A Rainy Day in New York

As usual, the new Woody Allen film — his 48th feature in 51 years! — is a disturbing departure from the last few. What disturbs is its newness. We’re disappointed when our expectations are denied. So an adjustment is necessary if we are to take it on its own, proper terms.  

The plot is familiar: when a small town hick comes to New York, her relationship with a city guy is challenged by the Big City. It’s Neil Simon country but Allen infuses it with an uncommon density of personal inflection. That goes beyond “What’s sexy about short-term memory loss?” And “Time flies….Unfortunately, it flies coach…. It’s not always a comfortable trip.”

Specifically the film responds to the time and circumstance of its making. When Mia Farrow’s long-dismissed allegations of Allen’s alleged abuse of her daughter resurfaced, Amazon broke their agreement to fund and distribute the film. As a result, the film is available in Europe but not in North America. So here: “The world is full of tragic little deal-breakers.” And “There are no newspapers that are not tabloids.” Not since Manhattan has Allen delivered such an encomium to New York City: “You are here or you are nowhere. You cannot achieve another level of anxiety, hostility or paranoia anywhere else.” Instead of the usual star-studded Allen cast, here Jude Law is the film’s one big star.        

As his name suggests, Gatsby Welles is a cultural construct. “Gatsby” signifies the illusion of old wealth and social stature.  “Welles” connotes a maverick individuality. The hero’s wealthy family propel him into the arts, the responsibilities of high society, the mixed blessings of the privileged. But at that privilege he bristles.

This Gatsby took classical piano but yearns to play romantic ballads in a bar. He doesn’t have to be able to sing well to enjoy singing a classic ballad. Instead of college studies he prefers high stakes gambling (at which he succeeds uncommonly, like Woody the filmmaker). Ultimately Gatsby breaks out of his romantic rut, unlike brother Hunter, doomed to marry a woman with an emasculating laugh.   

  Gatsby’s girlfriend Ashleigh comes from a wealthy Tucson banking family. A journalism student at Yardley College, she takes him to New York to interview the famously serious film director Roland Pollard. “You’re too original to have mass appeal,” the awed Ashleigh assures him. Gatsby’s old schoolmate dismisses his work with “Never a decent toilet joke.” When Ashleigh quotes Pollard’s line “Love and death are two sides of the same coin” she doesn’t understand it, but has evoked an early (funny) Allen title. 

The R.P. director’s nominal echo of Roman Polanski sets up Ashleigh’s NYC adventure. While in real life Farrow persists in her discounted allegations against Allen, she publicly defends Polanski against the sex charges to which he pled guilty. Here Pollard, his writer Ted Davidoff and actor Francisco Vega personify the predatory film industry that feeds off the star-struck, helpless naifs. Pollard uses his artistic suffering, Davidoff his unfaithful wife and Vega his star power to seduce the relatively innocent Ashleigh. Only the early return of Vega’s girlfriend preserves Ashleigh’s relative chastity. Implicitly Allen places Farrow’s persistent allegations in the larger context that undermines her.   

Seeing Ashleigh on TV with Vega, the heartbroken Gatsby hires a hooker to represent his fiancee at his mother’s classy dinner As Gatsby describes his mother’s literary circle: “It's rich housewives who have the leisure to pursue esoteric culture. The out of work, discussing the out of print.“ After his mother sees through the ploy and sends the woman home she tells Gatsby that she had herself been a hooker. Indeed that’s how she met his father. Indeed she used her savings to set up his eventually successful business. This candour opens Gatsby’s relationship with his mother: “She’s a lot more than I gave her credit for.” With that knowledge he can accept himself as well as her and he can follow his desire to stay in New York and live the life he prefers. There is not such a gaping gap between the respectable and the pragmatic after all. There is non shame in honesty.

The film ripples with allusions. Its sentimental core starts with the opening song: “I got lucky in the rain.”  The singer sadly needs a song, then “You came along,” the love of his life. Relationships begin and end in the rain here, climactically over “Misty,” because the rain signifies the melancholy chill from which we seek love for shelter. “What I really need,” Gatsby avers, “is a Berlin ballad.” In the converse call to social realism, Gatsby is supposed to see the Weegee exhibition at MOMA, but he abandons that to follow his new interest, Chan, the grown-up kid sister of his old flame Amy, into the older histories in the Met. 

This relationship begins with the Benedick-Beatrice sparring on a student film set, where they meet and have to act a passionate kiss. Eventually their life will follow that art. They meet on that film set, have that museum date then meet again under the Central Park clock reliving a favourite romantic film. Rooted in an old culture, Chan’s home is full of Old Master paintings and antiques. She reads Gatsby as an exotic searching for a romantic dream from a vanished age. That becomes her. But she's an active creative spirit.  Gatsby's move from Amy through Ashleigh to Amy's younger sister evokes Allen's from his relationship to Mia to her neglected step-daughter.

Chan wins out over Ashleigh because she knows Allen’s familiar dependency upon art for a meaning and consolation otherwise rarely available: “Real life is fine for people who can’t do any better.” That’s a film-romance re-write of Gatsby’s mother’s career.

Unfortunately, to cleanse themselves of the old Allen “scandal” Timothee Chalamet and Rebecca Hall announced they were donating their salaries to charity. They make themselves victims of the slander and misrepresentation Allen has suffered and survived for so many years. This is a film they should be proud of having served. 

The Curse of the Jade Scorpion (2001)

Even such a lightweight airy number by Woody Allen achieves a heft ordinary auteurs would strain to achieve.

In this delightful comedy Allen exercises his love for 1940s crowd pleasers. The film mixes screwball comedy and gumshoe thriller.  The script hits a Billy Wilder pace. The music, settings and stock characters recall Howard Hawks at his best. 

Allen’s performance as the insurance investigator is arguably his clearest homage to Bob Hope. “She graduated from Vassar and I went to driving school. “ A woman has a body that won’t quit: “Quit? It won't take five minutes off for a coffee break.” Does he want to see the siren’s strawberry birthmark on her thigh? “Sure, when can I take the full tour?” And of course: “I may be a scummy vermin but I'm an honest scummy vermin.”

Lengthening the tradition — the Allen and Helen Hunt characters are a modern Beatrice and Benedick as they wallow in an articulate antagonism that could only belie their essential love. In the fireworks kissing scene Allen exuberantly explodes the perennial cliche.  

The film may lack the obvious philosophic underpinning of Allen’s later work but it’s cut from the same cloth. 

As in The Purple Rose of Cairo, Alice, his New York Stories episode and the later Magic in the Moonlight, etc., Allen uses variations on magic to shift his characters into another mode of experience. Here hypnosis is ambivalent in its purposes. In the stage act it moves CW and Sally Ann into their antithetical relationship, love supplanting their antagonism. But as every opening brings vulnerability, the two also serve the jewel thief hypnotist’s criminal purposes.  

Hypnotism here serves as magic and art work for Allen elsewhere. It provides an escape from the “scummy…grungy” existence Allen always envisions the human condition to be, hungry for any possible escape or respite. The curse turns out to be a blessing.

  Indeed this idea may animate all of Allen’s compulsive returns to the music and film genres of the past. We’re cursed with mortality. What healthier insouciance than to ensure the immortality of the genres by which we used to connect?  

A Trip to Greece

A Trip to Greece is the sixth European-trip movie  Rob Brydon and Steve Coogan have made (with director Michael Winterbottom) in 10 years. That sets up the obvious parallel with Odysseus’s 10-year return home from the Trojan Wars. 

  Playing fictionalized versions of themselves, the two British stars deliver their own version of the archetypal epic. They land somewhere between Homer and Joyce. 

Perhaps the film’s key motif is the photography scene in the old amphitheatre.  Bantering as ever, they swap the classic masks of comedy and tragedy. Steve briefly resumes his affair with the beautiful young photographer 

The film ends on that fork. On the comedy side, Rob enjoys an idyllic reunion with his wife, Sally, freed from both their parental duties and their separation. 

To Steve falls the tragic: his father dies so he has to fly home early. He takes melancholy refuge in the home he left his ex-wife.  Their hug reminds him of his loss.  

This double vision of life makes this perhaps the most touching of the series. We get the familiar elements of the travelogue: the spectacular scenery, the mouth-watering national foods, the pretty women viewed — perhaps regrettably as usual — through the cocky banter of men still boys. 

The two men’s competitive teasing is amusing as ever, but now there are more jokes about their aging. There’s an intensity in their ostensibly playful race. Now Steve even has Bergmanic dreams, as if his real-life success as a more serious actor has brought a psychic vulnerability. 

A dark shadow threatens the film’s comic element early. Our heroes drop an acquaintance off at a massive refugee camp, secured with concrete walls and barbed wire. The  two buddies speculate about its horrors. But we don’t go in. They drive away, staving off the intrusion of the tragic side of life — for a while. 

Both men have a knack for impersonating famous actors. They compete at it, amusingly and even brilliantly. A whole conversation can be conducted in these guises. All the while they’re impersonating others, though, we know they are impersonating themselves. The outside scenes remind us this is a scripted drama and for all their personal infusions they are acting roles. 

Indeed the men’’s compulsive role-playing may betray their essential insubstantiality. They seem able to engage with each other — and with others — only by playing at being others. Even when Rob embraces Sally his emotion is filtered through play. As the jokes about their driving encapsulate, both men need to be in control. And that means staving off seriousness, openness, suppressing their emotional lives as long as possible. 

Perhaps that’s the point of their comic role-playing here. The masks of Greek tragedy are the faces we live. We may enjoy some comedy but the presiding, profound vision is the tragic. The real tragedy may not be death but the failure to live connected to our deepest self.  

 

Magic in the Moonlight (2014)

The marvellous thing about Woody Allen is how variously he can replay the same central core of themes and values for fresh pleasure — and how much serious thought can freight his comedy. 

In terms of themes and issues Woody makes the same movie over and over again. That’s what directors do, as Jean Renoir observed: The director makes one movie across his lifetime. But each replay is fresh, different, rewarding, a pleasure to enjoy and to contemplate. 

      As a case in point, here’s a joke in Magic in the Moonlight (2014). Stanley playfully rejects the charge he doesn't believe in the unseen world: “On the contrary, I always thought the unseen world was a good place to open a restaurant…. The spirits have to eat somewhere.” 

  Go back 40(!) years to Love and Death (1975), where a pattern of food/eating jokes undercuts the characters’ airy philosophizing with a bathetic, hardheaded reminder of the most basic human appetite: food. Boris returns to the philosophizing Sonia from the dead to describe death — It’s worse than the chicken at Tresky’s restaurant. 

The main theme of Moonlight is that hardy Allen perennial: “Depressing as the facts of existence are, they are the facts. There is no metaphysical world. What you see out there is what you get. I think Mr. Nietzsche has disposed of the God matter rather convincingly.”

The question is how we will deal with the fact that “Happiness is not the natural human condition.” As Allen continually dramatizes, life is so miserable we need illusions to get through it. 

Stanley’s long, intense conversation with Aunt Vanessa is a brilliant dance in dialogue. (I doubt there’s a livelier scene of such focused and ironic dialogue in any other 2014 film). Vanessa seems to support Stanley’s ever-weakening assertions even as she leads the stuffy skeptic to acknowledge his irrational desire for Sophie. Her minimal verbalism is a parallel to the sleight of hand by which the the magician manoeuvers his audience into an alternative perception. As Stanley discovers he loves the woman he just exposed as a fraud, Vanessa concludes, “the world may or may not be without purpose, but it's not totally without some kind of magic.“ 

Stanley is a magician who fakes a supernatural power. He also takes pride in exposing pretenders to engagement with a higher reality. But he is converted from absolute rationalism — twice. First he’s conned by his magician friend and the fake seer Sophie. But even after that Stanley discovers that fakery and reasserts his doubt, he still/again falls in love and accepts its irrationality. So much for his original conviction: “When the heart rules the head, disaster follows.” In his films (and life) Allen advances the saving grace of irrational love in an unsympathetic universe. Sophie shows the same refusal to be sensiblen when she dumps her millionaire fiance to marry the surly magician.

The film’s central focus on man’s reason — and its necessary limits — makes this a counterpoint to The Irrational Man. Both heroes are lumbered with learning, especially Nietzsche. Where the earlier film focused on the issue of moral responsibility, this one takes a breezier attitude towards finding through love the consolations available in our brief, doomed lives. The film is an unmitigated pleasure for the mind as for the jokes. 

One more point. The 1928 setting allows for a rich recreation of the glamour, beauty, romanticism of the period, in the characters’ rich lives and in the soundtrack. Allen's rare return to wide-screen shooting amplifies the opulence. But here’s the point: the horrors of the Depression and WW II are looming in the wings.

To Rome, With Love (2012)

The Eternal City gets a different kind of travelogue treatment here: a visit by a spectrum of Woody Allen representations. This is Rome seen through the prism of its creator. Allen's appearance was his first in six years, five films, his first since Scoop. As the dedication in the title suggests, it's a very personal dedication to the famous city.

  The framing song is the familiar old hit parade topper, Volare. That defines the perspective as an American of Woody Allen’s age — who would remember that song from the Ed Sullivan Show. It was the rare foreign language song to become an American pop hit 

Allen’s character serves a double function. As Jerry, tourist Hayley’s father, he deploys his familiar nebbish persona, nervous on the plane, suspicious of Hayley’s new fiancee, an Italian leftist. He’s also a failed music director. His long-suffering wife cares enough to define the reviewer’s “imbecile” as “ahead of your time.” 

But like Allen, Jerry has a good eye for talent. With more bravery than most: his Pagliacci brilliantly performs entirely inside a working shower. As the conventional opera unfolds exuberantly around him, he performs in his shower box, washing and lathering as he sings, superbly. That lunatic staging choice is an actual necessity. His tenor can only sing well in the shower. This image resonates further: in an apparently conventional staging something personal operates in a private box within, weird but vital. Like the Allen element in any story he tells. It may seem odd but it’s necessary.  

An alternative Allen surrogate opens the film. The Rome traffic director functions like a director: “My job, as you can see, is to see that the traffic move. I stand up here, and I see everything. All people. I see life. In this city, all is a story….There are many stories, next time you come.” On behalf of director Allen he introduces the characters and concludes the story.

Robert Benigni plays another Allen, a modest little man thrust into the ordeal of celebrity. TV makes him a sudden star — for being so ordinary. He enjoys promotion, public attention, the service of beautiful women, but he’s finally relieved when the spotlight moves on and he can return to his modest family. One might take this as an ironic reversal of the scandal/attention that drove Allen from the US to this cycle of European films. 

A similar personal reflection may lie in the story of two newlywed provincials whose move to Rome is complicated by their separate adulteries. Those unconventional sexual experiences have the salutary effect of enabling them to see past the surface allure of Rome. They return to the simpler lives, especially enriched by their respective sexual experiences. Their illicit adventures deepened their relationship.

The other plot has two Allen surrogates. Alex Baldwin is the mature man who returns to the Rome of his student days and through Jessie Eisenberg relives a doomed old romance. The interplay of past and present is a familiar Allen device, especially apt in the Eternal City which unchanged has survived centuries of human waves. The woman the mature man warns the younger not to fall in love with is precisely the kind of enchanting, bright but disastrously neurotic beauty Allen was prone to fall for (as he recounts in his current memoir). As another signature, the “Ozymandias melancholia” is revived from Stardust Memories.

Perhaps lacking the moral intensity of Allen’s best films, this is still a delight, engaging, rich, amusing, and as this reading proposes — subtly personal.