Crimes and Misdemeanors

It's been ten years since I watched a Woody Allen movie. The last straw was Everyone Says I Love You. (His "stab at a musical is meant to be lighthearted and droll, but it winds up revealing his true colors — he's a cloistered millionaire with nothing but contempt for those of us outside his tax bracket," I wrote at the time.) As a dorky Upper East Side teenager, I ritualistically attended Woody's '80s movies on opening day, disappointed only by the ones in which he didn't appear. Nowadays even the buzz around something like Match Point can't get me anywhere near his stuff. No, my revulsion has nothing to do with his love life. It's the films — blinkered, lazy, repetitive, ugly.

In this Woody-free decade, I've repeatedly had my feelings confirmed: I'm thinking Jonathan Rosenbaum's "Notes Toward the Devaluation of Woody Allen" ("as a director and filmmaker, even after nineteen features, he remains strangely unformed and unrealized"), Andrew O'Hehir's hurt reaction to Deconstructing Harry ("Increasingly imprisoned by his own narcissism, xenophobia and fear of death, Allen has now convincingly scattered his remaining disciples at one stroke"), and Nathan Lee's seething Film Comment review of Melinda and Melinda ("The screw-you abandon of a living icon who tosses off whatever he pleases and has long stopped giving a fuck about what anyone thinks"). But now David Rakoff's brilliantly witty, wonderfully meandering Nextbook blog about his subjugation to Film Forum's three-week Woody retrospective (I'm late in coming to it; I'm busy, remember?) makes me want to give the guy another shot — or at least revisit the stretch between Annie Hall and Husbands and Wives.

Rakoff at times seems deliriously reverential (read him on Manhattan, or on Manhattan Murder Mystery), but he has no illusions (Everyone Says I Love You is "a sloppy insult whose cracks and flaws are spackled over with fistfuls of money and sundry diversions in the form of real estate porn"). That Woody may be an artist of merit, as opposed to a Bergman-and-Fellini-fetishizing gag-man who hides his shallowness behind talented actors and artful cinematography, is a notion that didn't seem plausible for me again until reading Rakoff. Plus he's got wild, fascinating ruminations on all kinds of things, from George Sanders's suicide note to Viva's mockery of Nico to Drew Barrymore's nipples. His blog is a must-read, from start to finish. Though I can't help wondering, if Film Forum had included late works like Anything Else, whether Rakoff's admiration might have slid into disdain.

Comments

[cinetrix]

If you do give Allen another shot, start with The Purple Rose of Cairo. Long a personal favorite of mine, I now show it to the kiddies at the end of the semester. They love it [once they get over the fact that it stars the Dumb and Dumber guy]. An added plus for baby-havers like yourself: it's a crisp 84 minutes.

[mule]

"Husbands and Wives" and "Crimes and Misdemeanors" both hold up really well.

Not to mention "Love and Death", but maybe that goes without saying.

[Playgoer]

Looker baby,

To update an ongoing conversation from long ago...

I suggest a RE-valuation of Woody focusing on the following films:

Love & Death
Stardust Memories
Zelig
Purple Rose
Radio Days (surprisingly well made, on last viewing)
Crimes & Misdemeanors
Husbands & Wives

This, these days, is my "Alternative Wooody Canon." That some of these are already hailed above make me glad a conensus may be forming. I honestly believe these are films that will stand on their own long after anyone remembers who the funny little guy in the glasses ever was.

Of the Big Woody films from the past, the already beloved ones, I still find Manhattan & Hannah eminently watchable and good, despite liking the Woody character a lot less than I did as a teenager. "Annie Hall" still has a lot of laughs, but its maudlin relationship-drama only gets sappier with age.

I think Match Point was sort of a new breath of life in that it was actually a Watchable Movie--and not some embarassing release of someone's raw footage. Not a GOOD movie, but recognizable and digestible AS a movie, and it had been a long time since I could say at least THAT about his work.(I actually believe the fact he had whole new team of British collaborators--on camera and off--helped.)

But any hope that he was on a roll was soon dashed by the freakishly regressive and pointless "Scoop." (There goes my British theory.)

I'll repeat something I heard someone else say, so it's not me who uttered such a thought--the best thing that could happen to Woody now--as an artist, mind you--would be to die so that he could stop embarassing himself and his work can be properly and objectively re-assessed.

Either that or finally make a film ABOUT what's it's like to be Woody Allen in 2007. Not some retread of a Magician Adverture Radio Play he stuffed in his drawer 50 years ago... His great gift used to be that he had his finger to the pulse of a particular culture at a particular time. Like many artists in older age, he's lost that. But I still hope he could at least write something honest about being so OUT of step