Screen
O'Brien, Tom
SCREEN WOODY GOES WIRELESS RADIO DAYS' Radio Days will challenge all those for whom Woody Allen can do no wrong. The film is dismal, worth seeing perhaps only for the sets that recreate the...
...The film is dismal, worth seeing perhaps only for the sets that recreate the domestic world of the thirties and of the radio programs that first fascinated America in that decade...
...the nerds stay home, tune in, and dream...
...But with the episode of the beating and the child in the well, all Allen can create is a metaphorical link of the slimmest kind...
...But Allen relies on our being in the know in order to get his joke...
...and Woody Allen has a constitutional weakness for ideas...
...What you get inRadio Days is nostalgia surrounded by confusion...
...TOM O'BRIEN 112: Commonweal...
...The most dramatic event Allen can muster details how the child and his friends use binoculars to spy on a woman naked in her bedroom as she dances to a radio tune before taking a shower...
...it's classic self-enclosed insider wit...
...The answer is simple: they can't...
...But this, too, is forced and comes across as bombast...
...So why did Allen make Radio Daysl Not, to be sure, for money...
...I may be wrong, but I think it tells you more than you need to know about Allen's potential wimpiness, not (as he thinks) of body, but of mind...
...they're just not as honest about it as everyone else...
...Intellectuals crave gods...
...Especially because of his gifts of irony and mock heroism, Woody Allen has become the intellectuals' "designer" director: slap that brand name on a film, and they'll flock there like sheep...
...The only depth in the film involves the aunt-nephew relationship, especially when Wiest takes the child along as a sort of emotional chaperone on some of her heavier dates...
...In both The Purple Rose and Hannah, Allen has provided increasingly sensitive portrayals of women, and sometimes in Radio Days hope rises for more of the same...
...I must also confess a constitutional suspicion of canonization, which is what the high culture enthusiasm for Woody Allen amounts to...
...Film critics, too, have a constitutional weakness, jealousy, and perhaps this influences my response...
...Add to this the temptation of every witty person to strike first and ask questions later, and you get the dangerous predominance of wit over judgment...
...As narrator, Allen provides awkward voice-over transitions to fuse things together...
...Radio Days might have looked decent on the drawing board...
...To understand this, Allen would have to understand philosophy, rather than play with it...
...Radio Days is painfully superficial...
...Still the comedian, Allen feels compelled to please and succeed, which means a commitment to one movie a year and a reduction in time to think...
...But in contrast to his recent films, this time no unity emerges...
...Such consistent intra-film fictionalization is witty and even fits Allen's continual play with the make-believe of media...
...First, there are Allen's work habits as a director, which partake of some of the nervous compulsiveness of the adult character he often plays on screen...
...She later shows up as their substitute teacher—and so ends the episode, a cliche' to begin with...
...There is not enough plot to sustain a single genuine role...
...This show has too many disparate strands...
...But there is no dramatic interaction between the Rockawayites and 27 February 1987: 111 the stars...
...Such references and the composition of the cast make one feel that Radio Days was inspired when Allen suddenly turned to his cronies and crowed, "Hey, kids, I have a great idea—why don't we all put on a show...
...Nietzsche had a word for this neurosis: resentiment, the envy of the strong by the slick...
...Vainly one hopes for some unity to Allen's double plot between the world of Rockaway and radio glamour...
...He also makes an intellectual stab at unity by showing how he was saved from a beating when a radio news flash announces a child has fallen down a well in Pennsylvania...
...all Allen's themes are present, even, in a closing bit by Wallace Shawn, some "existentializing" about time and mortality at a New Year's celebration in 1944...
...But the story stinks and the so-so acting can't hide it...
...They go to Radio City, to be sure, and Wiest even wins a radio game-show contest...
...Catch the treatment of baseball in Radio Days...
...The hectic, slapdash origins of the film are evident in the many small mistakes, too numerous to note, that mar its basic narrative texture...
...Some of them are interesting at first—his mother (Julie Kavner, who finally cannot sustain the attention the camera gives her) and his maiden aunt (Dianne Wiest, an Oscar nominee for Hannah and Her Sisters), who keeps on having bad luck with men...
...Radio Days is an idea, not a film...
...But the very length of the acting credits is a warning...
...What it reveals is everything that's wrong with Woody Allen even when he makes good movies...
...The film is all parts and no whole...
...Allen must have thought some of his characters could generate interest simply by being there, like Jeff Daniels as Biff Bixby, the movie star who jilted Mia Farrow in The Purple Rose of Cairo and who turns up as part of the crowd of stars who frequent a nightclub in Radio Days...
...The child meanwhile is given no chance to mature or undergo any rite of passage and becomes increasingly insignificant...
...True, our private lives are often interrupted by electronic news flashes, and Allen uses the announcement of the attack on Pearl Harbor to good effect to illustrate this...
...The cast includes almost all of Allen's star friends from his other, more successful movies—Dianne Wiest, Tony Roberts, Mia Farrow, even Diane Keaton at the end, in a cameo as a nightclub songstress...
...In this regard, Radio Days is valuable for illustrating the bankruptcy of imagination when it can't grow beyond self, the past, and the little asteroid of Manhattan, Allen's Mecca...
...The stars broadcast, flirt with each other, visit the Copacabana...
...It doesn't help that it's weighted down with a heavy dose of Allen's usual narcissism as well...
...The real answer lies elsewhere, and suggests a corruption of sensibility...
...his father turns sentimental and stops slugging him as everyone gets glued tatheir sets for "further news...
...Sitting in the theater beforehand I wondered how all the performers could find their way into the announced ninety-minute running time...
...What Radio Days lacks is Allen's gift for weaving his gossamer plots into emotional substance...
...The center, at least for a while, is a thin, anemic-looking, tousle-haired (and almost prematurely balding) version of Allen's young self (Seth Green) and his family, a set of Rockaway grotesques that are given one demeaning characteristic each, and then left to degenerate by repetition into caricature...
...But even Wiest can't rise above the "broken record" nature of her material, a set of dates with inadequate men, concluding with the anachronism of one confessing that he is gay...
...They mostly consist of "Meanwhile...
Vol. 114 • February 1987 • No. 4
