Director Series: WOODY ALLEN

HANNAH ANNIE MANHATTAN
(in celebration of Vicky Cristina Barcelona)


VICKY CRISTINA BARCELONA marks Woody Allen’s 40th feature film. In honour of the little man with the enormous influence, Black Sheep Reviews presents its first ever director series. Allen has always strived to produce one film per year and while working all the time might alleviate some of his neuroses with mortality, it doesn’t always make for great cinema. Still, there is no denying Allen’s unique cinematic voice and his place amongst the greatest directors of all time.

His recent offerings have been spotty at best, with exceptions like his aforementioned latest as well as the modern masterwork, MATCH POINT, standing out as reminders of his genius. And so Black Sheep Reviews looks back for a moment at three of his most distinguished offerings, HANNAH AND HER SISTERS (1986), ANNIE HALL (1977) and MANHATTAN (1979), while still looking forward to what Allen has planned for the future.


As a writer, Allen gets to take all of the thoughts in his head and throw them up on the screen for the world to over analyze. In HANNAH AND HER SISTERS, he gives us a handful of characters and lets us into their heads instead. The simple argument there would be how all of Allen’s characters are essentially extensions of his own psyche but this particular film is so feminine that it transcends his trademark intellectual masturbation. Hannah (Mia Farrow) has it all, or so it would seem from an observer’s point of view. She left a successful acting career on the stage to have children and raise her family. Her sisters on the other hand (Dianne Wiest and Barbra Hershey) can’t seem to get it in line and rely heavily on her stability. Only, while she picks up their messes, she keeps her own inside and everyone assumes that she’s just fine. Even Allen makes the same mistake, as he doesn’t give her as much screen time as the others, presuming they need the attention more. Just because you can take care of yourself though doesn’t mean you don’t have fears. Luckily, anything can be rationalized away in our own heads.


From the internal to the explicitly external nine years prior, Allen gave the world his masterpiece, ANNIE HALL. For me, there is no other picture that has better captured the dynamics of a difficult relationship than the story of Alvy Singer (Allen) and Annie Hall (Diane Keaton). At this stage in his career, he felt that he wanted to take steps toward more deeper, personal films. The fourth wall is constantly being broken, split screens allow characters to comment on each others’ dialogue without having to be there, and Allen even elevated his cinematic approach with long, continuous shots with characters coming in and out of the frame. Allen chooses to reveal the details –good, bad or transplendent – of the central relationship entirely out of sequence. This way, we get to see all the parts as one, allowing for a more profound understanding of how these two individuals came together and what eventually drove them apart. Allen has never been more celebrated than with this film and never has he deserved it more. His decisions are brave and his honesty is refreshing and revealing. ANNIE HALL is timeless.


Two years after winning the Oscars for Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay for ANNIE HALL, Allen gave us MANHATTAN. It is no secret that Allen is a devout New Yorker and he opens this film as though it were a cinematic love letter to his hometown. Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” is the soundtrack to the opening sequence, which, in charcoal tinged black and white, frames countless New York spots, both known to tourists and known to locals only. The whole while, Allen’s character, Isaac Davis, narrates in voice over about how he and the city are intrinsically linked in order to establish the first chapter and tone of his book. What follows is the fodder of that book – an exploration of the ethical decline of perhaps humanity, but more specifically, New Yorkers. It is Davis’s belief, and one that he is not immune to, that Manhattanites create dramatic scenarios in their lives in order to avoid feeling anything genuine with themselves or another person – that Manhattan itself offers so much distraction that one isn’t capable of returning one’s focus back to what is right in front of them. This is, after all, where one can find all the answers if one can stop long enough to look.


Woody Allen likes to make his quips about the banalities of television or the superiority of New York over Los Angeles or the ridiculous nature of awards. He comes across as neurotic, overly cerebral and pessimistic but when you really spend some time with him, or at least the versions of him he gives us in his films, you realize that this isn’t entirely true. He is in fact overly neurotic and only slightly cerebral. Kidding, it’s just a little a joke for one of my favorite jokers. In all seriousness though, to call him a pessimist is prematurely dismissive. After all, would a pessimist keep trying as hard as Allen does to understand?

SCOOP

Written and Directed by Woody Allen

MATCHPOINT was a welcome and impressive return for Woody Allen as a director and a writer. Lush art direction and intuitive camera movement framed performances that brought Allen’s best script in over a decade to a dangerously high boil. It was sensual and provocative with deeply layered imagery. It earned four Golden Globe nominations, an original screenplay Oscar nomination and made this critic’s best film of 2006 short list. It now seems its success has spawned a somewhat awkward offshoot, a relationship between Allen and lead actress of both MATCHPOINT and Allen’s latest picture, SCOOP, Scarlett Johansson. According to the SCOOP press (or perhaps a spirit appeared to me and told me about this while I was being dematerialized, I can’t be sure), Johansson and Allen enjoyed their quick-witted off-screen banter so much that she felt it a shame that the two did not have any plans to work together on camera. I suppose its possible he too felt this was a sad situation, or I suppose its also possible he saw this as a great way to spend more intimate time with his new muse, but anyway you look at it, Allen decided to write a script that would feature the two as the film’s leads. And so SCOOP was born, the story of an American journalism student in London who is on the verge of uncovering the identity of the infamous tarot card serial killer and thus breaking a ginormous story that will give her budding career an enormous head start. Great for her but SCOOP negates in an hour a half all the momentum Allen regained in the first two brilliant minutes of MATCHPOINT. I laughed my way through SCOOP but most of the time I was laughing at the entirely ludicrous root of the story and Allen’s obvious concessions in his script that were necessary to make it still questionably plausible.

Is this exchange between Allen and Johansson really worth all this trouble? Admittedly, they play well off of each other, both in their limited capacities. Hers, despite exhibiting a drastically wide range of emotions in MATCHPOINT, is her sometimes-hollow comedic delivery and his is that distant, glassy look that comes naturally with age but here makes him look like he’s drifting in and out of his senses. They meet when he calls her on stage. He is a magician; she is his unsuspecting audience member who must step into a box. Then, because it was in Allen’s box that she first encounters a spirit that gives her the scoop while she is being dematerialized (now that earlier comment makes sense to you, it?), she insists on solving this mystery with Allen’s help. They quickly become inseparable despite having any good reason to be in this caper together. He is constantly tripping over the lies the pair tells to get close to their suspect, often nearly ruining all their work. Meanwhile, he has no real stake to gain by helping her at all. A typical scene will have the two snapping back and forth, reaching points where they both alternately ask why they bother with the other, followed by the two inexplicably reconciling and eating dinner together.


Allen has been directing films since the 1960’s. He should have been able to spot some fairly simple story adjustments that would have better justified the pairing of the two. Instead of perhaps lying to people about Allen being her father, maybe he could have just been written as her father. No way Daddy will walk away and let his daughter investigate a serial killer no matter how much she yells. Instead, Allen plays a relative stranger, leaving the only reason for them to spend time together being that they share some solid chemistry and the same sense of humour. Oh, that was the reason for writing this to begin with. And that glassy look that Allen sports onscreen also found its way off-screen. SCOOP’s aesthetic elements are strained and clumsy. The set designed for the boat to Hades scenes (yes, you read correctly), looks cheap and static. It doesn’t even appear as if the boat were moving amidst the abundant smoke from the machine off camera. The framing and camera work are also uncomfortable and sometimes amateurish. As I found it difficult to focus on anything other than the strange movement, I just became sad realizing the depth and purpose in MATCHPOINT’s aesthetics may have been fleeting. Thank God Hugh Jackman is on hand as the suspected serial killer to distract with his effortless talent and impeccably smooth good looks.

It isn’t entirely fair to repeatedly compare SCOOP to its predecessor, MATCHPOINT, but I cannot comprehend how the same person directed the two. MATCHPOINT has so much cunning and energy whereas SCOOP suffers from Allen’s longtime philosophy that there is no reason why he cannot unleash one movie every year. Here's the reason, Woody. The result is a rushed work full of holes that expose it as a weak excuse to indulge two actors’ egos. Chemistry alone does not a good movie make, especially when the chemistry in question is far from perfect. Um, see MATCHPOINT instead.

MATCH POINT

Written and Directed by Woody Allen

The ladies who saved my seat at the nearly sold-out screening of MATCH POINT I attended, were having the same conversation probably everyone in the audience has had at one point in time before buying their ticket for the evening’s final showing.

“I know,” the lady furthest to my right exclaimed. “My boyfriend and I were watching the preview and then it was, like, ‘This is a Woody Allen film.’ It didn’t look anything like that.”

“I know,” the closer lady returned. “It looks really good.”

This leads me to two major points of contention when it comes to addressing MATCH POINT. First, the previews look like a drastic departure from Woody’s previous outings. It looks smooth, glossy, and conventional even. The other point refers to the widely established opinion of the movie going public that it has been ages since Woody made a good movie. From two points, stem two questions. Is it really that different? And is it really any good?

Woody Allen has been making movies for just over forty years so it seems reasonable to wonder just how much of a departure MATCH POINT really could be from a director who’s neurotic mistrust of love and life looms over most of his offerings. Even as he gets on in years and no longer takes on the lead acting responsibilities, cutting down to merely writing and directing one film a year on average, the ghost of the Woody Allen caricature finds it’s way into the picture (see Jason Biggs in ANYTHING ELSE or Will Ferrell in MELINDA AND MELINDA.) The lead here, tennis pro turned instructor, Chris Wilton is played by Jonathan Rhys Meyers. We meet him after Woody’s classic plain white text on black background opening credits, interviewing for a job and looking for a London flat. The young lad worked his way out of a poor Irish background into the pro-tennis circuit before retiring for a more stable life where he could appreciate the finer things life had to offer, like opera and art. In opposition to past leads, he is well put together, focused. He has his eye on the ball, if you will. This is not to say he has everything figured out or is without fear. He knows he wants to do something of value with his life, isn’t clear on what exactly that is but also does not let hesitation paralyze him. Upon meeting Chloe Hewett (the glowing Emily Mortimer), Chris’ biggest similarity to the Woody Allen archetype becomes apparent. Despite all his efforts and subsequent accomplishments, he is a pessimist. He may appreciate the finer things but his belief is the finest things are those capable of capturing and communicating everything that is tragic about life. Can a pessimist truly know love? Woody seems to think yes, at least at first. Chloe is an eternal optimist who has never known anything tragic about life and despite their differences they fall in love while walking around London, which Allen frames like postcards in much the same way he has framed Manhattan for years.

Woody has a strong handle on the visual direction, allowing characters to walk in and out of the frame when we would expect them to. There are no surprises, just a natural direction, suggesting that Woody knows exactly what we will want to see as we watch from behind bushes or fences. More importantly, he has an even stronger control on this, his finest screenplay since 1992’s HUSBANDS AND WIVES. MATCHPOINT is ultimately about luck, how little importance we place on luck despite the significant role it plays in our lives and how far we’re willing to push our own luck. Chris, a devout believer in the influence luck has on his life, decides to close his eyes and hope for the best when he embarks on an affair with Nola Rice (Scarlet Johansson), his soon-to-be brother-in-law’s fiancé. The two gravitate towards each other, pulled by an uncontrollable sexual desire. Separately, they each represent opposite ends of the luck spectrum. Chris is still riding his lucky streak, scoring his tennis instructor job, meeting Chloe, getting a job at one of her father’s business firms. Whereas Nola is still trying to escape hers, running away from her dead-end Colorado home, struggling to make it as an actress and eventually losing her fiancé, Tom (Matthew Goode). The question then is how much better is Chris’ luck when all the successes he stumbles upon are not what he wants but what he believes he should want?


Further strengthening Woody’s script, is the issue of class woven in and out of the entire film. Both Chris and Nola come from modest backgrounds at best and are dating members of London’s higher society. Tom and Chloe are happy, High-spirited people with all the time in the world to pursue their interests – opera, tennis, opening an art gallery. Chris and Nola have been working their whole lives to get where they are with Nola finding she still has a great deal of work ahead of her while she’s not certain she has it in her to get there. For Tom and Chloe, there is no flipside to the coin and new opportunities arise all the time. They’ve always been lucky and what makes them descent is at least they can each acknowledge their fortunate existence. Nola has yet to truly know luck and lack of enthusiasm in her speech shows how little faith she has in potentially finding it. But it is the taste of a fortunate man’s life that is new to Chris Wilton. He has a driver now and his new flat no longer has a fold out sofa bed but it does have one of the most spectacular views of London available. So when his affair with Nola begins to threaten his newfound cushion of a life, he is forced to make a decision for the first time instead of leaving everything to chance. This decision brings about a tension and discomfort that is so rarely achieved in filmmaking today. Woody manages to blindside his audience without using it as a gimmick or relying on twists to give the film its ultimate meaning.

Be it lucky in life or unlucky in love, Woody serves up a film about the game itself. We may all think that we have control, that we hold the power over our lives or that we are making the decisions that will move us forward. What Woody wants to remind us is that, like a game, we don’t get to make any of these decisions until it’s our turn to serve and we certainly don’t know what our opponents will do next despite how well we think we know their game.