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Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
Woody Allen grows old ungracefully as a blind, neurotic babe-magnet filmmaker (who remains the center of the world).
May 8, 2002 | Woody Allen has been slouching toward irrelevance for almost 20 years now. What's remarkable about his slow trickle away from the forefront of American consciousness is not that it's taken as long as it has, but that he still manages to make it look like such hard work. No director in the history of moviemaking has expended so much effort in the service of drying up and blowing off the landscape.
In the '70s Allen was relevant, not least because he was a master at fashioning happily rough-edged works of pure pleasure: He distilled our collective intellectual anxiety into ramshackle rhapsodies that you didn't have to be either intellectual or anxious to enjoy.
But that was a long time ago. It would be nice if we could call it a tragedy that Allen's latest comedy, "Hollywood Ending," which he wrote and directed, is so inoffensively worn-in and faded that it leaves just a faint couch-potato shaped indentation on our brains. The sad thing, maybe, is that that's no surprise at all.
In "Hollywood Ending" Allen plays Val Waxman, a director who's fallen on hard times -- he's considered a has-been and no one wants to give him work. His ex-wife Ellie (Téa Leoni) is a Hollywood power player who persuades her bigwig studio-head boyfriend (Treat Williams) to let Allen direct a retro-'40s picture set in Manhattan, called "The City That Never Sleeps." She waves her arms emphatically as she tries to sell a team of Hollywood hotshots on her ex's suitability for the project: "The streets of New York are in his marrow!" Imagine what his liver must look like.
"Hollywood Ending"
Written and directed by Woody Allen
Starring Woody Allen, Téa Leoni, George Hamilton, Debra Messing, Treat Williams
Waxman gets the gig, but not before Allen has established him as a supposedly sympathetic sad sack who, in life and in love, just can't get a break. He's got a real hot tootsie of a girlfriend at home (Debra Messing, in an overeager, paper-cutout performance), but she doesn't have a brain. Poor baby! Ellie, who was his second wife, started fooling around on him while they were still married. Poor baby! He has a grown son with green hair and multiple facial piercings who refuses to have anything to do with him. Poor baby!
Allen plays Waxman like a man who has spent his whole life innocently bumping through the universe, falling for dumb bunnies against his will (though it's no accident that Allen keeps casting attractive, much younger women as babes who can't resist him); not being able to keep a wife no matter how pathetically neurotic, childlike and in need of protection he makes himself look; and fathering children who are so selfish they simply refuse to understand how deeply self-absorbed he is. How can we not love a man so clearly born into such a world of suffering?
It's supposed to be terrifically funny when Waxman, just before the first day of shooting the movie that will either make or break the rest of his career, suddenly goes psychosomatically blind. Who ever heard of a blind movie director? But the gag would be funnier if Allen, as the movie's director and writer (he'd probably be the first one to use the word "auteur"), seemed to actually see the actors around him.
As it is, Allen has done little more than plunk himself into the middle of their universe, as the swollen-headed sun king around whom they're happy to revolve. Actors are always thrilled to work with Allen (or at least they pretend to be), but it's become almost impossible to see why.
In the past few years there have been a few who have held their own in his movies, despite the way his egotism bleeds, quietly or otherwise, into the margins of every project. In the reasonably entertaining "Sweet and Lowdown," Samantha Morton, as the mute girl who's madly in love with Sean Penn's scalawag guitarist, carried the picture without saying a word. (That's especially interesting since words are Allen's stock in trade.) And, in a much smaller role of a different stripe, the not-of-this-earth Elaine May quietly crept off with "Small Time Crooks." When Allen, as a bank robber turned cookie tycoon, approaches May at Ruby Foo's and, happy to see her, asks what she's doing there, her breathily straightforward response is like a one-sentence ode to the spacy brilliance of Gracie Allen: "I'm eating Chinese food. It's what you do in a Chinese restaurant."
