Woody's World
PODHORETZ, JOHN
Woody’s World The old man and the sea of beauties. BY JOHN PODHORETZ Woody Allen’s Vicky Cristina Barcelona is, quite literally, the work of a dirty old man. This is not a criticism, merely...
...She thinks she wants stability and certainty...
...And with the ham-handed obviousness that, at times, affl icts the old when discussing the actions of the young, he informs us that, for one character, “the thought of them in bed caused her some confl ict...
...Of course, since most of the time she is speaking in idiomatic Spanish, I have no idea whether her dialogue is as ludicrous as everyone else’s...
...She is, one character says, chronically dissatisfi ed...
...Allen’s entire life has become a routine straight out of Curb Your Enthusiasm...
...Coming up next from Woody Allen: a movie about a man in his sixties and his obsession with an actress very much like Scarlett Johansson...
...The ensemble of Vicky Cristina Barcelona discuss death and love and pain and art with a deadly seriousness entirely unleavened by the irony, wit, and humor that made people think, once upon a time, of Woody Allen as a man with something signifi cant to say...
...The bourgeois life is not for her, but when she fi nds herself in the more adventurous m?nage ? trois situation with Juan Antonio and his ex-wife, Maria Elena, she decides that isn’t for her, either...
...So what if many of them are whores, psychotics, or bipolar lunatics, either sexually withholding or sexually demonic...
...She wants to be an artist but doesn’t know how to express herself (another condition that affl icts Allen women...
...Vicky, the Catalan identity student, is tightly wound, nasty, and depressed...
...And yet Vicky Cristina Barcelona is not entirely without interest...
...Even omniscient narrators living in Woody Allen World, who might otherwise be expected to have a modest command of the English language, deploy pretentious malapropisms that reveal their creator’s profound intellectual insecurity...
...About this I’m not kidding...
...This is a movie about how impossible it is for women to be satisfi ed, how women do everything in their power to destroy their own happiness and the happiness of others, and how they perpetrate emotional violence on themselves and the men hapless enough to cross their paths...
...Cristina is hungering for “something more...
...Larry David plays the Jewish man in his sixties...
...He gives them a lot of lines, and for actresses, that’s all that matters...
...John Podhoretz, editorial director of Commentary, is THE WEEKLY STANDARD’s movie critic...
...Allen is 72 now, and he has made a movie whose most notable scenes involve a lesbian embrace between the luscious blonde Scarlett Johansson and the equally luscious brunette Pen?lope Cruz followed by a m?nage ? trois featuring the two women and the glamorous leading man, Javier Bardem...
...But then, Vicky is not a resident of the real world...
...Google her name and Allen’s and look at the pictures that come up and you will see image after image of him staring straight at her breasts...
...BY JOHN PODHORETZ Woody Allen’s Vicky Cristina Barcelona is, quite literally, the work of a dirty old man...
...She plays Vicky, an American graduate student spending the summer in Spain in pursuit of a master’s degree in “Catalan identity”— which is odd, since she speaks no Spanish and since “Catalan identity” is not the name of a recognized fi eld in which one is awarded a master’s degree...
...That makes sense...
...It is true that he writes many roles for women, unlike other comic moviemakers...
...Also on display, although far more modestly, is a ravishing British actress named Rebecca Hall...
...but of course, what she really wants is some romantic guitar playing and an hour in a glen with Juan Antonio...
...In Woody Allen World, for example, people speak in the overly deliberate manner of characters in a mediocre drawing room comedy...
...For one thing, it is rare to see a work of such profound misogyny...
...Listening to narration this dreadful causes me some confl ict, too—confl ict between my desire to throw things at the screen and my need for the money I will receive for this review...
...Vicky Cristina Barcelona has just such a narrator, given fussy voice by a fussy stage actor with the fussy name of Christopher Evan Welch...
...The only woman who seems to have any sense of herself is Maria Elena, who is passion personifi ed—which means she is sexually omnivorous, nasty, suicidal, and homicidal...
...Interesting perspective on the opposite sex from a man who allowed his girlfriend to fi nd nude photographs he had taken of her teenage daughter, his lover...
...This is not a criticism, merely a description...
...Her spiritual ugliness is captured perfectly by Pen?lope Cruz in a knockout performance...
...When Juan Antonio proposes that he, Vicky, and her friend Cristina all go to bed together, Vicky responds with shock, horror, and disgust— which, to be sure, only reveals how desperately she wants it...
...She is a creature in Woody Allen World, a place that only superfi cially resembles our own...
...The narrator is also something of a bore (not that Allen knows this) since he keeps describing to us in words exactly what we’re watching...
...As Vicky and her friend Cristina take photographs around Barcelona, the narrator says, “They spent the day taking pictures in Barcelona...
...She is a proper bourgeois, engaged to a businessman who works for a company called Global Enterprises...
...Allen is often praised for the roles he writes for women...
Vol. 13 • September 2008 • No. 48
