Woody Allen’s theme here opens with a telling ellipsis in the opening statement. In the quote from King Lear, “Life is a tale…full of sound and fury signifying nothing,” Allen omits the phrase after ‘tale’: “told by an idiot.” The line with that omission is repeated at the end.
Dropping the “idiot” has several implications. For one, it frees from that identification the offscreen narrator, the teller of this tale. It also shifts the idiocy from the teller to the characters. Each of the subplots exposes the folly, vanity, self-delusion, self-destruction, of the uniformly pathetic characters. All pursue follies, under the misguiding light of the title song: “When you wish upon a star” …. you wish will come true.
Across the cast — it doesn’t. The aging divorcee Helena believes holus bolus in the fraudulent fortune-teller, Cristal. Daughter Sally grows impatient with her failure husband Roy but misses the chance for an affair with her art gallery boss. When she has the chance to open her own gallery her mother denies her the promised loan on the fortune-teller’s advice.
Novelist Roy has abandoned his medical career then fails as a novelist. Then he steals the MS of the friend he thought was dead — but appears about to come out of his coma. The film ends before that tragedy plays out. But already the novelist has left wife Sally and courted a neighbour who throws over her fiancee for him, a catastrophe for both families. On his first night in her flat Roy wistfully watches his ex Sally undressing across the courtyard.
Meanwhile Helena’s romance with an occult book dealer flounders when he fails to ask his dead wife for permission to marry Helena. At a second seance he asks and receives her blessing. That saves Helena from having to await her fulfilment in a future life. She has a growing conviction she was Joan of Arc in an earlier one. While her superstition may salvage her life it ruins Sally’s.
Sally’s father Alfie, having left Helena in hopes of a racy bachelor life, marries a hooker Charmaine in hopes of recovering his youth and having a son, his first having died young. Alfie is as successful as the other characters. His garish wife stops faking pleasure in their marriage, saps his fortune, betrays him with at least one younger man and in announcing her pregnancy can’t assure him the child is his. Her trainer/lover has just beaten Alfie up, so he may have to find another gym. This adds insult to injury.
For all this canvas of idiocy Allen articulates a sympathy for his characters. As he has often — perhaps usually — reminded us, life is bleak, awful, doomed, and so we need illusions and fantasies to sustain us. The film’s title exemplifies the cliche delusions by which we drag ourselves forward in unsubstantiated hope.
And if we can find relief from a fantasy, if illusions help us carry on, then more power to us. That puts this film especially in line with The Purple Rose of Cairo.
The film has a curious tone. There are very few jokes. The characters’ heart-rending defeats make it a modern, post-Loman tragedy. But the film’s effect is almost comic for its unremitting parade of the characters’ folly. That harkens back to Allen’s Melinda and Melinda, where the two versions of the heroine’s story — one comic, one tragic — are essentially the same.
Finally — need I say it: this is a superb, richly detailed, masterfully realized film, another in Allen’s unbroken line of classic achievements.
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