On Screen
BROMWICH, DAVID
On Screen JUST LIKE OLD TIMES BY DAVID BROMWICH Young directors with art credentials worn face-up have begun to weigh in with shockingly violent debuts. The screaming kill pushed close to the...
...The boys have been friends since their early teens, and together go from mooching to pilfering to dealing...
...Alda's narcissism, his smarminess, his showy decency and the safe sarcasm that protects it are used in Manhattan Murder Mystery to conscious effect, but sapped of their customary assurance they become human...
...He is assaulted everywhere by voices with miscellaneous advice, warnings, imprecations...
...He is certainly a director who is good for actors...
...A central ambiguity hangs on a doubt about the arrest of Trevor earlier...
...They make violent movies because they grew up watching violent movies...
...The acting is often unratable, buoyed as it is by the stutter of streetwise patter and the expert editing...
...The narration, however, is prominent in early and late montages: a voice over home movie shots of the young hoods at cards and basketball, their rich suburban precincts tinted a glaring sunset red...
...but really, the sense of the place is never dramatized...
...the making of a grownup nihilist from whom the director holds himself at an uncertain distance...
...Does that mean he is an "actor's director...
...One forgets now and then that the film is narrated as a flashback by the timid and pliable Andy...
...It is no comfort at all that she may be inspired...
...Trevor and Billy are the sentimental and cynical poles of almost any teenage melodrama...
...She has always thrived in Allen's company, and never more than now...
...A point of the treatment here—glossed over by the action format, which works against individual traits—is that they aren't noticeably Jewish...
...He holds our interest and our laughter because under the suave citizen lifting a book of matches one sees the guilty citizen face to face with his somehow deserved death in a stalled elevator...
...The screenplay, also by Weiss, has been impoverished by faithful imitation of the same model, several "f---s" a minute covering the range of shock, pity, loathing, wonder, and exasperation, as in: "Yez a bunch of f---ing moils, yez a bunch of f---ing nobodies" and "This is f---ing tuna, I said chicken salad, dick...
...wondering at his inadequacies and her compulsions, and how a woman may ruin the well-plotted tranquillity of a man's life...
...Did Billy set him up...
...someone asks Jackie, and he answers with glib thematic aptitude: "They're us, all over again...
...This shift from the ultraformal cinematography of Sven Nykvist is a reminder of how much class and how little cunning there has been in the broad artistic choices of Woody Allen's films...
...Joseph Lindsey's Billy struts convincingly, and he has nerve power around the eyes and mouth, but not one shock wave passes through the mold of the character—the sort of intensity that came off Ray Liotta the moment he walked on screen at the high school reunion in Something Wild...
...One scene has them trapped in an elevator, where Allen slips into an insane claustrophobic reverie about a stallion running free—a piece of comedy as pure as the undercover robot gone berserk in Sleeper...
...He atrophies for two hours in Manhattan Murder Mystery, while Keaton thinks and frets and paces, hides under the neighbor's bed, stakes out a seedy hotel, and drags him along as a compromise when she can't find a better companion...
...He coaxes, he cringes, he listens with exquisite defeated tolerance, and wags his finger and rolls his eyes, all to set Keaton more engagingly in the spotlight...
...When Keaton sees Allen thinking about Huston she warns him, "Your pupils are dilating," and one can understand why they would...
...Who are these kids...
...They babble of California while Billy and Andy look on with awe...
...Touring a site where he wants Keaton to build a restaurant, he tells her how he used to come to this courtyard with his divorced wife: "1 used to say, 'What am 1 doing here with Julie?' We didn't love each other any more...
...But most of the fun is in Allen's reactions to what Keaton is, rather than to what she says: observing her with strung-out courtesy and annoyance...
...It made the moment doubly poignant...
...Allen makes a very gentle and seemly second banana...
...He wants his old girlfriend back, and, in a moment whose triteness comes from very old movies indeed, he swallows the line his pals feed him?She'll want to live in style...
...Trevor (Patrick McGaw), Billy (Joseph Lindsey) and Andy (Steve Paralavecchio) have all melted into the broad savagery of the American money hustle...
...The Jewish message is cashed out in one line by Jackie, an old black market jewelry runner whom the boys fall in with...
...A hidden element of Woody Allen's appeal to actors has been his ability not only to make the best look good before they were well-known in movies (as with Dianne Wiest), but also to make indifferent or unlikely talents, such as Alda here and Martin Landau in Crimes and Misdemeanors, appear suddenly gifted with a depth or self-irony they never showed before...
...On the other hand, Steve Paralavecchio's Andy has the retentive look of the man who will be telling the story some day, and he grows in conviction scene by scene...
...Trevor, the thoughtful one, gets busted on a drug delivery, but he doesn't rat...
...This element is extremely effective and comes out of Goodfellas, where the jolt and speed were the narrator's coke habit talking...
...Anjelica Huston's business is to be sexy, husky, quick-witted and a threat...
...He returns from prison a new man—riding a motorcycle, wearing a head-bandanna, accompanied by a new friend and guru who preaches indifference to money...
...The screaming kill pushed close to the camera, the slow torture, the bullet-riddled corpse with every hole punched out—all the tokens of murderous authenticity are apt to materialize almost without a preface...
...And just inches wide of the twenty-third "f---" the dialogue quits or congeals to a gruel of I-really-love-you and Now-at-last-we'll-be-rich...
...Exercise changed my life," says the woman who will be murdered, and as soon as you hear it you know that she must go...
...Action credit, ethnic credit, local-loyalty credit—every bet is so finely hedged there is no room for surprise...
...Trevor and his girlfriend are stock young lovers...
...No director so excruciatingly close to the mayhem ever survived to complete his first take...
...Yes, he would know all about doubly poignant...
...And the climax here—a shooting in a movie theater which echoes the last minutes of The Lady from Shanghai while that film is showing on a screen-within-the-screen—displays the same kind of arbitrariness...
...But Trevor has a weakness...
...With his well-honed surface, how does this director fare when a thought or feeling is called for—when his cinematog-rapher (Michael Bonvillain), editor (Leo Trombetta), composer (Mick Jones), and the soundtrack of songs from Dylan to Tony Bennett fall away and we look to see whether the life on the screen can matter...
...Rob Weiss, who at 26 has released Amongst Friends, is firmly in the grip of Goodfellas, My Beautiful Laundrette and lots of other good or seductive pictures about the brutal intimacy of youthful bands of outsiders...
...Much of the footage was shot with a hand-held camera—an affected display of ingenuousness that bears no relation to any other trait of the film, since the settings are New York and posh, the colors rich and deep as they have been ever since Annie Hall...
...When were you at Cafe Des Artistes...
...To make some money, he falls in with Andy and Billy again, and the rest of the film is his personal war with Billy, the most relentless of the group...
...The film shows off its Long Island roots, with advertised place names like Cedarhurst...
...The truth is that he is a comedian who did roughly the same work in monologues, in acting and in directing films, who happened, as he became more independent, to become more popular also...
...a screwball comedy, not fast-talking enough to remind you much of its '30s prototypes, but untimely in a rather favorable sense...
...The relaxed excitement between the two, the perfect sympathy of the timing, are the real pleasures of the story...
...The scenes are varied by a second couple, Anjelica Huston and Alan Alda, each of whom nurses a wholesome erotic interest in splitting up Allen and Keaton...
...This is a story of betrayal...
...The plot—her compulsion to find out the truth about the widower across the hall, whom she suspects of murdering his wife—is a pretext for the one-liners and familiar raillery of the screenplay by Allen and Marshall Brickman...
...For Weiss, the jumpy style has become a vague metaphor for disenchanted American coming-of-age...
...Allen has often been judged severely as an art-film director by the index of choices like these...
...Near the end, the half-muttered, half-quoted appeal "You kill me, you'll kill yourself," does lazy duty for a whole unwritten screenplay...
...The reason, say the publicity kits, is that the young director knows the neighborhood, but suppose we forget that snow job...
...The genre commonly offers a portrait of the drug terrorist as a young man...
...placing his body between her mind and its whims...
...Midway through a chase, plunged into total darkness, Allen lights a match and after a pause comes a voice from the pitch black: "Where'd you get that book of matches...
...His success is distrusted in the exact degree that his luck is envied...
...The answer to that unspoken question should be in Lindsey's face, but isn't...
...Amongst Friends suggests a canny eye for effects that will resonate—an ingratiating quality, but not a particularly youthful one...
...In its texture, this film belongs to the vein of Radio Days, Broadway Danny Rose, and A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy...
...but people are right to be happy with it as a "return" of several kinds at once...
...The surprise of Amongst Friends is that the gang is composed of Jewish boys from Long Island: an ethnic group till now unsung in the genre, and odd to find so neatly filled with the usual types...
...Ego-delicate and addled as usual...
...The line echoes a pan of the friends in deck chairs on the boardwalk, looking unconsciously like their parents, passing a cigar and chattering...
...The film brings Woody Allen back together with Diane Keaton...
...Allen replies: "I prefer to atrophy...
...1 doubt that hardened Alda-despisers will believe (until they see it) just howwell he comes off here...
...and besides, for the aspiring filmmaker art imitates art much more than it imitates life...
...Patrick McGaw seems not yet formed enough to get much footing in the soft-edged and difficult role of Trevor...
Vol. 76 • October 1993 • No. 12
