The Screen
Westerbeck, Colin L. Jr.
Sea of Galilee, they were beset by a great storm. Jesus calmed the wind and then chided his disciples "Why are you so frightened? How is it you have no faith?" (4:40) Possessed by fear they could...
...He swore he wouldn't or Dayton, though it may simply have even return for a visit until, big book been Denver, for reasons he never i n both arms, he returned, as he said, adequately explained, though not for to "plant my flag...
...Despite being in the middle of a comedy, it strikes us peculiarly as a bit of comedy reliefDmore comedy for us, maybe, but at last a few moments relief for Woody...
...being a writer, though dead, he told it with extraordinary skill and gusto, qualities for which he'd been noted in his day...
...The duration of the stare, one would think, implies some measure of interest: one stares because one is interested...
...Actually, all his presence did was make a serious dramatic subject into another comedy...
...They mean me no active harm, I think...
...LOVE'S LABOR'S LOST 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 THE SCREEN Woody Allen wants to break our hearts...
...Leave, he said, and you're dead...
...When a pudgy little dandy in a Panama hat goes by, Allen awards him first prize in a "TrumanCapote look-alike contest...
...Annie Hall begins with Allen addressing the camera, monologue-style, and telling two old jokes, one of which is the Groucho Marx gag about not wanting to "belong to any club that would have me as a member...
...He and Diane Keaton are such winsome people, we can't help feeling at the end what a genuine shame it is that things didn't work out for them...
...Yet as startled at my desk I sense a presence and look up, it looks back at me: blank, inscrutably dumb, unexpectedly moonfaced, oddly endearingmlooldng as if it had never known, would never know, tragedy...
...Otherwise one would not stare, as any number of critics have pointed out...
...Not So...
...The impromptu quality of the scene----the promenaders seem to have been shot with a candid camera so Allen could shoot them with his mouth--is very much in the 13May 1977:306 spirit of the rest of the film...
...But broken up as it is here into vignettes, it breaks us up as well...
...This surprised me...
...Then I recall a near neighbor is said by the oldtimers to raise the creatures...
...A sheep at my window...
...In the remote West which he had never really accounted for he undertook the Big Book...
...I live in the country, under a hundred miles from New York City but very much the country...
...The thick matted wool is a dead giveaway...
...They're black and white mostly...
...We sense all along how close to the quick of Allen's real life the film stays...
...Not So...
...COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR...
...4:40) Possessed by fear they could not remember clearly what he had said to them and done for them...
...All that happens is that assorted characters walk past and Allen makes scathing, generally hilarious comments on them to Keaton...
...DEAD WRITERS: A PARABLE SAUL MALOFF indifferent...
...Look at me, and tremble...
...Allen returns to the joke a couple of times later in the film, too, as if it were the tagline for his whole life---the touchstone against which all his experiences must be proven, or rather, disproven...
...Before going West he had in fact published two novels in a single calendar year, one new, the other not-so-new...
...The point of that joke, the iron fist barely concealed within its velvetglove funniness, is that it is oneself who is being rejected rather than the club...
...What is it doing there, outside my workroom window...
...Sound familiar...
...After a long string of comedies of less and less consequence, he turned up last time in (what was billed as) a serious dramatic film, The Front...
...Several scenes look as if they were just improvised, especially one in which he chases live lobsters all over a kitchen while Ms...
...The reason it remains thus is also to be found in the scene by the Boat Basin...
...Imitations of Drowning," Live or Die, p. 17...
...That's what makes him funny...
...It has to be...
...Up the road, cows graze...
...Yet the underlying pain does remain...
...The irony is that the film should cede so much of the stage to Ms...
...Maybe this is also why, funny as the scene is, it has its melancholy side as well...
...Moreover, I have no reason to believe they're not cows...
...but more than either it is absurd, an offense against nature and nature's design...
...The critics had cleared their throats, nodded limply, muttered an admonition: two books in a year...
...The Aw/ul Rowing Toward God, p. 84...
...Extending my life in the pure air was my motive, I argued fatuously...
...All Allen's films are based on his own personality, of course, and in that sense all are autobiographical...
...You know that something is up just from the title of this new film, Annie Hall...
...the rule doesn't apply to them...
...He is called a farmer and he's not the only one in these parts...
...In a better moment she knew something else: "Look to your heart/that flutters in and out like a moth./God is not indifferent to your need./You have a thousand prayers/but God has one...
...They could not remember, they could not hear, not because of the wind, but because of the clanking of the chains of their own mortality, because fear engulfed them, isolating them from one another and from Jesus...
...The game on whose sidelines Allen sits is always the one in which he is playing...
...But now, in his new film, he really does come close to turning the tables...
...Down the road, the pigs are swinishly SAUL MALOFF is the author of Happy Families and Heartland (Scribner's...
...I read it somewhere...
...Besides, I had heard that country had much to recommend it...
...and so are the ducks and goats and horses and, by and large, the donkeys...
...As soon see penguins in Barbados, a writer in God's house...
...It is simply not true that nature is red in tooth and claw...
...you,ll be a dead writer, You can write The Sound and the Fury and Light in August in one year, but after a year's silence, two at the most, you're dead...
...Keaton...
...This scene stands out because we realize that, while Allen always works, as here, by a kind of sly ridicule, the contest he's running is usually for a Woody Allen look-alike, and he usually awards the first prize to himself...
...Dead as a writer, he said...
...want of tryingmthis writer-friend made After the first year or two letters Commonweal: 307...
...The auto-critique is always implicit...
...But that insight failed her...
...earlier moved to Duluth or Des Moines ness, ex-wives...
...He manages to be, for a change, not quite so inconsequential...
...Then heard the utter silence of the empty island, and fearful, drowned, hopeless, died...
...now he had i t - - a foundation grant, an almost certain extension of it, to be followed by another grant from another foundation...
...Done as a straight narrative, a distressing childhood, two unsuccessful marriages, a spoiled love affair and relentless sexual frustration would have been a pretty grim tale...
...Being alone is drowning and, as Anne Sexton knew, "There is no news in fear/but in the end it's fear/that drowns you...
...Making now a movie really about himself, Allen manages for once to get outside himself...
...He makes a comedy work as a drama...
...Annie Hall isn't that serious, but it is more serious than usual for a Woody Allen movie...
...That's a name for a serious person, not a dumb movie like Bananas or What's Up Tiger Lily...
...The scene is set by the Boat Basin in Central Park, where one of New York's most curiously populated promenades is located...
...Laughed even...
...When Woody Allen lets somebody besides him get a laugh in the film he's directing, that's serious...
...in his own words a "long complex dynastic novel covering four possibly five generations," all there in his head throbbing to be written...
...Farms and farmers, true country men and women of the soil bred...
...also rich squires and amateur gardeners, city people, essentially "weekenders" though they live here daily the year round, the distinction being a state of mind...
...Her heart did flutter like a moth, she prattled out her prayer, thrashing and bleating...
...Neither here nor elsewhere, however, does the melancholy get the upper' hand...
...When I departed the city eight years ago, a friend, a writer who had several years a strong, emotional appeal to me to reconsider...
...Not cows...
...She moored her boat at the island she thought was God...
...Woody Allen is always outside himself...
...Keaton takes his picture, and the film generally hops around in Allen's life from past to present in a way that looks unplanned and spontaneous...
...The off-hand manner in which Allen makes these observations on his life is what keeps them from becoming maudlin...
...But this one goes further: it is actually based on Woody Allen's life, complete with two marriages and, most recently, Diane Keaton...
...But that's not really fair either...
...His story was a strange one...
...it must be a sheep, nothing else could be that woolly, and I know for a certainty that's where wool comes from: sheep...
...One of the ways you can tell this is that Diane Keaton, in the title role, actually gets to be funny...
...He's someone alienated not just from society or politics or even other people, but alienated from himself...
...Any time there are two interesting characters instead of just one, no matter how funny they are, what you're going to get, basically, is a dialogue, and dialogue, unlike a stand-up monologue, is a dramatic art form...
...Actually there was a t h i r d a a pseudonymous "paperback original...
...It remains a suggestion made in passing, a mere hint Allen is dropping about himself, which is its effectiveness...
...And the wide westering spaces away from the tumult, morat chaos, vendettas, dreck, crazi...
...It makes you think this is a movie about a labor organizer in the 1930s who became disillusioned when she got lynched...
...As I walk by on my daily rounds, they undulate to the fence, some of them, and stare at me interminably but without interest...
...Indeed, one rather quiet scene in which he and Keaton literally sit on a sideline is in a way the crux of the whole film...
...That's how I know they're cows...
...but at the time only he and I and his agent knew of it...
...Annie Hall is serious because it's about a relationship instead of a monomania - - a doomed relationship between a very successful comedian and a young woman he helps, sort of, to stardom...
...He's so irreconciliably outside himself that he is by nature a parody of the alienation of us all...
...All he needed was time...
...E erie, outlandish, both these...
...Anyway I think it's a sheep, it looks so like pictures I've seen in books I've read to my children...
...The point about nature, as Hardy and others sensed, is that it doesn't care very deeply about us...
Vol. 104 • May 1977 • No. 10
