Dooflow-

Nice comment. I think part of why we cherish "Woody" the persona has to do w/ "Woody" the performer, and for me, "Woody" the stand up comic (I can still recite large chunks of his 40 year old routines)--something we don't get from the other directors. We call him "Woody" the way we call Groucho Marx by his first name.

I do agree with you about Woody being so enamored of cinema history and technique, and so devoted to an intellectual, historical approach, that it can spoil the freshness of his work, especially for viewers who are also buffs. For those of us who think first and feel later, that approach is less off putting, I think. But his stuff can feel studied, mannered. Even still I think it's often more human in the end than say Tarantino, whose approach is fresh but who is even more studied and mannered. But you're right, even the best of Woody's post Annie Hall/Manhattan movies can't approximate the fresh ebullience of his early comedies. But hell, you can say that about any comparison of an artist's early, breakthrough work w/ his or her later mature work.

I'm not sure I agree w/ you that Tarantino's a hack. I hate to admit it, but the guy's approach to story telling is dazzling and has already changed movies, TV, comic books and all the visual storytelling forms. His movies ARE all triumphs of formal ingenuity, lacking the kind of emotional substance of "real" drama. But each one is a hell of a ride.

I didn't mind Shadows & Fog so much--yeah, yeah, a mannered German expressionist genre pic, but so? (tho' I only saw it once). Interiors is the one I'm unlikely to ever sit through again.

And, amen, finally another vote for Alice!

[sean]

Jason: a couple of things re: Scorsese/Allen. You are correct, Scorsese doesn't inspire the same hatred, despite the fact he too has become something of a bore.Much of this is due to their public personas. Scorsese is clever (if too nostalgic) in inteviews, where Allen has that same droopy, hangdog face he's been displying for decades. Whatever Scorsese's failures as a director, he's been a decent critic, extolling the virtures of certain Asian gems. There is a sense that Allen's career was over LONG ago while Scorsese just might have one more great work in him if he stops trying to impress the Oscar crowd (Gangs of NY, and The Aviator were nothing if not bait to secure one of those middlebrow treasures)and gets down to business.
Scorsese's problems over the past 20 yrs seem to have resulted from a combination of bad material, poor execution (simply doesn't have the chops to put across many of his obsessions) and slovenly thinking. (His next movie is a remake of Infernal Affairs, a Hong Kong policier.) But at very least he broadened his subject matter (when of course, he wasn't repeating himself), doing Edith Wharton, the Dalai Lama, while Allen has basically stuck to the same Jewish/upper-middle class/privaleged/I-went-to Barnard milieu.

[chervokas]

Sean-

It's an interesting comparison. I think Allen is much more of a classic 'auteur' and he sticks to his world and life as a source of material. He's not a movie director in the classical way that Billy Wilder was--working on very disparate projects for a studio and a market (every year my amazement at Wilder grows and grows). Or the way Hitchcock was--exploring a formal approach to storytelling (it doesn't matter so much what the story is, it's ALL a macguffin. It's how the story is told that matters. Tarantino's this kind of director.)

Woody is much more of a writer/performer who happens to be a director. Better to think of him in literary terms. Like a 20th century, Upper West Side (now Upper East Side) Henry James. I have no problem w/ that (maybe it's because I know his world so well; maybe HE should have directed Age of Innocence). I don't think it's fair to lodge a complaint against a guy for doing what he invented. It's like saying, "Charlie Parker's ok, but he would have been better if he branched out and played something other than bebop."

Scorcese started making movies that were similarly personal and close to home. And frankly, those remain his legacy works--Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, Raging Bull (I also love King of Comedy). When he's branched out it hasn't always been fun to watch (tho' I liked Age of Innocence, I HATED Kundun--any one of Woody's throw away latter day fluff pieces is better than that) and when he's warmed over the angst-ridden street tough it's been even less fun (I HATED Goodfellas despite the dazzling tracking shots, even the title was a phony as a $3 bill).

I agree w/ you, however, that slovenly thinking may be a problem for Scorcese. For example Gangs of NY was stunning, brilliant, until the denoument when, somehow, Scorcese tries to get the audience to believe that a modern multicultural America was born in the crucible of the draft riots--in which angry racist mobs burned black orphanages. It was abrupt, it made no sense, and the movie didn't even begin to make a compelling case for that looney idea. It completely scuttled a movie that could have been a masterpiece--personal motivations, not big ideas, are Scorcese's metier. His best movies are small stories told large that plumb the psychological depths of a single character. (The Aviator was ok, but I have a deep bias against biopics, and although I'm fascinated by Howard Hughes, I'm most fascinated by him in his last years as a reclusive lunatic, something Scorcese really didn't explore, in fact, the movie was psychologically superficial compared to Scorcese's big 4).

Anyway, I love both those guys. It's really hard to create. It's really hard to stay true to yourself as a creator in a world of commerical creation. Those guys have largely done both. In addition, both those guys have encyclopedic knowledge of film history and technique, something I deeply respect. I'll see any movie they make until they kick the bucket (tho sometimes I'll wait for DVD); I'll always hold out hope that they've got more good ones in 'em; and I'll always give them the benefit of the doubt based on my faith that they know what they're doing and why they're doing it.

BTW, Orson Welles was a guy who was a writer/performer/director who could act in mutliple kinds of roles, direct different kinds of stories, explore a wide range of human motives, and remain true to himself. But he was one of a kind. Another guy whose work amazes me more and more each year. Thank God for Turner Classic Movies.

I don't want to belabor this thread but I think you misread my objections. It's not that Allen doesn't "branch out" or try new things, or any of that, it's that his NY is so hermetic, so reductive, and in many ways so shallow, that its just not interesting to me anymore. Movie after movie revisits the same cluster of solipsistic, privaleged, NY'ers as they fight, bitch, complain, have affairs, reconcile (or don't, as the case may be.) Formally, he's a decent craftsman, which I guess there should be more of, but very low on surprises.

As for Scorsese, he's aged into his own worst nightmare. He's now everything he never wanted to be. But I read him different than you.
I too dislike biopics. They're conservative by nature, inherently hagiographic, and big on the melodramatic story arcs. The Aviator is no different. It substitutes any psychological depth for another ode to wasteful capitalism. (HH may have been an innovator but he was a lousy filmmaker.)But of course it was made for the same reason that Gangs Of NY was made, to win an Oscar. (I know it's gratifying to have others appreciate your work, but really why should he care?)
Since, say, the mid 80's his style has become both overwrought and underwhelming. The cheap bag of tricks he pulled out for Cape Fear, were left undigested in Age Of Innocence (compare Terrence Davies Edith Wharton adaptation of The House Of Mirth.)I didn't hate Goodfellas like you did but over the years I have come to care for it much less (it's briiliance for me is not so much in the tracking shots which he,or for that matter, DePalma, can do in their sleep, but the pauses/freezes which he uses as commentary. What's worse though is Casino, a tired rehash of every musical/genre cliche he avoided early in his career. Kundun is beautiful in parts (namely the last half hour) but again he's seems way out of his element. Bringing Out The Dead is more strained, Schrader symbolism, completely overwrought.
There was a time when Scorsese's movies were leaner, not merely shorter or more economical, but compressed so that every cut or every camera move meant something. Not anymore, though I'm still rooting for him.

[ILoveWoody]

Why you put Interiors in your "bad Woody" list among other unfair dismissals, as did the blog who provided a link to your blog, is beyond me. Interiors is a masterpiece.

[daveminnj]

well, let's see...
ilovewoody loves interiors.
jason loves alice.
if anyone talks up shadows and fog,i'll
know this an elaborate practical joke.
my favorite woody allen moment will always
be the dream of two groups of monks carrying
men on crosses through manhattan and getting
into a rumble over a parking space.

[chervokas]

My favorite Woody moments, too numerous to count. But one that keep coming up...that the inmates in Take the Money And Run are served one hot meal a day -- a bowl of steam.