Beauty in a world of schlock
BURKHART, MARIAN
IN DEFENSE OF WOODY ALLEN Beauty in a world of schlock MARIAN BURKHART Everything has its uses, even negative reviews of movies we love. If none existed, we might never get round to figuring...
...How does one live in a universe so capricious that one cannot count even on disaster...
...He uses the tawdry artifact his world provides to make what is not tawdry at all, a marriage, very much less than perfect, it is true, but a marriage that lasts, against the odds...
...After the rite itself, the newly confirmed sang with gusto a popular song asserting the necessity of loving yourself and walking alone...
...That he doesn't have a brain tumor violates the principles upon which he lives and which his life to date has done its share to validate...
...The monsignor suggests it despairingly, without the touch of hope that brightens the face of the Hare Krishna boy, for he recognizes that Mickey is not one whom reasoned argument can reach...
...Wordsworth found solace and order in nature...
...It is covered now with black canvas — rather to my regret...
...After his divorce he dates Holly, when the essentially perceptive Hannah suggests they have much in...
...He undergoes a CATscan...
...It is frequently remarked that Allen makes movies by, for, and about New Yorkers, movies that win awards at Cannes but don't play in Peoria...
...I can't be the only ex- or present Denverite who finds comfort in nice old buildings that have been allowed to stand and relief in noting that the imposing state capital, centrally located on a large tract of rising land, has not yet been razed for condominiums...
...One approaches most who consider conversion by suggesting that they read "our literature...
...He has suffered certain symptoms which his talent for assuming the worst interprets as proof of a brain tumor — malignant, of course...
...Things do not work for Mickey...
...Tom O'Brien in Commonweal (March 14, 1986) joined her in condemning a "romance" that ignored New York's dirt and its homeless...
...Hopkins transcends and justifies that solace when he says, "The Holy Ghost over the bent/World broods . . . with ah...
...Of course, his search fails...
...I need answers...
...He is one of the few Americans who make films — not flicks — and to determine with some precision what gives Hannah its charm is no more than his due...
...I live around the corner from it...
...Her liberation ties the architectural imagery into the film's theme, for we meet the man she will ultimately marry walking up the steps of Columbia University's Loeb Memorial Library, the first beautiful spot — aside from Hannah's apartment — in which we have seen her...
...Thus New York's beautiful buildings play their part, as the affirmative backdrop against which Mickey's negations bounce...
...It amused us during dinner conversations with one another and with friends for the next few weeks...
...Pauline Kael, whose New Yorker (February 24, 1986) review I read long after its publication, MARIAN BURKHART has taught college English in and out of New York, is a book reviewer, and writes an occasional literary essay...
...But instead he suffers his emotional crisis...
...Against the odds, Hannah comforts one sister and reasserts the bond that holds them together in the words her culture gives: the psychobabble of "supportive...
...And Paul, who profited from that earlier visitation, wrote later that we see now as in a glass darkly...
...One doesn't spoil the ending of a film that provides a catharsis, that takes the material — family relationships, illness, children — so cheaply milked in a movie like Terms of Endearment, and allows us by means of it to see ourselves not as fools because we hope...
...bright wings...
...And while we're on that block, we can discover where, even so long after Vatican II, Allen found religious objects as appalling as those Mickey brings home during his flirtation with Catholicism...
...Who would have thought New York held Pomander Walk, the small encampment of Alsatian-looking cottages on either side of an enclosed yard...
...In a world so ordered — or so disordered — why doesn't he have a brain tumor...
...It seemed I shared, pleasantly but uninterestingly, a common response...
...How can the man of faith hope to persuade him...
...Not so...
...He does what men who love their wives do when those wives want children, and he has to resort to artificial insemination...
...But before the rite we had sung, "Come, Holy Ghost," and afterwards, against the odds, the choir sang Confirma Hoc Deus in Gregorian chant...
...My daughter was confirmed last spring in a ceremony informed by the Holy Spirit...
...The strongest statement of that theme is the quarrel between her parents that Hannah comes to resolve...
...But Wordsworth's vision is no more avail8 May 1987: 295 able to Mickey than is Hopkins's theology, for Mickey, alas, is as much an urbanite as he is a skeptic...
...The monsignor to whom Mickey goes for instruction is not really cold...
...His pessimism, his certainty that the world's only order is disorder, is so all encompassing that Hobbe's Leviathan, besides Mickey's angst, is the effusion of Little Mary Sunshine...
...Against the odds, her marriage lasts, even though her husband has an affair with her other sister...
...Allen passes over the architectural errors that are Columbia's other buildings, for, against the odds, they set off Loeb and frame a cloistered campus for it to overlook...
...Take one small scene...
...Her parents are accusing one another of infidelity...
...What have other skeptics done in Mickey's plight, especially those who are as romantic as Mickey is...
...After all, one of the aspects of New York that is most disconcerting is that it is the rest of America intensified...
...The acceptance he achieves of a world less than perfect, of a glass in which he sees, though he sees but darkly, is rewarded...
...The ones I read saw the "slurs" as Allen's comic irreverence, and having been written apparently by lovers of handsome buildings, opined on the whole that it was very nice that Allen loved them, too...
...Consider Mickey's crisis...
...Note that Mickey needs those answers not when he thought himself ill, but when he discovers he is well...
...Other reviewers, she said, were applauding what was no more than a superficial "romance of gentrification...
...One has only to walk one short block east to Amsterdam Avenue and two or three short blocks south to find a gaggle — some even uglier...
...But Allen deserves better than that...
...The song catches quite exactly the father's limited world, the superficiality of the songs he sings, the show-biz facade that is his life...
...Such limited vision Mickey cannot at that point accept...
...he says...
...Against the odds, that other sister uses the affair as a means to free herself from the selfcentered artist with whom she leads a sterile life in an unlovely apartment in a bleak neighborhood...
...And, of course, all Americans live with schlock, with bad design, babbling words, and tawdry art...
...The practitioner of Hare Krishna whom Mickey accosts in Central Park responds, with one significant difference, in much the same way...
...Take, for instance, Woody Allen's most recent Oscar winner, Hannah and Her Sisters...
...found the film merely so-so...
...When last we visited, downtown was a series of overly tall buildings that made wind tunnels...
...Those of us gifted with faith keep that faith against the odds not just of evils like the Holocaust which multiply geometrically the evils people of all time have been subject to, but against those odds that Allen assesses...
...That against-the-odds quality belongs to other buildings he shows...
...He visits doctors...
...For Mickey is paranoid...
...He wants wonders, and his search leads where such searches do lead — to the brown paper bag filled with schlocky icons and Wonder Bread...
...Against the odds of an overly gung-ho approach, the bishop's dignity as man and prelate prevailed...
...His characters' lives present disorder enough...
...Nothing comes out as the ordinary view of the world says it should...
...I would agree with her that the picture under-uses Mia Farrow, but Kael very much objected as well to the "quick tour of Manhattan's architectural marvels" that Sam Waterston uses as an occasion for sizing up Hannah's sister Holly and her buddy...
...The occasion is a fiasco...
...For those of us with the kind of trivia-memory that recalls the lyrics, the moment is even more precisely defined, for the words are, "You are too beautiful, my dear, to be true, and I am a fool for beauty...
...He goes out into Central Park expecting to be happy...
...He is merely bemused, as any monsignor with a lick of sense would be if he were confronted by so unlikely a convert as Mickey...
...Mickey, the 294: Commonweal character Allen plays, is walking up Broadway on his way to the theater in which he will see the movie that occasions his epiphany...
...1 do believe...
...He objected, furthermore, to the film's anti-religious stance, particularly the view of Catholicism implied by the "cold" monsignor and the ghastly statuary...
...I grew up in Denver, in those days a small, humanly ordered city in which children played freely in parks, the downtown area functioned pleasantly in buildings not too tall to fit the terrain, and the air was so clean that on sunny days it caressed you and you could, on cold ones, eat the snow...
...It, too, almost didn't...
...The lineup is so suitable to Allen's film and Mickey's mood that one suspects a mock-up, but that block exists...
...His motive for that tour is larger than Waterston's, and if his camera stresses what is beautiful about New York, what he pictures really exists and, furthermore, is central, as is what he has to say about religion, to what the work is all about...
...When it first opened, it sent me and my family home aglow...
...If he is to find any sort of peace, any modus vivendi, he has to do it not through nature but through the things of man...
...To his astonishment he has no brain tumor...
...Some fifteen years ago we all signed petitions to get it named a landmark...
...What he is concerned with is how quite ordinary human beings use what their world provides to triumph over that disorder — to triumph against the odds — since the means they use are as feeble, as inappropriate, as mired in contradictions as are the characters themselves, as is New York itself...
...If he doesn't, why do other evil things happen...
...1 have had my fill, too, of the knee-jerk anti-Catholicism members of New York's intelligentsia do not even classify as prejudice, and I drop in my change whenever I come across those bottles the Coalition for the Homeless sets up to enable us easily to give our mite for those who suffer most obviously from New York's callousness and New York's greed...
...Her mother has been drinking...
...common...
...I might have died...
...He will live...
...The early reviews I read thought highly of it, too...
...and one of the city's most serious problems was smog...
...So begins Mickey's search for faith...
...But Mickey is seeking not faith — an intellectual virtue — but an existential event that will shock him out of his despair and destroy it forever...
...Christ appeared only once on the road to Damascus, and if he appeared again on any road that Mickey knows, he would be arrested for blocking traffic...
...His skepticism is so profound, so integral to his character, that next to what we experience of the way he thinks, such documents as Montaigne's "Apology for Raymond Sebond" seem expressions of childlike credulity...
...The image, again, is exact, for, whether Mickey knows it or not, if you seek for wonders, you will find only that which relates quite precisely to spiritual sustenance as Wonder Bread relates to food...
...Hannah sobers her mother up, and her father, now retired from musical comedy, goes to the piano and comforts himself with a singularly overblown and sentimental tune...
...296: Commonweal...
...the bleak post- Bauhaus apartment building overlooking Cheesman Park — my playground — had as its selling point the absolute security of a locked elevator you drove right to, for which only tenants had keys...
...How could the Ansonia survive a rabidly commercial age in a rabidly commercial city...
...If none existed, we might never get round to figuring out what made those films so lovable...
...He walks past stores called "Jhon's," "A Different Step," and "Nuts and Dried Fruits...
...Trembling Mickey, strapped helplessly into the state-of-the-art machine which will decree his fate, is Chaplinesque-man dominated by his inventions as wholly as in Modern Times...
...He flatters his wife, justifies, excuses, and sympathizes with himself...
...He turns in desperation to that monsignor who can give him only a reasoned account of the faith Mickey thinks he seeks...
...Things for Mickey go right, so movingly right that I shall not reveal the final Tightness...
...Allen has no need to show the architectural disorder that is as much New York, but no more, as are the buildings he chooses...
...We might not even note that for the most part the positive reviews missed the boat, too...
...But both points, it seems to me, slide past what is really going on in the film, and the positive reviews are not particularly useful either...
...It's still there, except that the firm now occupying the premises of "Jhon's" must have seen the movie, too, because for two or three weeks there was a hole where "ho" once had been...
...He marries the admirable, stable Hannah, and the marriage falls apart...
...But the point is that he makes it work...
...It is, as a matter of fact, only because of some hard horsetrading that the complex recently escaped demolition...
...But it is quite understandable that Hannah and Her Sisters collected four Oscars...
...1 must admit I was not surprised when a friend of mine told me that when he and his wife saw an early Allen opus in an Atlanta shopping mall, no one else laughed...
...And, of course, Mickey makes use not of a great movie, but of a rather silly early musical to achieve his epiphany, for it is an epiphany of the ordinary, of the joy there is in human life — against all odds...
Vol. 114 • May 1987 • No. 9
