Screen
O'Brien, Tom
them into being to lessen a mother's grief, be a reminder of a dead spouse, or bring a dream to fulfillment? Ultimately, the moral response to these questions involves discerning in what wisdom...
...By placing Niebuhr's thought in the 14 March 1986...
...The best involves a lovely line from e.e...
...The key to his growth toward s "ccess in that effort is the last scene, when he even has the -grace to deny himself a last witty word...
...The miracle is that from this confusing (and often self, indulgent) material, Allen creates a believable, gentle tale about family life that actually celebrates (at last) commitment...
...If a director so glorified Southern California or Texas, imagine the howls from the myopic New York critics who so glorify Allen's work...
...First, a simple problem concerns structure: Allen does not always manage to connect his character's story with the three sisters', and the plot often seems less juncture than fracture...
...Nevertheless, Hannah is worthwhile, often charming, and even moving...
...Ultimately, the moral response to these questions involves discerning in what wisdom consists...
...The story of the three sisters illustrates Allen's growing capacity to sympathize with women and present them in a genuine manner...
...If mainstream Christianity is to , , , , C...
...elliptical cuts sustain suspense...
...Indeed, some have suggested that Hannah is Allen's Fanny and Alexander...
...The visual fulfillment of the line a few moments later is exquisite...
...Allen, meanwhile, had been married to Mia, but was unable to have children -- a fact handled with some gross comedy, but which had a serious impact on their eventual divorce...
...I am by nature skeptical at coronations, so let me list the defects of the film not often mentioned in the praise that it is currently receiving...
...His findings are wellorganized and lucidly presented...
...151...
...But then Allen is at his best when honoring women...
...Just as most ordinary citizens, however intensely religious, have learned to be skeptical about pious politicians aspiring to the mantle of William Jennings Bryan, so the American "community of conscience" may be learning to live without the prickly comfort afforded by "intellectual preachers" like Reinhold Niebuhr...
...Yet, above all, Fox strives to create an account that does not simply rehash the history of Niebuhr's restless thinking about religion and politics...
...Hannah and Her Sisters is a hopeful sign...
...The plot of Hannah and Her Sisters thus simply literalizes the claustrophobic tone of all Woody Allen films...
...all the men, moreover, are losers or villains except for Allen's character...
...Hannah is the best of them...
...Allen is present in Hannah (he was absent in Purple Rose) but as only half of the story...
...Allen still has to imagine his way into wider circles of experience...
...Society-at-large, and ethics in particular, should attempt to enable widows like Mrs...
...To make a better film, Allen must, to borrow a term from The Right Stuff, "push through the envelope...
...Despite the contrived plot, when Allen concentrates on these tensions and on what sustains a family despite them, he nears a gold mine of genuine emotion...
...his imitation Bergman film, Interiors, sketched something of the same plot as Hannah, where yon Sydow provides a Bergman echo...
...It is unfortunate he never quite explores it deeply...
...No scene better achieves this than a difficult lunch between the three, where Allen's camera pans around the table in an unobtrusive but all inclusive manner...
...For all of Allen's "soui-searching," incidentally, what his hypochondriac finally achieves is no more than deliguru: "the heart," he pompously proclaims, "is a very resilient muscle...
...His judgments on Niebuhr's own books are anything but tendentious: he generally confirms what by now may be conventional academic wisdom that although Niebuhr wrote too much, too often, some of his works, like Beyond Tragedy (I 937) and The Irony of American History (1951), deserve to be remembered as minor American classics...
...He plays a hypochondriacal television producer who provides comic relief from a sororal soap opera featuring Mia Farrow as Hannah, with Barbara Hershey and Dianne Wiest as 9 9 \ her sisters in -- where else...
...If moral theology responds to the reproductive technology of the 1980s by advocating discernment and caution, and by offering guidelines rather than prefabricated solutions or prohibitions, responsibility for profound ethical decisions will rest with very vulnerable people...
...both regard their "earth mother" sister Farrow with fine sibling love/hate...
...More seriously, it's no accident that Allen here touches on a variety of incest in tracing the sisters' intertangled sex lives, which Allen and other men share on a kind of rotating basis...
...cummings: "No one, not even the rain, has such small hands...
...Having continued as amicable friends, Mia even sets him up with her ditzy, (failed) actress sister, Dianne Wiest, whose narrow eyes always convey benign bewilderment...
...At times his narrative is good enough to make a novelist jealous...
...Dianne Wiest is at her nervous worst, having just been rejected at another audition...
...Allen then sophomorically lampoons various philosophers on the "meaning of life," finally accepting Pascal's wager, but never mentioning it by name, as if he can't give religion any credit...
...Barbara Hershey (whose affair with Caine is her secret) is convincingly racked by guilt...
...The slight story is also magnificently edited: economic flashbacks provide key past family history...
...Despite formidable obstacles, Fox clearly has done better research, more successfully penetrating Niebuhr's privacy and that of his family, than any previous study of his life and thought...
...Or maybe a lie...
...Solomon knew that a loving mother would sooner give up her child than see her child deprived of life...
...It is noteworthy that everyone in Hannah is either an actor, artist, or writer (except one accountant, a heavy...
...After REINHOLD NIEBUHR A BIOGRAPHY Richard Wightman Fox Pantheon, $19.95, 340 pp...
...Such self-serving self-referentiality is not the hallmark of a comprehensive imagination...
...imagination of someone who experiences New York with the anesthesia fortune makes possible...
...On the other hand, it is quite possible, given the extraordinary limits of his Manhattanite parochialism, Allen doesn't know that religious thinking even exists...
...The most meaningful human experiences are central to this issue: love, parenthood, life, and death...
...Or the absence of...
...Some backbone provided by rel~ated scenes at Thanksgiving dinners, where Hannah's parents (the late Lloyd Nolan, and Maureen O'Sullivan, Mia Farrow's actual mother) provide an anchor, at least for common concern, among the daughters...
...Dennis P. McCann contemplating Richard Fox's biography, I conclude that perhaps it's just as well...
...Cases such as that of Corinne Parpalaix are still unusual, but such difficult cases will probably not be solved by the application of abstract moral strictures which often are not convincing to ordinary people...
...Third, Allen's incestuous concern with Manhattan (although enjoying good film precedents in the 1930s' comedies that he reveres) aggravates by its parochialism and selectivity...
...The younger Woody Allen would have wisecracked...
...I II I! I II I [ Screen I II II NEW AMSTERDAM 'HANNAH & HER SISTERS' W OODY ALLEN the director has found a partial solution to the problem of Woody Allen the character...
...At present, he makes films for movie critics and New Yorkers...
...With a rare trace of garbage, blight, or humidity, Hannah and Her Sisters resembles an "I Love New York (City)" travel poster...
...What holds the material together...
...continue to be a reforming influence in our pluralistic society, it will have to find another way...
...A dead father's hope, a widow's desires, the best interests of a child who has not yet been conceived...
...and the use of titles (on a blank screen between scenes) piques curiosity...
...Allen's religious quest brings him to dry-as-dust monsignors and stores selling kitschy crucifixion art...
...Instinctively, or on advice, Allen thus reduces the level of annoyingly narcissistic self-concern -- all the more tedious since his cinematic self is ~o loquaciously convinced of inadequacy -that had become a fetish in earlier films...
...modern Manhattan...
...The plot is a complicated trio of boymeetsgirl: Mia's (Hannah's) husband (unevenly played by Michael Caine) falls in love with Barbara Hershey, who lives with Max yon Sydow (also heavy as a pedantic avant-garde artist...
...But it seems that this is the role moral theology should be playing, given the complexity of the issues and the needs of moral decision-makers...
...such, for example, is the vivid portrait of the 1903 Chatauqua at Lincoln, Illinois, with which he begins his story...
...Allen has always been a romantic ironist...
...The word of rural "Christian America" that nurtured them no longer exists, but even more decisively, in various ways we have all been conspiring to destroy the kind of civic culture that would confer celebrity status on its would-be prophets...
...Here we are treated to spotlessly photogenic scenes of New York streets and institutions -- as though the city Were really New Amsterdam and no one appreciates it more than Woody Allen...
...Real seriousness, even real comic seriousness like Chaplin's, however, involves more than inside references and insider movies...
...TOM O'BRIEN Books: THE LAST SUPERSTAR R EINHOLD NIEBUHR died fifteen years ago, and in the time since then, no religious figure, clerical or lay, theologian or social activist, has emerged to fill the vacuum that his death created, not only in the "mainstream churches" of Protestant Christianity but also in the so-called "vital center" of American politics...
...Parpalaix, and others to whom technology holds the promise to solve their reproductive dilemmas, to understand the myriad repercussions of what pregnancy and parenting under such circumstances would entail...
...On a par with Allen's provincialism is his caricature of Catholicism, rooted in some warmed-over nonsense from the fifties dredged up on screen when his hypochondriacal character contemplates conversion...
...The family themes and feelings he touches on here could be explored far more profoundly...
...Allen has always idolized Ingmar Bergman...
...Fox's biography of Niebuhr deserves all the favorable attention it has been getting in the secular press...
...Allen contributes some Commonweal: 150vaudeville one-liners in his scenes, which, now reduced in the screenplay, refresh rather than bore by repetition...
...the problem has been getting the two elements properly co-ordinated...
...In Hannah and Her Sisters, he succeeds in displacing the focus of his filmmaking from his own character to another, just as he did last year in the fine The Purple Rose of Cairo...
...The_ family theme does include a fine surprise at the end, what one might even call a tear-jerker...
...Richard Fox's excellent biography of Niebuhr, besides presenting as much of the indispensable evidence for interpreting Niebuhr's life and thought as may ever be available, hints at some of the reasons why that vacuum may never again be filled...
Vol. 113 • March 1986 • No. 5
