The A.V. Club on Woody Allen
I don’t usually write long, ranty responses to articles unrelated to Juno, but I read one yesterday that really stuck in my craw. This will possibly sound obnoxious, whiny, and defensive, but deal with it — this article offended me deeply, on a personal level. (Note: I’ve included the article link, but feel free to not waste your time reading it, since I plan to quote from it extensively and respond to each of their “points.”)
Longtime readers know of my deep and abiding love for Woody Allen. Despite the oddly inconsistent quality of his movies over the past, let’s say, 20 years, his body of work from 1969-1989 more than makes up for a few dark spots. Even now, he still occasionally makes great movies; mostly, they range from “decent” (Small Time Crooks) to “unwatachable” (Scoop). So defensive though I may be, I’m not blind to the man’s flaws (both personally and artistically). Keep that in mind if what I write after this sounds insufferable.
I guess I feel compelled to respond because it’s hard enough to get people of my generation to watch Woody Allen movies without a complete hatchet job of an article discouraging them from ever taking the plunge. Typically, I enjoy A.V. Club’s reviews and articles, but this is just a flaming turd.
1. African-American people
For a brilliant writer and perceptive chronicler of the human psyche, there’s a whole lot that Woody Allen, or at least the Woody Allen we know from his movies, just doesn’t seem to understand. Allen’s charming, maddening new movie, Whatever Works, provides another in-depth glimpse into the strengths and weaknesses of his neurotic, acerbic, New York-centric worldview. Allen is a whiz at exposing the anxieties and desires of the upper-middle-class Manhattan smart-set, but his blind spots are legion. Take African-Americans for example. Allen named his son after the great pitcher Satchel Paige and has a deep abiding love for jazz. But African-Americans have, by and large, been conspicuously absent from Allen’s films. Allen very tardily tried to rectify that situation by casting Chiwetel Ejiofor in 2004’s hopelessly muddled Melinda And Melinda—a veritable master class in all the shit Woody Allen doesn’t get—as an impossibly suave, unthreatening musician so improbably perfect he makes Sidney Poitier look menacing. Congratulations, your progressive treatment of race just caught up with 1967’s Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner.Â
So… He loses points for portraying a black man as dignified, educated, and well-spoken, with abundant charm and artistic talent? I guess on one level, this article chaps my ass because it sort of implies through its half-cutesy, half-hostile tone that Allen himself isn’t aware of his shortcomings. He’s stated multiple times — because the A.V. Club is not the first to bring up the lack of black characters in his movies — that he doesn’t feel confident writing authentically about the black experience. That’s why he went from making an ultra-depressing movie about black jazz musicians to making Radio Days.
And then there’s the fact that the writer of this little tidbit completely ignores Cookie, the black prostitute played by Hazelle Goodman in Deconstructing Harry. She effectively becomes Harry Block’s sidekick, receiving nearly as much screen time as Allen himself, and although the “black prostitute” characterization is a stereotype, Allen’s screenplay and Goodman’s performance give Cookie enough dimension to make her one of his increasingly rare strong, interesting female characters. Plus, it’s one of the rare late-period Allen movies that gets around the inexplicable, self-indulgent “old man conquers women young enough to be his granddaughter” conceit by (a) making their relationship 100% sexual and (b) making Harry Block pay for the “relationship.”
2. The American South
Complaining to a friend about the insularity of New York in Annie Hall, Allen says, “Don’t you see the rest of the country looks upon New York like we’re left-wing, communist, Jewish, homosexual pornographers? I think of us that way sometimes and I live here.” So if that’s how the rest of the country sees New York, how does New York see the rest of the country? Based on Whatever Works, Allen’s vision of the South is pretty much the opposite of New York, populated by right-wing, Christian, uneducated yokels (and closeted homosexuals) who devote themselves to intellectually vapid pursuits like beauty pageants. When teenage runaway Evan Rachel Wood arrives in Manhattan from backwater Mississippi, she’s an empty vessel that David can fill with his misanthropic “wisdom.” Her conservative parents (Patricia Clarkson and Ed Begley, Jr.) arrive later in their Sunday best, but their regressive Southern values are easily tamed by the bohemian polyamory and tolerance of the big city. Being Southern is a disease that New York City can apparently cure.Â
It’s harder to find specific examples to refute this point using a specific example, because I can’t think of a Woody Allen movie (other than Whatever Works, which I’ve not yet seen) that even acknowledges the South’s existence. I guess this is their only valid point, although it’s at least sort of funny that the A.V. Club and others have railed against Allen for not writing more minority characters, yet nobody seems to care that he’s patently ignored vast oceans of the Caucasian world, as well.
Also, I’ve spent enough time in the rural South to know that “right-wing, Christian, uneducated yokels” is the rule rather than the exception. Mainly because, when I’m not being shot at for hiking into somebody else’s ill-defined property line, the friends and family I have down there (many of whom suffer from this themselves) insist that the anti-intellectual movement has swept locals up in such a fervor that they actually value their lack of education, just as they value their religion and their (generally right-wing, often to the unfortunate extreme) political views. And it’s fine that they feel that way, until you disagree with them. Then you never hear the end of it. On the plus side, they’re easily distracted, which defuses a lot of tension. They also believe words like “grandma” are “grayma,” derived in their mind from the hair color, and they call ghosts “haints,” which actually is derived from the word “haunt,” but became a laugh-out-loud stupid part of the standard lexicon generations ago. So, really, how smart and non-yokely could they be?
It’s a generalization, yes, but just because some Southerners are pinko liberal abortion-loving atheists who teach junior college and drive hybrids doesn’t mean the “right-wing, Christian, uneducated yokels” don’t exist and shouldn’t be portrayed in cinema. As I said, I haven’t seen Whatever Works, so I can’t say how offensive and/or stereotypical the characters are, but they can’t possibly be worse than any of the characters in Mighty Aphrodite (which, admittedly, they call out as obnoxious and cartoonish). Nevertheless, it shows that Allen can stereotype his native New York culture with the same skill and aplomb as Southerners.
3. Great Britain
Back in 2005, Match Point was widely hailed as a major comeback for Allen, who seemed refreshed after leaving New York to stake out new territory in the British Isles. British critics were not so kind: Allen’s decision to repurpose a thriller set in the Hamptons for London made for a vivid change of scenery, but his cultural tone-deafness showed, too. Guardian/Observer critic Peter Bradshaw dismissed his portrait of upper-crust Brits as “quaintly conceived,” took issue with dialogue that “sounds clenched, stilted and occasionally plain bizarre” (and also contained lots of egregious mispronunciations and errors), and resented Allen’s tourist’s gloss on the city itself. Allen didn’t much improve with 2007’s Cassandra’s Dream, which attempted to tell the same reheated Crimes And Misdemeanors story from the other half of the class spectrum. The two “cockney” brothers played by Ewan McGregor and Colin Farrell sport accents so egregiously inauthentic that Uncut critic Stephen Trousse mocked them as “wavering between Dick Van Dyke and Tony Curtis doing Cary Grant in Some Like It Hot.” And Allen’s understanding of working-class South London isn’t much more nuanced. The bickering family in Cassandra’s Dream looks virtually interchangeable with their counterparts in Annie Hall or Radio Days; the only difference is that the brothers in Cassandra’s Dream have access to a yacht.Â
I’m probably not qualified to dispute this because I’m not a Brit, and aside from what I’ve gleaned from the absurd amount of British TV I’ve watched, I don’t know much about their culture. However, the fact that most of the English reviews when Match Point and Cassandra’s Dream didn’t do much more than take potshots at the shit they know Allen may not know much about (colloquialisms, cultural norms, etc.), rather than reviewing the movies themselves, suggests that there isn’t that much less to complain about, or maybe just that the Brits are living up to their stereotypical reputation as stuff, condescending pricks. It’s not that the movies are great — neither is, although I think Cassandra’s Dream was inexplicably and unfairly maligned — or that I hate British people, but the article fails to acknowledge Allen was sort of stuck between a rock and a hard place. His Dreamworks deal ended, his popularity in the U.S. has decreased to a pitiful point, and the only deal he could get was with BBC Films — on the condition he set the stories in the UK using primarily British actors.
Most of that’s beside the point, however. The thesis of this bulletpoint is: “Allen’s UK-set movies sucked and got bad reviews; therefore, Allen doesn’t get the UK.” Melinda and Melinda was significantly worse than either Match Point or Cassandra’s Dream and got mostly bad reviews. Does this mean Allen doesn’t understand New York? Also notice that this argument never once mentions Scoop, the worst of his UK movies and an absolute low point in his career. Could this be because the universally negative reviews concentrate on the actual broadness of the movie itself, rather than nitpicking the many things Allen clearly doesn’t understand about the culture?
4. The Female Psyche (post-Husbands And Wives)
Woody Allen is a fascinating paradox. He’s written some first-rate roles for women and guided multiple generations of actresses to their defining performances. Then, in 1994, the part of Allen’s brain that understands women apparently exploded and his female characters became a thinly sketched parade of castrating shrews (Christina Ricci in Anything Else being an especially egregious example) and vapid, rampaging sexpots intent on bedding Allen and his countless surrogates. With Melinda And Melinda, Allen set out to showcase the formidable talents of Australian actress Radha Mitchell and ended up giving her two terrible, borderline unplayable roles, one comic, one dramatic. Mira Sorvino picked up an Oscar playing a sentient Playboy Party Joke of a hooker with a heart of gold in 1996’s Mighty Aphrodite. But the ultimate late-period Allen female creation is Samantha Morton in 1999’s Sweet & Lowdown. She’s cute, sad, supportive, and completely mute. On the upside: The carefully crafted women of last year’s Vicky Cristina Barcelona suggest that this situation might be righting itself.
What the hell does this even mean? “From 1977 to 1995, Allen created a plethora of vividly written, well-acted female characters. Then he started creating awful caricatures, except in certain movies, and maybe now he’s going back to writing good, solid female roles.” Were they high when they wrote this?
Never mind the sloppy argument. I don’t have any great insight into Allen’s personal life, so I won’t spend time arguing about the odd metamorphosis of his post-Farrow filmography. I’m sure someone who took the time to thoroughly research it could make a solid case about the impact his personal life and feelings have on his films and the way he writes his characters, but I’m not that guy. I only know this: eventually, writers just start pumping out shit. I’m sure there are hundreds of reasons why this happens, but the important thing is that it happens. So this argument is sort of like saying, “Man, Stephen King sure writes crap now. He clearly doesn’t understand how to scare people.” In order for that to make sense, you have to ignore a sizable, more memorable and more artistically worthwhile chunk of his material — which is essentially what the A.V. Club does. Cherry-picking examples using arbitrary time periods and pointing out counterexamples without acknowledging that they totally obliterate the argument…is just shitty writing. I guess that means I need to ignore the hundreds of other well-written reviews and articles and say the A.V. Club doesn’t understand how to persuade people.
5. Gentiles
Despite the fact that the goyim of America make up a large chunk of his audience, Woody Allen doesn’t quite seem to get them, despite his romances with people named Farrow and Keaton. In Annie Hall, it’s easy to get the impression that Alvy Singer gets off on dating a non-Jewish girl from the Midwest in the same way he would if he showed up at a party with a space-alien on his arm. Gentiles are so lacking in neurosis—which, in a Woody Allen movie, is essentially the trait that defines humanity—that they might as well be robots. Indeed, Woody’s robot butler in Sleeper seems more natural and unaffected than the chilly, affected Gentiles who populate films like September and Alice.Â
Nice job ignoring Hannah and Her Sisters, Interiors, and Another Woman, in which the “chilly, affected Gentiles” are nothing but neurosis. And ignoring the fact that Annie Hall sort of treats Alvy and his ultra-New York Jewish liberal intellectual Central Park West Brandeis University socialist summer camp upbringing with the same space-alien attitude.
6. Los Angeles
Woody Allen’s films seem to be funded by a mysterious cabal of Europeans, well-heeled New York comedy buffs, and clarinet aficionados. He therefore has no use for the motion picture industry, or for its Los Angeles headquarters. His characters seem vaguely aware that there is a place called Hollywood, and that it’s geared towards the production of movies that people in Woody Allen movies would never see, but otherwise they react to any suggestion of La-La Land with the kind of revulsion that most people reserve for “Best Fascist Dictator” Adolf Hitler. Woody’s famous line about California—that its only cultural advantage is that you can make a right turn on a red light—only rings false because obviously, he’s never driven a car in his life, and wouldn’t know that you can’t [sic] do that in New York, too. Speaking of…
A filmmaker with a ’70s heyday who disdains and distances himself from the Hollywood establishment?! If you say so… I can’t wait for A.V. Club’s next inventory: “12 things Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Sidney Lumet, and George Lucas don’t get.”
Seriously, though, regardless of Allen’s personal feelings (and one could argue those feelings come not from not getting Hollywood but from getting it a little too well), half the points on this inventory seem to come solely from repeated viewings of Annie Hall. Allen has taken his fair share of potshots at the Hollywood establishment, but the only time an open disdain for Los Angeles and the entertainment industry became an actual character trait and plot point was in Annie Hall. Even in Hannah and Her Sisters, Allen’s character laments not moving out to L.A. with his former writing partner and becoming rich as kings writing horrible sitcoms — he’s portrayed as the one who made the bad move, not the other way around.
Also, I’m all for taking unfair potshots, but could you make rights on red in New York circa 1976-1977? I’d trust Woody Allen to know that more than the Midwestern 20- and 30-somethings who wrote this article. Speaking of…
7. Driving
It’s hard to imagine Allen behind the wheel, but maybe that’s because 1977’s Annie Hall made his driving neuroses a fundamental character trait. As a kid, Allen’s Alvy Singer worked out aggression via bumper cars, impeding his ability to drive as an adult. When he attempts to drive during a trip to Los Angeles, he can’t leave a parking lot without ramming other cars and smarting off to a police officer. He’s uneasy as a passenger, too—first with a flighty Keaton behind the wheel, then with her potentially psychotic brother Christopher Walken, who confesses to him, “Sometimes when I’m driving on the road at night, I see two headlights coming toward me fast. I have the sudden impulse to turn the wheel quickly, head-on into the oncoming car. I can anticipate the explosion. The sound of shattering glass. The flames rising out of the flowing gasoline.” Hmm, Allen should probably stay off the road.
Like the last point, Annie Hall is the only movie where bad driving is both a plot point and a character trait. (In Manhattan, bad driving is a plot point, but he drove badly intentionally, in order to run over his ex-wife’s lesbian lover.) I recall a few offhanded references to bad driving in other movies, but it’s balanced by movies like Broadway Danny Rose, Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask), Manhattan Murder Mystery, and Deconstructing Harry. He drives cars like a normal person. Nobody dies or crashes. It’s almost like Annie Hall is a work of fiction.
8. Violence
For a guy who’s made a handful of murder-mysteries, Woody Allen seems to have the same attitude toward violence that most people have toward sewage disposal: They know it exists, but dwelling on the details is unpleasant and probably offensive. Whenever his movies make reference to war, they might as well bring up “Yakety Sax” on the soundtrack; references to the Holocaust are generally used as punchlines. And in his murder-mysteries, the violence itself is usually handled with the lightest touch this side of Agatha Christie. Crimes And Misdemeanors begins this tradition, and it hasn’t gotten any less ridiculous over time; in Woody Allen movies, violence is something that happens to other people, and then it’s only to get the plot rolling so he can do what he’s really good at. It’s this reluctance to portray things that make him feel icky that made Joe Queenan observe: “The only thing Woody Allen has in common with Ingmar Bergman is Sven Nykvist.”
So The Maltese Falcon is a bad movie because Archer’s death is kept to the shadows instead of having CSI-like CGI close-ups of the bullet ripping into his flesh? I know that sounds like an obnoxious straw-man argument, but I’m being 100% serious: Archer’s death puts the plot of one of cinema’s greatest movies into motion, but the movie doesn’t linger on the details. In fact, thanks to the one-two punch of the Hays code and common decency, Golden Age movies were never explicit in their violence, and the movies themselves rarely dwelled on on grisly carnage. So this means Alfred Hitchcock’s pre-Psycho output is a waste of time? Should Woody Allen have made Crimes and Misdemeanors a little more like Se7en in order for it to have any impact? What the fuck is the argument here?
(As a side-note, it’s been awhile since I’ve seen it, but I seem to recall Jonathan Rhys-Meyers icing the neighbor with the shotgun in Match Point being fairly gruesome and shocking.)
9. Bob Dylan
Give him this much credit: It takes a certain kind of courage to mock one of the best loved and most respected musicians in the history of modern pop music. In 1977, Bob Dylan was still very much in the public eye. He’d released Blood On The Tracks, one of the all-time greats, only two years before, and was still touring regularly when Annie Hall hit theaters. But despite Dylan’s critical acclaim, Allen wasn’t a fan, and there’s no greater way to slander an artist than through the praise of an idiot. While trying to get over his breakup with Diane Keaton, Woody Allen goes on a date with music reporter Shelley Duvall. She throws out words like “transplendent,” she’s nearly impossible to please sexually, and worst of all, she’s a devoted Dylan fanatic, prone to quoting from “Just Like A Woman” in rapturous, vapid tones. “And she aches just like a woman / But she breaks just like a little girl,” is beautiful when sung, but in this context, it sounds like the brain-dead meanderings of some college poet high on empty profundity.
What? Woody Allen doesn’t love Bob Dylan? HOW DARE HE?! (Full disclosure: while I love Highway 61 Revisited, I don’t particularly like Bob Dylan. Call the cops if you must. I’ll go willingly. But don’t say I don’t “get” him; I just don’t find his songs, lyrics, or performing ability particularly worthwhile.)
Honestly, though, neither my opinion nor Woody Allen’s matters with this oddly distorted point. Go ahead and watch Annie Hall. It’s okay; it won’t bite. One could argue it remains his most accessible, appealing film, so you’re bound to — at worst — not hate it. When you’re through with it, answer this: is the joke of Shelley Duvall’s character at the expense of Bob Dylan or not? I’d argue “or not.” Allen portrays her as lacking any original thought — she spends the bulk of her time quoting the opinions of others (not just Dylan) rather than expressing herself, and when Alvy makes a quip about his sexual functioning, she asks him “who said that?” (To which he responds, in one of the movie’s best lines, “I think it may have been Leopold and Loeb.”) So, in my mind, it’s not Dylan he hates so much as people who quote people like Dylan because they themselves have nothing to contribute. I don’t really see that as the same thing as “slandering through the praise of an idiot.”
10. Modern music in general; rock music in particular
The vast majority of Woody Allen’s films are set in New York, a city that gave us Brill Building pop, American punk, and hip-hop. But as far as he’s concerned, the music scene stopped evolving approximately three years after he was born. Every time contemporary music rears its ugly head in a Woody Allen movie, it’s the subject of scorn and derision, from his mockery of Annie Hall’s Fillmore East program to his reaction, in Hannah And Her Sisters, to Dianne Wiest’s taking him to a punk club. He acts like rock music was invented specifically to get on his nerves. Even his famous love of jazz, documented in the inappropriately named Wild Man Blues, focuses on traditional New Orleans styles from the teens. In Woody’s universe, even post-bop and cool jazz seem like intolerable intrusions on music as it should be; if Charles Mingus or Miles Davis ever showed up at one of his parties, he’d probably call a cop. Allen’s beyond-arms-length distance from rock did lead to the one funny line in Hollywood Ending, though, when Allen told his silly cartoon of a punk-rock son, “I love you Scumbag X.” Punk might just be silly names and abrasive noise to Allen, but the bond he shares with Scumbag X remains profound.Â
Stop the presses! A man who grew up in the ’30s and ’40s loves jazz?! I know I keep getting sarcastic, but I can’t figure out why, tonally, the writers seem so aghast at what’s at best a preference and at worst a personality quirk. I grew up in the ’80s and ’90s. My music preferences lean toward rock and metal, but I also like jazz, opera, Romantic, and bluegrass. However, I will openly admit I don’t understand rap. Theoretically, I’m right in the age bracket and demographic (white suburbanite!) who should love rap. But I just don’t get it. I don’t get why the percussion has to be so overbearing, or why people think talking in rhythm is more impressive than singing. Like Allen and rock music, rap will only infect my work in the form of vaguely hostile jokes. Because I don’t understand it, and what I don’t understand, I ridicule. What’s wrong with that?
11. Independent And International Cinema After 1975
Allen studied at the feet of the masters and makes no attempt to hide it. Many of his films recall the style of great directors like Ingmar Bergman and John Cassavetes, paying homage while—usually, anyway—not letting the mimicry get in the way of his own artistic personality. But the films of others, or at least others to which Allen likes to pay tribute, pretty much ends with late-period Federico Fellini. Allen’s casting choices could double as time capsules for which actors were bubbling up at the time of the film’s production. (If that’s Juliette Lewis, this must be 1992.) But when he wants to try on another director’s tricks, he tends to return to the same sources, the stuff that made the deepest impression while he was still finding his own voice.
Am I wrong for assuming filmmakers are more frequently inspired by those who came before them than their contemporaries? Or, when they do find inspiration in contemporaries, they’re accused of being hacks? Look at the Quentin Tarantino phenomenon: a man with an alarming, near-encyclopedic recollection of cinema’s past that has given him the tools to make very interesting (if not wholly original) movies. Meanwhile, all the people making knockoffs of Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction are — even now, 15 years later — accused of hackery, while Tarantino is (somewhat justifiably) hailed as a visionary.
Maybe it’s hard to tell when a filmmaker’s career reaches a certain longevity, but I guess it makes sense that filmmakers would continue to find inspiration in the directors of their youth and young adulthood than in contemporaries. To accuse Allen of this and not contemporaries like Spielberg, Coppola, and Scorsese (the latter of whom is lately more egregious in imitating his influences than Allen was at his worst) is pretty lazy and irresponsible. Would I expect Woody Allen to start operating his camera like Sam Raimi? Not any more than the other directors listed. (And even the most visually inventive of the three — this is debatable, but I’d go with Spielberg for that — shows more Bergman and French New Wave influence, even in his newer movies, than in any of the notable directors who came up over the past 25 years.)
12. Recreational Drug Use
Woody Allen worships all things intellectual; for him, life isn’t something to be experienced so much as catalogued, criticized, and over-considered. It’s not really a surprise then that he’s not much into things that make analysis an after-thought. But it’s not just that Allen abstains from spirits and drugs; the very concept of other people willingly clouding their judgment for pleasure baffles him to the core. In one scene mid-way through Annie Hall, he tries to explain his reservations. Diane Keaton isn’t much interested in sex, and wants to get high before they screw, and Allen isn’t having any of it. First he dismisses pot (“Yeah, grass, right? The illusion that it will make a white woman more like Billie Holiday”), then complains that making love to a woman who’s high makes the whole experience a cheat, like getting a laugh from a stoned audience. As always with Allen, he’s a little ridiculous and a little right at the same time.
Yes, Allen’s brave and irresponsible anti-drug stance has frequently confounded audiences and critics alike. Seriously, though, the argument here is that drug use is the only way to “experience” life? That’s the type of retarded sentiment I’d expect from the 19-year-old son or daughter of wealthy, conservative parents who decides to get revenge for years of perceived and actual repression by going off to art school and going wild. I would’ve hoped, like most of these kids, the A.V. Club writers would’ve outgrown such a laughable point of view. I guess they’re entitled to their opinions, but again, just because they feel that way doesn’t mean anyone else has to agree with them. But I guess they expected more out of Allen, who has always touted himself as the mouthpiece for Gen-Y slackers.
(Side-note: As someone who has had the misfortune of (a) screwing while high, (b) screwing while my partner was high, and (c) screwing while both of us were high, I can vouch for Allen’s perspective on the subject.)
So there you have it, guys: ignore this article and check out some Woody Allen. Ironically, I’d recommend reading the A.V. Club’s surprisingly well-written Primer on Woody Allen.
Posted by Stan on June 30, 2009 5:24 PM | Permalink | Print-Friendly | Random Musings | Digg It
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