Oscars unbound: Woody meets his maker
109.2Abstract (summary)
The title also points to the end of Hollywood. Val's triumph is to escape Hollywood -- and its continental grasp -- for civilized Paris. This has been [Woody Allen]'s impulse from What's New, Pussycat? (1965) to Everyone Says I Love You (1996). As usual, Allen satirizes Hollywood's lack of proportion. Haley Joel Osment receives a Lifetime Achievement Award at 14. Studio hanger-on Ed (George Hamilton, wielding an equal-weight tan and golf club) and studio head [Hal Yeager] personify Hollywood's shallowness and greed. Though he looks much healthier than the pasty Val, Yeager reports, matter of factly, that as a result of the non-stop California sun he's having another skin cancer removed. The big Frank Stella painting behind Yeager's desk attests to his flash and investment savvy, not any respect for strong, personal art. In this world values are upside down. When Val objects to working with Yeager -- "This guy stole my wife!" -- agent Al assures him: "He doesn't hold that against you. It's business." Ed calls a film "garbage" but hastily adds "I'm not saying that as criticism." From Val's perspective, Hollywood wants "garbage" and prohibits art. Courting the job, Val mistakes the producer's question about the film's target audience: "The demographics? You mean why the country got so stupid suddenly? My theory is it's the fast foods." This Hollywood happy ending ends Val's indenture to fast food Hollywood and recovers [Ellie] from her exile there. Val achieves the reunion Alvy Singer didn't.
A visual joke undercuts her later poolside discussion with Yeager: Ellie wears red boxing gloves, for no apparent reason. The gloves may suggest an incipient tension with Yeager; their "Everlast" label anticipates her and Val's realization that they never stopped loving each other. Ellie, her gloves suggest, is fighting for him more than she realizes. When Val and Ellie arrange a professional meeting to free their collaboration from their personal tensions, Val alternates between sentences of amenable professionalism and paragraphs of bitter marital recriminations. His emotional subtext keeps erupting. That scene defines them as a good couple, in the tradition of Beatrice and Benedick, Petruchio and Kate. Ellie seems to crumble when Val suddenly kisses her. Yeager unwittingly pushes her toward Val when he sternly states "I don't ever want to worry about your loyalties" -- Allen's camera holds on her, pensive, after Yeager has left. Only after she denies Yeager's suspicion that she fell back in love with Val does she realize -- and admit -- that she has never stopped loving him. That Val will ultimately save Ellie from evil (i.e., Hollywood success) is prefigured in the barbecue discussion of "Hitchcock's best film," Notorious. Val always dissolves when Cary Grant carries the poisoned Ingrid Bergman down past the Nazis to safety.
As usual, this new Allen work flirts with autobiography. We're tempted to read the 66-year-old Allen into this outcast director, aging and debilitated, hiding in embarrassed mismatches with a bimbo starlet (Debra Messing as Lori). "How did I go from the cutting edge to the buttering edge?" In the first scene, the studio objections to Val echo those against Sandy Bates in Stardust Memories (and against Allen generally): "His pictures were ten years ago. Then he became an artiste." A film poster on the agent's wall echoes the Manhattan skyline logo, but this film's title is Manhattan Moods -- i.e., an Allen remake but with "moods" imposed. Ellie tells Yeager she left Val because "One day you wake up and realize laughs are not enough." But Val -- like Allen -- is begrudged that stretch in his filmmaking and is expected to deliver empty entertainment, like the "stupid potboiler" Yeager is remaking. Making the project a remake points to modern Hollywood's imaginative poverty, but also to the charges that Allen just keeps repeating himself (on which more later). The homonymy of the lead males -- director Val, producer Hal, agent Al -- suggests a narrow range of film industry personality, but it also implies their root in Allen.
MAURICE YACOWAR teaches film studies at the University of Calgary. His most recent book is The Sopranos on the Couch: Analyzing TV's Best Series (Continuum Press).
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New York City has had, of course, much on its mind over the past year. For a while it seemed that nothing familiar would ever feel the same again. Leave it to Woody Allen, then, to wade right into our changed consciousness with his old familiar style, shtick, and stammering critique of the bland and the beautiful. Old style and old feelings are the stock-in-trade of a man who has said he's never had any interest in music produced after 1955, and who has hardly ever ventured outside Manhattan. And, somehow, it all feels so crankily reassuring.
THE NERVE of Woody Allen! He's still reprising his schlemiel shtick, despite the alacrity with which reviewers yawn away each new effort. Also despite the pundits' pronouncement that in this anxious age we need new hero models - selfless, competent, steady men like police and firemen. No nebbish need apply. But Woody goes on as if nothing happened last September.
Perhaps there is something to be said for simply carrying on. In the face of cataclysm there is a dignity and strength in continuing to live one's social and moral life with quiet, mundane responsibility. The small moral choice against the current, not the cannonball splash - that's enough to make a little anti-hero heroic. It's heartening to know that we still have Woody to chatter us through the murky dilemmas of our day. He has been a reassuring presence from the March Oscars show through the familiar discomfiture of his new film - his twenty-seventh as a director (not counting the eight he performed in for others). The kid works. So does his shtick.
BUT FIRST, let us review this year's Oscar show, which was plotted as indomitable America's message to the outside world. It took strength of will to proceed with the full-scale production, terrorist threat be damned - or at least handled by laborious lobby searches of every celebrity pouch and paunch coming in. The Emmys ceremony, after all, had been twice postponed and was then diluted by a nervous bicoastal presentation (New York and LA).
Telecast globally, the Oscar show seemed determined to celebrate America for the very virtues about which the Third World has such doubts - hence the emphasis on the ascent of blacks in American popular culture. This was calculated in casting Whoopie Goldberg as Bob Hope - the irreverent MC, but safer, more predictable, less cutting than Steve Martin and Billy Crystal - and in the homage to Sidney Poitier, the black man who could come to anyone's dinner. The career montage and the testimonials from current black stars reaffirmed America's progress in civil rights over the course of Poitier's career. As if to augment that theme, Denzel Washington and Halle Berry happened to win Best Actor and Best Actress honours. In the same calculation, the awards to (Edmonton-born) Arthur Hiller and to Robert Redford, the Sundance (Film Festival) Kid, celebrated America's liberal spirit, at least as it sometimes penetrates its mainstream - albeit minor tributary - films.
Of course, sentimentality sent the big prizes to A Simple... oops, make that A Beautiful Mind (Ron Howard, director); its four-Oscar swag was matched by the boring special effects swamp of Tolkein-inspired Hobbits. But generally the awards were distributed with an eye on their implication. British ally Jim Broadbent was Best Supporting Actor, the bona fide American rebel Robert Altman won a screenplay Oscar for the British-as-fried-bread Gosford Park, and the embarrassingly bellicose Black Hawk Down was acknowledged/dismissed with Best Editing (the one advantage art still has over political reality). For once, the Best Foreign Film award went to the most political nominee - No Man's Land (Bosnia-Herzegovina) instead of the most whimsical (the Norwegian Elling or the oh-so-French Amelie). To cap the classy evening, we were spared the usual schmaltzy dance numbers around the Best Song contestants - frustrating the critics of our system's excess, tastelessness, and irrelevance - and were instead graced with the Cirque du Soleil. All in all, this was the most expressive and efficient Oscar telecast I've seen.
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For many, the highlight was Woody Allen's appearance. Allen came on for a brief stand-up act, stole the Growing Old joke that I had been flogging all week ("Now that I've turned 60, I have to be realistic: I've lived maybe a third of my life"), then introduced Nora Ephron's montage of New York movie scenes, highlighted by his magnificent first frames from Manhattan.
Two things were significant in that appearance. One, this was Allen's first appearance ever at the Oscars. He used to score points with his disdain for such Hollywood folderol. Even when he was a quadruple nominee for Annie Hall he religiously kept his Michael's Pub clarinet gig in New York. But here he was, a surprise - hell, a shock - walk-on. He delivered the same cunningly paced, self-effacing routine that paved his way into film 37 years ago. The second point was the reaction to his appearance: an immediate, spontaneous and prolonged standing ovation. Hollywood rose as one to welcome back its prodigal son, the poet laureate both of New York and of the halting American intelligentsia. The audience implicitly forgave (i.e., forgot) the scandal that had undermined America's conscience. Thus Hollywood's America presented another united face to the world. Allen's moment confirmed the deep note of reconciliation that was this Oscar show's response to the anxieties after 9/11.
ALLEN'S new film, Hollywood Ending, continues his ardent valentine to New York but, mercifully, reverts to his more acidic/Hasidic view of Lotus Land. The film picks up his double theme of loving Old Hollywood movies and loathing the current Hollywood culture (an oxymoron, like "agent ethics" in the movie). As in Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993), the superior Bullets Over Broadway (1994) and Everyone Says I Love You (1996), and the lesser Small Time Crooks (2000) and Curse of the Jade Scorpion (2001), the machinery of a nostalgic genre plot serves to revive a waning relationship -- or, in the latter, to convert an instinctive antagonism into love. When Allen exercises a classic genre, his real subject is the values required to regenerate a relationship. Fidelity to a past cultural norm relates to honour in one's personal life. This theme is reversed in his best film of this period, Sweet and Lowdown (1999), where the mechanics of the musical biopic anatomize a disintegrating psyche. Still, the public structure of genre provides the form for a personal meditation.
As the title promises, Hollywood Ending has a romantically upbeat conclusion. Val Waxman (Allen) is a once-successful director (two Oscars long ago, perhaps around the time of Annie Hall?), who is now so cold he has to film deodorant commercials in a Canadian blizzard. When Val returns home early he tries to salvage his honour: "I quit over a big thing.... They fired me." Hobbled by his reputation for unreasonable production demands, artiness, quitting jobs, and making himself sick with neurosis, he craves one last chance.
That he gets when his ex-wife Ellie (Tea Leoni) persuades her studio-boss finace, Hal Yeager (Treat Williams), to let Val direct a $60 million remake of a 1940s noir thriller. On the eve of shooting, though, Val suddenly goes blind. His agent (Mark Rydell) insists that to save his career Val has to direct the film anyway, relying on a confidant to guide him. Ironically, Val first relies on the translation skills of a business student at NYU to make his art. Then he depends on Ellie. The film proves a disaster with audiences and critics alike. But Ellie is drawn back to Val after becoming increasingly repelled by Yeager's principles.
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But the film is a huge success in France. "Here I'm a bum, there I'm a genius," Val exults. "Thank God the French exist." That existential confidence must have gone down well when Hollywood Ending premiered at Cannes, where Allen was feted like no one since de Gaulle. Flooded with job offers, Val and Ellie realize their "unfulfilled life dream," to live in Paris together. The last line summarizes Val's dependency, insecurity and bliss: "You didn't forget to bring the Dramamene, did you?"
The title also points to the end of Hollywood. Val's triumph is to escape Hollywood -- and its continental grasp -- for civilized Paris. This has been Allen's impulse from What's New, Pussycat? (1965) to Everyone Says I Love You (1996). As usual, Allen satirizes Hollywood's lack of proportion. Haley Joel Osment receives a Lifetime Achievement Award at 14. Studio hanger-on Ed (George Hamilton, wielding an equal-weight tan and golf club) and studio head Yeager personify Hollywood's shallowness and greed. Though he looks much healthier than the pasty Val, Yeager reports, matter of factly, that as a result of the non-stop California sun he's having another skin cancer removed. The big Frank Stella painting behind Yeager's desk attests to his flash and investment savvy, not any respect for strong, personal art. In this world values are upside down. When Val objects to working with Yeager -- "This guy stole my wife!" -- agent Al assures him: "He doesn't hold that against you. It's business." Ed calls a film "garbage" but hastily adds "I'm not saying that as criticism." From Val's perspective, Hollywood wants "garbage" and prohibits art. Courting the job, Val mistakes the producer's question about the film's target audience: "The demographics? You mean why the country got so stupid suddenly? My theory is it's the fast foods." This Hollywood happy ending ends Val's indenture to fast food Hollywood and recovers Ellie from her exile there. Val achieves the reunion Alvy Singer didn't.
Allen's film does not specifically explain Val's blindness. It could derive from his habitual psychosomatics (we learn he has contacted inter alia hoof and mouth disease, an allergy to oxygen, the Black Plague and elm blight) or from his anxieties over the film project (personal and professional). His psychiatrist's proposal seems privileged: as his film depicts a gangster hired to murder his own alienated father, it provokes Val's guilt about his alienation from his punk musician rat-eating son, Tony (Mark Webber). But that explanation feels slick, like the shrink's tidying up at the end of Hitchcock's Psycho. Besides, Val's recovery of his sight is related more to Ellie than to Tony. Val goes blind when Ellie flies back west, and he recovers after she has seen him through the post-production.
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Indeed, Val's relationship with his son feels less integrated than everything else in the film. The episode works less effectively as plot or characterization than as theme. Val's reunion with his son -- for which he skips the film's wrap party, a salutary choice -- expresses his embrace of an antithetical set of values, aesthetics and morality. Tony's punk rock is a world away from Benny Goodman's "Hooray for Hollywood" and the exuberant "Going Hollywood" which open the film. But, for once, Val's emotion overrides his judgement. At the same time, Allen discovers a connection between antagonistic poles. He embraces the Other.
Tony belies his apparent boorishness. He immediately understands both his father's surprise visit and his condition. He detects that his father is blind, and he knows it's psychosomatic: "You never get anything real." Later he assuages Val's pain at the reviews. Val has to grow to accept his apparently alien son. But as Tony, who has renamed himself Scumbag X, observes: "We're both trying to do something original, you with film, me with a live rat." In Allen's irony, the repulsive punk proves more understanding and pure than the mogul. In the scene's bathetic climax Val tells his son, "I love you, Scumbag." This quiet but striking line carries a load of sentiment, acceptance, sincerity, courage and resignation.
The romantic resolution -- Val's reunion with Ellie -- is subtly calibrated, so more plausible than a Tea-Woody union would normally seem. The film opens on her valiant case for hiring Val:
Ed: "He's a raving incompetent psychotic."
Ellie: "He's not incompetent."
A visual joke undercuts her later poolside discussion with Yeager: Ellie wears red boxing gloves, for no apparent reason. The gloves may suggest an incipient tension with Yeager; their "Everlast" label anticipates her and Val's realization that they never stopped loving each other. Ellie, her gloves suggest, is fighting for him more than she realizes. When Val and Ellie arrange a professional meeting to free their collaboration from their personal tensions, Val alternates between sentences of amenable professionalism and paragraphs of bitter marital recriminations. His emotional subtext keeps erupting. That scene defines them as a good couple, in the tradition of Beatrice and Benedick, Petruchio and Kate. Ellie seems to crumble when Val suddenly kisses her. Yeager unwittingly pushes her toward Val when he sternly states "I don't ever want to worry about your loyalties" -- Allen's camera holds on her, pensive, after Yeager has left. Only after she denies Yeager's suspicion that she fell back in love with Val does she realize -- and admit -- that she has never stopped loving him. That Val will ultimately save Ellie from evil (i.e., Hollywood success) is prefigured in the barbecue discussion of "Hitchcock's best film," Notorious. Val always dissolves when Cary Grant carries the poisoned Ingrid Bergman down past the Nazis to safety.
As usual, this new Allen work flirts with autobiography. We're tempted to read the 66-year-old Allen into this outcast director, aging and debilitated, hiding in embarrassed mismatches with a bimbo starlet (Debra Messing as Lori). "How did I go from the cutting edge to the buttering edge?" In the first scene, the studio objections to Val echo those against Sandy Bates in Stardust Memories (and against Allen generally): "His pictures were ten years ago. Then he became an artiste." A film poster on the agent's wall echoes the Manhattan skyline logo, but this film's title is Manhattan Moods -- i.e., an Allen remake but with "moods" imposed. Ellie tells Yeager she left Val because "One day you wake up and realize laughs are not enough." But Val -- like Allen -- is begrudged that stretch in his filmmaking and is expected to deliver empty entertainment, like the "stupid potboiler" Yeager is remaking. Making the project a remake points to modern Hollywood's imaginative poverty, but also to the charges that Allen just keeps repeating himself (on which more later). The homonymy of the lead males -- director Val, producer Hal, agent Al -- suggests a narrow range of film industry personality, but it also implies their root in Allen.
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The Esquire reporter's voice-over journal parodies the possibility that this film is a form of Allen's diary. In the limbo between art and life, film director Mark Rydell is cast as Al Hack, Val's agent, with fashion-designer-turned-film-subject Isaac Mizrahi as Elio Sebastian, the hilariously wasteful production designer (Central Park will simply have to be rebuilt). Allen's jokes about the Chinese cinematographer (Lu Yu) -- hired to give "texture" to the film's scenes -- likely do not reflect Allen's three films with Zhao Fei (or his present collaborator, German cinematographer Wedigo von Schultzendorff). Val loses a gimmicky schlock horror film to the marginalized Peter Bogdanovich. An establishing exterior shot reveals that The City that Never Sleeps is being shot at the Kaufman Astoria Studios, where Hollywood Ending was shot.
A few scenes obscure the line between life and story-telling. At his "professional" meeting with Ellie, Val appeals to the other restaurant patrons for support as he rants about Ellie's infidelity, then scolds one: "Follow the story!" In that quip, a lived moment is a story being told. So, too, when blind Val -- misled by the perfume to think that the journalist Andrea Ford (Jodie Markell) is his confidante Ellie -- divulges his nightmare, that Yeager learns Val has been shooting the film blind. The nightmare he tells is the nightmare he is living at that moment, for Ford will expose him to Yeager. When Val falls spectacularly off the set, it is in the out-of-focus background of a shot in which Ellie and Andrea Ford face off in the fore. The composition anticipates Val's downfall, when he fails to distinguish between these two women. The director is living out his story.
For Ellie, Val is the best director for The City that Never Sleeps for the same reason Allen would be: "The streets of New York are in his marrow." As Val continually complains that he can't sleep, the very title of the film becomes a projection of his neurosis, i.e., his character. Ellie expresses the Freudian idea that art results from such artistic neurosis: "You had all the symptoms but not the disease of genius." In this view a film can be the personal expression of its director, especially when it works in tension with the conventions of its genre and its producers' commercial requirements. That is the classic "auteur film." Hollywood Ending centrally reaffirms the value of auteurist film-making. That's why Hitchcock is valorized as a director who managed to make very personal films that were also commercial, connecting to their audience. In contrast to the director who can be understood through the content of his films, Yeager is defined by his box office. For Val, the fact that Yeager has made financially successful American films "... should tell you everything you need to know about him."
As the film reaffirms auteurist cinema, it is also religious. For it celebrates the idea of a Maker. In fact, it discovers an altar in auteurism. Val's producers are appalled at his suggestion to shoot with a hand-held camera in black and white. "Arty," Ed grimaces. The golden glow of this film's Manhattan is a far cry from Allen's usual velvets. Its plush radiance -- like medieval and Renaissance religious art -- imbues the physical world of NYC with spiritual potential. Of course, it's also as autumnal as Hitchcock's The Trouble with Harry, which adds the tinge of mortality. Val initially rejects working with Yeager and Ellie because "He's a philistine, she's a quisling, we have a religious conflict." Like Broadway Danny Rose (whose speech Val evokes when he argues with Yeager on the phone), the quip posits a religious morality in show business (even) that is violated by the unscrupulous producer and the betraying wife. In two Jewish references, Val gets the new script around Yom Kippur, the fasting day of the Jewish New Year, and he goes blind on Passover, when Ellie's flight west leaves them in respective bondage. When Al talks Val into hiding his blindness, he says, "Sometimes God works in strange ways." "Like Job," the afflicted Val agrees.
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But Val's suffering serves an unseen -- what else? -- purpose. It returns to him Ellie and Paris. Moreover, going blind saves Val from making what Yeager wanted: "a nice middle-of-the-road commercial picture." Val also thwarted his romantic intention. "Between you and me," Yeager confides, the film "is my valentine to Ellie." Instead of Yeager's valentine, Ellie gets her Val back. Contra Hollywood: that less is more.
Unlike The Purple Rose of Cairo and Zelig films-within-films, we don't see any footage from The City that Never Sleeps -- though we hear some symptomatic crashes. We don't know in what way it's bad or how validly it might be considered good. When Val finally gets his sight back and is able to watch his film in the screening room, his first response is "Call Dr Kevorkian." But auteurism -- like other religions -- requires faith in the maker. Any film an auteur makes will reveal the director's quality and character. Its coherence and purpose may not be immediately apparent to us, nor even to the auteur. But there will be a reason and a significance for every choice the auteur made, whether consciously or not. So we can believe that the blind Val made "the best American film in fifty years" (as the French critics claim), if only because it was his own troubled but gallant persevering vision. It came from his inner eye. By not showing us any of the film, Allen allows the possibility that it might indeed be brilliant. As journalist Ford speculated, perhaps Val is indeed a genius who thrives on chaos, like Fellini. After all, Allen's Stardust Memories was his 81/2 and his Celebrity his La Dolce Vita.
By now Allen's gag themes and obsessions and fidgety acting style are so familiar that they are either (i) a tiresome bore or (ii) a reassuring ritual, depending on whether or not you're a believer. To the auteurist, however, familiarity breeds meaning, not contempt. Allen always pours new whine from his dusty old bottles. For example, his latest masturbation joke has often been quoted in the negative reviews: "The nicest thing about masturbation is after, the cuddling part." We've heard it before (e.g., "Don't knock it. It's sex with someone I love."). But not exactly. In the present form the joke prefers the aftermath to the heated experience. That befits a film about an aging director, struggling for his self-respect (the celibate form of self-love), even indeed to keep a grip on himself. Besides, when Val makes that joke now it's in the context of a man cracking a tired old joke, out of habit. Allen is well ahead of his impatient critics.
The idea of a blind man directing a film is a variation on the magic theme that recurs throughout his career (most explicitly in the preceding film, The Curse of the Jade Scorpion). For a blind man to direct a film is a kind of magic. But the blindness device is more pointed still. When agent Hack encourages Val to direct the film blind, he points to the paucity of visually vital films these days: "Have you seen some of the pictures out there?" Ellie is confident Val "could do this material with his eyes closed." Later, when Yeager is honoured as "Man of the Year" by the video retailers' association, he acknowledges that Hollywood now addresses itself to the small screen, where the larger profits lie. This points to the cinema's shrunken aspiration and quality. That's also why most American film is largely reduced to talking heads and massive special effects that preclude ideas and complexity. At the backyard barbecue, Val's friends bemoan the loss of the old New York film scene, when one could choose from ten foreign films every week. We, too, remember those days, as through a glass darkly. In this context the director's blindness is a wilful escape from the cinema that no longer sees -- nor looks for the profound veracities of being.
More lightly than in Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989), the blindness points to the greater need for moral vision and understanding. The new film crackles with sight jokes. Val accuses Ellie of adultery: "On the phone you were exchanging glances, then it was bodily fluids." "You don't see what you don't want to see," Ellie tells him impatiently. Yeager, Ellie and Hack all desperately hope that the blind director has some "vision" of how to edit the mess of the dailies. Before he loses his sight Val is content with the sex bunny Lori. And he compromises his own artistic integrity by casting his ditzy girlfriend as a wealthy socialite, even though Ellie, unaware of Val's relationship to the actress, describes her as "a step above trailer park." Only when he's blind can Val see past Lori to recover his appreciation for Ellie. Lori is more interested in her film role than in Val, while Ellie subordinates her responsibilities as producer to protect him.
Similarly, Val's blindness enables him to reject the attentions of his beautiful star, Sharon Bates (Tiffani Theissen). When she makes a play for him in her dressing room, nonchalantly opening her robe to reveal her sexy lingerie, he is of course utterly oblivious to her charms. After she draws him to the sofa, taking his hand and placing it on her breast, he stammers nervously, "Oh, I'm comfortable thanks. I don't need a throw pillow." Not discouraged, the starlet persists: "The way you look at me, it's like you're making love to me with your eyes." He can only escape by groping his way along her dressing room wall, explaining that when he becomes this excited he is overwhelmed by the urge to "fondle a wall" (the second masturbation reference in this paragraph). This rejection is especially funny because it flies in the face of the desperate lust of Allen's persona, especially in "the early films, the funny ones." Again, there is a ritual element, with incremental inflections and cross-references, in Allen's use of familiar material.
Allen handles the blindness scenes with remarkable restraint. The slapstick is minimal. Its primary register is Val's confusion in space. He has lost his physical bearings, just as he had earlier lost his moral bearings. In the typical sight gag, Val doesn't know whom he's talking to -- as when he confides his secret to the reporter -- or where his company is, as when he looks away from the people with whom he's conversing. His "man-to-man" meeting with Yeager is a choreographed non-connection -- with Allen earnestly addressing himself to an empty void 90 degrees from where his counterpart is actually seated. As these sight gags are about sound, they transcend slapstick. Allen sets them up early when Val reports he can't hear in his left ear.
In summary, Val's blindness is a psychosomatic expression of his self-doubt and guilt. It augurs both aging directors' looming debility. It reminds us that the greater truth about values and relationships lies beyond material experience and requires more intuitive, more deeply rooted apprehension. So "Every husband should go blind for a while" -- to recover his bearings, to rediscover the values that he may have been taking for granted. Of course, one could explain away the French appreciation of Val's film by recalling their auteurist ardour for Jerry Lewis. But as blindness here is an alternative mode of apprehension, perhaps the proper precedent is their (eventual) embrace of the Impressionists - another art of blurred vision.
INCIDENTALLY, the blind film director is not entirely imaginary. Hollywood assigned its first 3-D (!) feature film, House of Wax (1953), to director Andre de Toth, who had only one eye -- and so lacked depth perception. If Hollywood Ending is a heartfelt comedy of the Absurd, well, that's the reality it mirrors both in its social context and in its author's introspective vision. Still pointed after all these years, Woody Allen reminds us that our longest relationships necessarily are the richest -- whether with a mate or with a favourite film director -- and that there is a significant heroism in going about one's work, pushing one's familiar limits, sowing and harvesting the same fields, in the face of spectacular temptations and intimidating terrors. And for all our vulnerability and failures, he still has faith in the maker -- at least, of art.
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Word count: 4533
Copyright Queen's Quarterly Summer 2002
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