Woody Allen's life as seen in movies
Yaffe, David
AT THE 1992 Republican Convention, Newt Gingrich hurled the nastiest salvo he could think of toward Bill Clinton, saying that the allegedly libidinous governor of Arkansas had "Woody Allen...
...In one of Harry's fictions, the elderly Max (who would have been a great role for Zero Mostel) is confronted by his wife about reports that he killed and ate a former wife, as well as his mistress and children...
...I work, I don't bum the candle at both ends, I practice the clarinet diligently like a nice, Jewish boy . . I do my exercises and my treadmill...
...But Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989) is his true stab at humanism, in which Allen insists on being moral: in a world in which Alan Alda gets away with murder metaphorically while Martin Landau does so literally, Allen and Sam Waterston play nice guys who always finish last...
...Deconstructing Harry offers an almost endless supply of top-notch oneliners, within a startlingly intricate structure, although what the structure contains is disconcerting...
...Allen's abandonment of the sentimental nebbish of twenty years ago is as much a commentary on our own nasty times as it is a reflection of his own inner decay...
...The first Allen film I remember seeing was Zelig (1983), accompanied by my mother, at a sparsely populated Dallas multiplex when I was only ten...
...More than twenty years later, Deconstructing Harry's similarly lax sexuality makes Allen seem like a considerably less charming Austin Powers, defrosted after the sexual revolution without realizing that times have changed yet again...
...for Allen as an upstanding family man...
...Deconstructing Harry contains even less self-justification than Allen's interviews, in which, alluding to the Soon-Yi affair, he admits to no wrongdoing, claiming "I was the wronged party...
...it proposes a code that states that financial, artistic, and romantic success is unimportant compared to the integrity of Woody's character, who is willing to be a failure in the name of decency...
...Allen may repeatedly insist that his films have no relation to his own life, but that's only when he's talking about his life's controversial aspects...
...Even if I didn't have the faintest idea at the time who F. Scott Fitzgerald and Susan Sontag were, I was transfixed by the mythology the nerdy little man in the glasses created for himself, how deftly he maneuvered himself into history...
...morality debate is even more problematic...
...superficiality of Paul Simon's character...
...Allen's romance with young Soon-Yi Previn left a permanent scar on his otherwise idealized world of glamorous jobs, witty banter, and enviable apartments...
...If I tell you why I did it, do you promise not to noodge me...
...A book jacket says of the self-deprecating Allen that "his only regret is that he has is not someone else...
...In Annie Hall (1977), he is the upholder of art, culture, and the last defender of New York City (a seemingly quixotic cause at the time) against the L.A...
...Mighty Aphrodite (1995) is a detour, good P.R...
...It's me thinly disguised," says Harry "I don't think I should even disguise it anymore...
...it evokes a series of New York Post covers with paparazzi shots of Woody and Soon-Yi hand-in-hand...
...Woody's filmic tell-all is apropos to a moment when grown men can cry on Oprah, and the public can ponder whether oral sex in the White House constitutes adultery...
...I wanted to live in that cloistered urban paradise, where everyone's neuroses made for great conversation, and life was full of romance, culture, and Upper West Side brownstones...
...Those who are willing to indulge Allen will find that, navel gazing though he may be, he is less generous toward himself now than he was in any previous film...
...Such frankness seemed cutting edge in Annie Hall, in which Annie and Alvy sleep together on the first date...
...0 NE UNSYMPATHETIC reviewer of Deconstructing Harry admitted that he could fill his review with great lines from the movie, but said that a string of great jokes does not a great movie make...
...Even though Allen is a neurotic swinger representing his time in Annie Hall, he has a sympathetic commentary to offer...
...Crimes and Misdemeanors is pure existential moralism...
...Until that summer of Woody's discontent, I felt the same way about Allen that he felt about his heroes...
...In an early scene, Lucy (Judy Davis) tells the Allen character what most people in the audience are probably thinking: "You take people's suffering and turn it into gold—literary gold...
...Deconstructing Harry could perhaps be used as evidence that Allen hasn't capitulated to his attackers' view of him, but has rendered that view grotesque...
...In Play It Again Sam (1972), Woody has to learn to renounce his idolatry of Bogart and trust himself to be a romantic hero, which he achieves as the stuttering, neurotic, yet sweetly romantic Alvy Singer in Annie Hall...
...IT IS ONLY in his post-trial work—after Allen entered the tabloids for alleged child molestation as well as seducing his ex-lover's adopted daughter—that there has been a subtle shift, most fully manifested in Deconstructing Harry...
...Such decency has been replaced with a raw honesty in Deconstructing Harry, and it is apparently an honesty that leaves all other morality aside...
...Bullets over Broadway (1994), the first postscandal screenplay, finds the mediocre writer, played by John Cusack, clinging to bourgeois morality, while only the amoral mobster, Chazz Palminteri—who eventually kills a bad actress for the sake of his play—truly wins the artistic sweepstakes...
...Twenty years later, Allen still casts himself as 96 n DISSENT / Spring 1998 the improbable object of affection of beauties like Elizabeth Shue, but the charm of Alvy Singer has given way to a man who uses whores, pops pills, and calls women "cunts...
...suddenly, Woody's world didn't seem so perfect anymore...
...DISSENT / Spring 1998 • 95 NOTEBOOK After Elizabeth Shue dumps the emotionally stunted Harry for the obviously superior Billy Crystal (who, in return, is characterized as Satan in one of Harry's fictions), we are meant to feel little sympathy for Harry as he's bailed out of jail by the happy couple...
...Just as Allen makes it difficult for us to ignore his own life, he makes it even harder for us to ignore morality...
...Everyone Says I Love You (1996), meanwhile, seems a desperate attempt to distract himself from his woes by escaping into the world of the MGM musicals he loved as a kid, but with a nastier, buried subtext of cynicism...
...In Deconstructing Harry, he out-memoirs the memoirists...
...But autobiography and morality collide so violently in Deconstructing Harry that the film seems like an elegy for his past moralist self...
...Indeed, Deconstructing Harry could have been titled Portrait of the Artist as an Old Lech, as it includes love scenes with women young enough to be his granddaughters, cripple jokes (Woody and Billy Crystal compare encounters with "Pearl in a wheelchair"), and a series of scenes in which Judy Davis, Kirstie Alley, Amy Irving, and even Mariel Hemingway are put in the roles of whiny, matronly shrews...
...If the title character of Deconstructing Harry seems to be indicting himself, the viewer could also indict the women around him, who, it seems, are only attracted to this man for his fame...
...Whatever the consequences of his moral abdication, Deconstructing Harry makes it painfully clear that he can't have it both ways anymore: the confessional filmmaker and selfrighteous moralist can no longer coexist...
...Not surprisingly, Allen's next film will be called Celebrity...
...This accusation is repeated throughout the film, in which Allen goes on a journey upstate with a prostitute, the son he has kidnapped, and a dying friend in tow, to receive an honorary degree, while flashing back to his failed relationships and wickedly funny fictions...
...The film urges the public to back off and let him go on with his decadent life, in which the world is justified only as an aesthetic phenomenon...
...Today, as I leave a showing of Deconstructing Harry, I am filled with a mixture of admiration and queasiness...
...Manhattan ends with Woody, who has been sleeping with a seventeen-year-old, lecturing Michael Murphy about ethics in front of a hanging skeleton...
...It's me...
...In various interviews he has expressed a sincere desire to switch places with a number of luminaries, from Federico Fellini and Ingmar Bergman to Louis Armstrong and Marlon Brando...
...There are some who will find this approach to filmmaking self-indulgent, but the same people who would object to this confessional mode would also have to object to Fellini's 8 1/2, Francois Truffaut's Day for Night, Bergman's Persona, and much of Allen's own oeuvre...
...autobiography debate is never simple, the art vs...
...In a recent interview, Allen vigorously denied that he is Harry, insisting, "I lead a basically middle-class life...
...Not surprisingly, by casting himself as a renowned comic writer with artistic leanings, Allen has inspired accusations of autobiography, which he vigorously denies with a New Critical distinction between the well-wrought urn and the messiness of biography...
...The glare of the tabloids has encompassed the tragic and the absurd so thoroughly that the front-page New York Times story reporting Ted Hughes's belated poems about Sylvia Plath becomes bleached into the same color as the endless tales of Monica Lewinsky...
...Allen has said that he originally intended to call the film The Meanest Man in the World, as if to respond to the public's vilification of him in the past five years...
...Many of his films—particularly Deconstructing Harry—find his characters in an endless revolving door of relationships with varying degrees of fidelity...
...What makes the self-indulgence of Deconstructing Harry different from that of earlier films is his unwilling dual role as tabloid character and auteur...
...When Annie Hall transformed Allen from successful comic filmmaker into cultural spokesman, he was an odd mixture of nostalgia and progressiveness...
...In fact, Allen created a particular mode of self-indulgence, and anyone who objects to it might as well chuck most of his other movies out the window as well...
...Allen is clearly pushing the envelope on how repulsive he can make the Hollywood leading man...
...Now when Woody puts his soul on screen, it's no longer just about his favorite Cezanne painting...
...pleads Max with dead-on Borscht-belt timing...
...DAVID 'YAFFE has written for the Village Voice, the Nation, the New Yorker, and other publications...
...Woody may not have liked the music of the sixties upheaval, but he sure benefited from the sexual revolution...
...Allen, too, would love to stop being noodged about marrying his expartner's adopted daughter, but, unlike Max, he doesn't even feel the need to justify himself...
...In his pretrial films, Allen could be both moralistic and autobiographical...
...AT THE 1992 Republican Convention, Newt Gingrich hurled the nastiest salvo he could think of toward Bill Clinton, saying that the allegedly libidinous governor of Arkansas had "Woody Allen family values" (in stark contrast to Garth Brooks's televised eulogy for Jimmy Stewart: "Leave it to Jimmy Stewart to have a traditional American family right in the middle of Hollywood...
...the admission in Manhattan (1979), later confirmed in an interview, that Sam Wo's is his favorite Chinese restaurant...
...Taking advantage of the memoir craze, Mia Farrow has written her own version of Life with Woody, but it is Allen himself who insists on having the last word...
...In Broadway Danny Rose NOTEBOOK (1984), he is the agent with the heart of gold, martyred for his generosity...
...That may be, but what jokes...
...Woody thinks that the public unfairly conflates art and life, but our confusion is really between revealing, say, a predilection for much younger women vs...
...Woody-watchers may be shocked to find Allen calling Judy Davis a "world-class, meshugene cunt," asking the black prostitute Cookie (Hazel Goodman) to "hit me, give me a blow job," and popping pills with booze (in Manhattan, Woody's character recoils in horror at Diane Keaton's occasional use of the f-word...
...the man still churns out 94 • DISSENT / Spring 1998 impressive films, but I no longer envy his life so much...
...Finally, Deconstructing Harry unleashes the bile many Woody watchers have been waiting for...
...His New York was all McKim, Mead, and White façades with a soundtrack dominated by Sidney Bechet or Mozart...
...I'm not someone who's out all night indulging, nor have I had a dissipated life...
...Toward the end, Harry confirms Lucy's accusation when an English professor asks about his latest fictional protagonist...
...yet his attitude toward sex put him right in the cultural moment of 1977, when Annie Hall swept the Oscars (and Allen, as usual, was playing Bechet at Michael's Pub...
...This is not only because the repellence he manifests in Deconstructing Harry suggests not an indifference to morality but a need to defy it, but also because Allen himself has played the role of moralist in earlier films...
...Although the art vs...
Vol. 45 • April 1998 • No. 2
