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.

Midnight in Paris (2011)

After the panorama of failed dreams in You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, here Woody Allen empowers his hero to escape his limited life through fantasy. 

Successful Hollywood hack Gil discovers an alternative life when his fiancee’s (shudder) Republican parents bring them to Paris. His imaginative experiences lead him to abandon his unsatisfying life, including his engagement, and to settle into his dream city, Paris. Presiding over his new romance is Cole Porter’s urbane “Let’s Do It.”

In the pre-title sequence a Dixieland song-long montage of the glorious sights of the city sets the stage. Over the credits Gil extolls the romance of Paris to his unsympathetic Inez, especially his desire to have lived there in The Golden Age, the 1920s. The hero of Gil’s novel runs a nostalgia store. That suggests his fascination with the past, which will mature into his decision to go live with it.

This film is an act of alchemy. Pedant Paul dismisses Gil’s romanticism as a pathology: “Nostalgia is denial - denial of the painful present. The name for this denial is Golden Age thinking, the erroneous notion that a different time period is better than the one one's living in. iI's a flaw in the romantic imagination of those people who find it difficult to cope with the present.” 

But Allen makes Gil right and Paul wrong. About Rodin’s wife, as well as about the perception of an idealizing reality beyond the material. Hemingway’s lessons include the insight that Inez has been having an affair with Paul.

Gil’s 1920s romance, Adriana, rather than appreciating her contemporary glories, yearns for her lost Golden Age, the Belle Epoque. When both are transported there, Gauguin and his mates harken back to their Golden Age, the Renaissance. Even the Golden Agers yearn for a lost Golden Age. 

  Adriana decides to stay there. But Gil returns to his proper time, emboldened to deal with his reality. His lost heroes can still inform him as he navigates their world in his/our time.

Ironically, interior scenes in Gil’s current life are often shot in a golden glow themselves, in the characters’ hotel room as well as in the later visit to King Louis’s home at Versailles. That is, our time could well be the Golden Age for a future one. However harsh or drab our world, others may well find it their own preferable refuge — and so could we, as Gil ends. 

  What causes Paris’s alchemical miracle, bringing contemporary Paris to such life for Gil, is the arts. In his midnight meanderings Gil meets the artists and writers who have given him his romantic vision of the city. For Allen the artistic life, the freed imagination, provides an energy unavailable in uncompromising normalcy. As Gertrude Stein finds this theme in Gil’s novel — “The artist's job is not to succumb to despair but to find an antidote for the emptiness of existence.” —  she evokes so many of Allen’s movies from Annie Hall on. 

Gil’s discovery of himself in Adriana’s memoir recalls Allen brilliant story of Madame Bovary stepping into a hapless professor’s life. Still, Gil misses out on the described consummation when she stays with Gauguin. 

Inez dismisses Gil’s love for Paris as “a fantasy.” But the past Gil perceives there is real. In the Parisienne Gabrielle, herself a nostalgia dealer at the flea market level, Gil finds his true soulmate, in name as in nature. She may not be Adriana but — she’s real and she’s there. Inez wasn’t.

You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger (2010)

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.

Saboteur (1942)

Hitchcock’s opening image embodies the central theme of the film. A shadow of a mysterious male figure appears against a massive wall of white corrugated metal. That introduces the attack on the factory that triggers the plot. 

The image also anticipates a very dramatic scene later, when villain Fry shoots real bullets from behind the cinema screen, fulfilling the threat from the inner movie’s irate husband. Taken together these two shots embody the functional discontinuity between image and reality. 

Specifically at issue is the image of American democracy. The villains are wealthy American traitors undermining the nation’s 1942 defence against a foreign totalitarianism.  As Tobin explains, these exceptionally wealthy — and respectable! —people hunger for unmediated power. They would profit from the overthrow of democracy. Striking for a WW II thriller, there is no mention of Nazis. The threat to democracy is the US oligarchy.

They disdain of the sentimentality and idealism that hero Barry Kane (a more ideal, humane Citizen than Welles’s of 1941) represents. The elite that has prospered from democratic capitalism here abandons the outcast, the underprivileged.

The circus freaks are a broadening miniature of American society. Their instinctive responses to the troubled couple set the spectrum of humanitarianism. The mean dwarf Major bitterly argues for their betrayal. As the essential human, The Human Skeleton instinctively defends them: “The normal are abnormally hard-hearted.”  As the Siamese twins are of course divided on every issue, it falls to the bearded lady to intuit the couple’s emotional connection. She has the romantic instinct to save them. 

The film teems with instances of deceptive appearance. Twice the feuding Patricia and Barry are taken to be passionately in love, as others foresee their harmony. Patricia’s father is in the tradition of the extra sensitive, extra perceptive blind seer. Barry is struck by the difference between the real Patricia and her billboard image. Conversely, the very respectable Tobin and society matron Mrs Sutton prove to be the vile traitors, undermining America’s defence against her enemies. Setting the climax on the Statue of Liberty confirms the film’s political core. Here life and freedom literally hang by a thread. America has to defend its values against internal subverters as well as their foreign enemy.   

Especially chilling is Tobin’s cynical description of Kane: “He's noble and fine and pure... So he pays the penalty that the noble and the fine and the pure must pay in this world: he's misjudged by everyone.” 

Barry establishes an immediate connection with trucker Mac, an example of Tobin’s “moron millions” who lack his ambition for a “more profitable type of government.” For Mack having three meals a day is a sufficient dream. Like the freaks later, Mac helps Barry escape the forces of law and order that have been suborned by Tobin’s false image of citizenship and respectability. Dishearteningly, this debate over America’s soul is as current today as it was in 1942. That battle was won but the war persists.   

Still, despite that sombre theme this is a hugely enjoyable film. There are several delightful set pieces, especially Hitchcock’s venture into the Western chase scene, Barry’s scenes with the blindman and with the freaks, his extemporizing in the Sutton lair, the surreal cinema scene, his careful deployment of little Suzie and, of course, the climax on Lady Liberty.