Screen:

...She's a New York photographer who has never achieved success...

...otherwise, it's there as static background...

...That's the distance between doormen and taxis...

...In private, she gets one good scene too: in front of a mirror, she eyes her aging face and laments, "There's something missing here-my future...

...The only visitors to the house-besides the immediate circle-are New Yorkers looking for a country home...

...Farrow plays a flounderer, one of Allen's best subjects when he focuses on a woman character...

...I would not harp on this if, in a potential film genius, it weren't regrettable...

...The main contrast to Farrow's depression is provided by her mother, played by Elaine Stritch...

...Warden manages it-barely, his credibility breaks with closing references to photons and quarks...

...It's the only inflection in her character, which yields mostly a diagrammatic inversion of her daughter's...

...TOM O'BRIENOM O'BRIEN...

...A film should be judged on its cinematic success, not on its assault on notions of cinematic success...

...Allen here recites the creed of another New York humorist, Fran Liebowitz: "Outside...

...Stritch is an ex-model, ex-showgirl, and still, at sixty, tries to be the sexy, provocative life of the party...

...But Allen hasn't grown lately...

...But teaching through example is one thing, lecturing another...

...Too bad Allen and Streisand never met as youths in Brooklyn, canceled out each other's weaknesses, and shared their strengths...

...Allen here challenges his audience to confront its own expectations about the "life" of a film...

...Take the scene in which Jack Warden, a physicist-and Stritch's latest husband-delivers a speech on the apparently meaningless nature of the cosmos...

...few lines, in a weak screenplay, seem fresh...

...No doubt Allen means it selfconsciously...

...The problem here isn't intellec-tualizing, but the thin texture of his ideas...

...he wants us to see it as symbolic of one aspect of September, and still make the claim of a hidden life beyond the ordinary level of moviemaking...

...He needs a seminar less than a sabbatical...

...At one point in September, Waterston reveals of his would-be novel: "it's lifeless...

...When an artist is told he can do no wrong, rest assured he soon will...

...With her granny glasses and shapeless, flatttened hair, Farrow is "thirty-something," but frozen in her own big chill...

...Unlike most women in Allen's films, she gets no comic redemption-or even relief-in this somber drama...

...Of course, Allen does this in part to prove a point about making an "interior'' film that matches an austere, lifeless style and content...

...Around these two and their memories slowly pace a circle of Allen characters played by favorite actors: Dianne Wiest as Farrow's friend (a woman escaping her family), Sam Water-ston as a would-be writer, Denholm Elliot as an older neighbor, who loves Farrow...

...SCREEN ALLEN WRENCHING FLOUNDERING IN 'SEPTEMBER' Why did September, Woody Allen's latest film, die so quickly...

...What new discoveries are possible with such a stable, narrow ensemble as Allen has now gathered...

...In September Allen tries to stage a seminar on film...

...But what he really demonstrates is another seduction by theory, and the way it can be used to justify any work that lays claim to a subtle aesthetic strategy...

...I tried to like this film, and, midway, rooted for it to improve...

...Allen has Waterston joke about the speech later, but never questions its content...

...The film underdoes what Nuts overdoes with Barbara Streisand: the power of the long-buried family secret...

...Perhaps because it has only one redeeming feature and only one redeeming scene: the portrait of a depressive by Mia Farrow and the moment in which she explodes...

...You get the feeling that all Allen knows, or wants to know, about physics, is an idea that fits his morbid view of the world...

...But the casting is also to blame...

...But Farrow loves Waterston who loves Wiest who loves...

...her only asset is a house in Vermont...

...All it reveals is glib wisdom-not even shared by all physicists...

...He beat her...

...Only in her explosion does this material come alive...

...If Allen's bandwagon of admirers admitted this about his previous (and better) films, perhaps they wouldn't have encouraged the lack of self-criticism, even self-awareness, that produces a disaster like September...

...The entire film is shot indoors, despite the claims that the house is set in Vermont...

...Farrow gives a gritty performance, sadly close to the lives of many lost souls of the sixties...

...The buried family melodrama begins with Stritch who ran away with a mobster...

...But it also reveals his usual distaste for anywhere but Manhattan...

...A deadly feel affects this soap opera...

...Can a director get to know actors too well-or vice-versa...

...Neglect of landscape, locals, and textural diversity points to the general problem in Allen's work: thinness of imagination...

...Woody Allen's greatest weakness has not been a desire to be serious, but letting trendy notions get the better of him...

...young Farrow shot him and has reaped a heritage of guilt and paralysis ever after...