Monthly Archives: August 2015

  • To Rome with Love

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Woody Allen (2012)

     Woody Allen firmly back in decline.  He’s been quoted as saying that he thinks his recent films are his best:  it’s a bit sad, given his hyper-awareness of mortality, that he doesn’t see the effects of anno domini on his work.  To Rome with Love comprises four different stories, all played out in the Eternal City.  I went to see it in a complacent frame of mind – a complacency born of Allen’s relative return to form with Midnight in Paris, and awareness of the new film’s structure:  I assumed that, given the cast and this was a Woody Allen movie, I was bound to enjoy at least parts of it.  After half an hour, I realised with dismay that it didn’t matter which of the vignettes Allen returned to because none of them was any good.   The one consolation was that the writing is mostly so perfunctory that he’s able to wrap things up reasonably quickly – although To Rome with Love is a most unusual Allen movie in that it still seems too long (at 112 minutes).  The characters are a mixture of Americans and Italians.  For much of Vicky Cristina Barcelona, Woody Allen seemed to see Spain and Spaniards through rose-tinted sunglasses but this was redeemed by the neurotic force of the Penelope Cruz character and her rows with Javier Bardem – with New York lines translated into Spanish.  Allen has a similar sentimental tourist attitude towards the Italians in To Rome with Love ­– they’re mostly comically demonstrative chatterboxes.  This benign stereotyping suggests a generic view of a people; as such, it’s borderline racist.  And, unlike Vicky Cristina Barcelona, the writing of the Americans abroad is blah too.

    I can’t remember a Woody Allen picture from which I took less pleasure in the performers – a combination of his giving good people nothing to do and dismally unimaginative casting.   John (Alec Baldwin) is a successful architect, visiting places in Rome that he knew from thirty years ago when he was a student in the city.  As he sits reminiscing, he’s approached by Jack (Jesse Eisenberg), a young architecture student who’s presumably John’s younger self.  John hooks up to Jack’s life and the two women in it – Jack’s girlfriend Sally (Greta Gerwig) and her friend Monica (Ellen Page), who comes to stay and tries to seduce Jack – don’t notice the older man’s presence.   Eisenberg and Gerwig are pleasant but innocuous.  Baldwin is more conspicuously wasted.  He’s a stronger presence than anyone else in this part of the film (perhaps in the whole film);  he has a nostalgic intensity, especially in his walk, that leaves you wanting more – much more than Allen allows him to give.  The Ellen Page character is a messed-up, egotistical actress (the build-up to her arrival is very like one of the halves of Melinda and Melinda); Monica drops Jack and hotfoots it back to America the moment she hears she’s landed a movie part.   Sad to say, Ellen Page’s acting is as obvious as the cartoon Allen’s written for her.  In another story, Penelope Cruz is proficient but unsurprising as a spectacular hooker who – in a lame mistaken identity routine – scandalises the snooty relatives of Antonio (Alessandro Tiberi), an earnestly ambitious young man who’s just arrived in Rome from the provinces with his new bride Milly.   As Milly, Alessandra Mastronardi gives one of the very few charming performances in To Rome with Love.  It’s not worth explaining how Milly gets to be in a hotel room with a slobby celebrity called Luca Salta (Antonio Albanese) and a hold-up man (Riccardo Scamarcio) who demands their money and valuables.   But I think the only bit in the film I found likeable was when Luca Salta had scarpered and Milly and the hold-up man go to bed together.  The genial, why-not pragmatism of the coupling is funny and nicely played by Mastronardi and Scamarcio.

    Roberto Benigni is Leopoldo, a boring office worker who begins sentences ‘If you ask me … ‘, and suddenly becomes a national celebrity when that’s what the media start doing:  interviewers thrust microphones in Leopoldo’s face and ask him everything from his political opinions to what kind of underwear he prefers.  The competition is keen but this is the worst piece of casting in To Rome with Love.  Benigni isn’t remotely ordinary or unnoticeable:  he’s such an attention-grabbing performer that Leopoldo’s transformation has no impact at all.  The script’s best idea, on paper, involves Giancarlo (Fabio Armiliato), a middle-aged funeral director who has a great voice when he’s singing in the shower.   Giancarlo’s pompously principled son Michelangelo (Flavio Parenti), has just got engaged to an American girl Hayley (Alison Pill), whose parents Jerry (Woody Allen) and Phyllis (Judy Davis) travel to Rome to meet her fiancé.  Hayley’s father is a retired opera director and determines to make a star out of Giancarlo.  Jerry was notorious throughout his career for eccentric staging (although Rigoletto with the cast as white mice is the only example supplied – there are two references to it).  He decides to put a shower in the centre of the stage and the production, with Giancarlo, wearing a towel, singing in it.  Unless Giancarlo seems like an unassuming undertaker who happens to be a magnificent singer, the idea is pointless.  Fabio Armiliato is a well-known opera tenor and, like most of his breed, he’s not a naturalistic actor.  From his first appearance in the shower at home, he looks and moves like a stage performer:  his facial expressions and his gestures in the shower are too defined; he acts scrubbing his back like an opera singer doing comic opera.  Woody Allen’s own return to the screen (for the first time since Scoop) is mostly regrettable:  he’s lost some of his timing and speed of delivery.  Even so, the only times I nearly laughed were in exchanges between him and Judy Davis – particularly when Phyllis tells Jerry that his desire to come out of retirement and his choice of an undertaker as a way of doing that merely reflect his fear of death.

    The lampooning of celebrity in To Rome with Love is very tired; I can’t decide whether Allen’s realising or not realising that is worse.  There’s also something unpleasant about his, in effect, punishing a supposedly insignificant fellow like Leopoldo for daring to demand an audience.  I assume Milly has a crush on the celeb Luca Salta because she’s a naive, provincial girl but since he looks a fat boor and Alessandra Mastronardi is not only beautiful but witty the idea isn’t at all convincing.  On the evidence of this film and Midnight in Paris, Woody Allen seems to think that famous people are OK only if they’re part of the past.  He now moves the jokes around as it suits – without these belonging to the characters.  Leopoldo, before he become famous-for-fifteen-minutes, comes out of a cinema rattling away to culturally benighted companions about the movie they’ve just seen.  It’s an echo of the Woody Allen character doing the same thing in New York thirty years ago but it doesn’t make sense here because Leopoldo is meant to be not very bright.   A visitor to one of the world’s great cities who wanders off into unexpected-cum-fantastical experiences there – experiences that make a spiritual difference to their lives – is now a dominant trend in Allen’s work.  It was central to Midnight in Paris:  both the Alec Baldwin and Alessandra Mastronardi characters do it in To Rome with Love.  But Allen doesn’t have the will or the energy to make it a consistent motif and it’s too late in his filmmaking life for him to make a style of randomness.  The divagations here don’t feel mellow or surreal; they’re just slack.   The working title of this movie was The Bop Decameron but it’s hardly surprising that was dropped:  the end product is too mild and weak to mention Boccaccio even in a semi-ironic tone.   I disliked You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger more than To Rome with Love but only because this new movie is so feeble.

    Something Woody Allen can’t be blamed for is the gales of listen-to-me laughter on the left-hand side of the Odeon in Red Lion Street.  We were sitting on the right, where the smell of damp was worse but which, in the end, seemed a slightly better place to be.   Allen may love Rome but if audiences who also love Rome think shots of the city + Woody Allen is double your fun it’s rather distressing, given what he’s done in the past.  It’s distressing too that this film, albeit perhaps on the back of Midnight in Paris, is giving Allen greater commercial success in his declining years than he’s ever known before.   Even if Midnight in Paris was overpraised, it had good things in it and a lovely performance by Owen Wilson:  anyone who’s a Woody Allen fan had to be pleased with the film’s success.   But I wish he would go back to New York City now – Whatever Works, although its reception was hostile, was one of his stronger films of the last decade.  For the most part, his forays into continental European compare well only with his terrible London movies.  It’s time for Woody Allen to give up touring.

    22 September 2012

  • Sleeper

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Woody Allen (1973)

    In Sleeper, Woody Allen plays Miles Monroe, who once ran a health food shop in Greenwich Village and went into hospital in 1973 for peptic ulcer surgery that went fatally wrong.  Miles’s body was cryogenically preserved, however, and he’s revived two hundred years later by scientists who are part of an underground movement in the totalitarian state that America has become.   Their plan is for Miles, because he has no biometric identity, to infiltrate the military dictatorship’s planning of something called the ‘Aires Project’ (pronounced ‘Aries’:  I wasn’t sure if the spelling was meant to be one of many examples of the state’s ineptitude).  The plan, of course, misfires:  when the authorities arrest the scientists responsible, Miles takes refuge in a van containing robot butlers (in traditional butler attire) and pretends to be one of them.   He finds himself working for a poetess socialite called Luna Schlosser (Diane Keaton):  when she wants to get the butler’s head changed for a more ‘aesthetically pleasing’ one, Miles has no option but to reveal to Luna his true identity.  She threatens to turn him in to the authorities so Miles gags and kidnaps Luna, and goes on the run.  When she finds herself threatened by the militia even as she’s trying to hand Miles over to them, Luna changes sides; she and Miles become allies and, pretty soon, start falling in love.  In the course of the next hour, they get separated, Miles gets brainwashed, Luna joins a group of guerrilla rebels who de-brainwash him, and the pair penetrate the site of the Aires Project.  This turns out to be a plan to clone the state’s leader from his nose – all that remains of him as the result of a rebel bomb plot several months earlier.  Mistaken for doctors, Miles and Luna are asked to perform the cloning operation.   They steal the nose from the lab and manage to squash it under a steamroller.

    I saw Sleeper on its initial release and it’s the first Woody Allen film I remember really enjoying.  I enjoyed it again nearly forty years on but it’s not as good as Love and Death, which came next.   In Love and Death, there’s both a disjunction and a kinship between the Allen character Boris and the world of nineteenth-century Russian literature (although Boris’s mindset is anachronistic, his propensity for melancholy cerebration fits with the setting) – and the combination is exuberantly funny.  Sleeper, which Allen co-wrote with Marshall Brickman, doesn’t have the same quality:   Allen is often preoccupied here with more slapstick, less verbal comedy.  There are plenty of words eventually – although it takes a while for Miles to speak and comes as a considerable relief when he does – but the focus on the visual in Sleeper tends to de-emphasise the incongruity of the forty-year-old man from 1973 and the world of 2173 in which he comes back to life.  There are times in more verbose Woody Allen films when you want him to shut up yet, when he’s mute, you feel starved.  This movie was the first in which he’d directed Diane Keaton (she’d co-starred in Play It Again, Sam but Herbert Ross directed) and, although his off-screen partnership with her had already ended by this time, perhaps Allen needed the experience of Sleeper to realise Keaton’s potential as a comedienne.  She’s very charming here but partly because of her game-for-anything quality:  her character isn’t as coherent, or Keaton’s playing as secure, as in Love and Death two years later.

    There are plenty of funny things to watch and to make you realise that Woody Allen is an accomplished physical comedian:  the troupe of humanoid-butlers in their black suits and bow ties and, in Miles’s case, tortoiseshell-framed spectacles; a fight routine in which Miles and one of his pursuers keep slipping on a giant banana skin; Miles semi-airborne in an inflatable suit.   You get a sense, though, that the physical comedy is there because Allen feels this, rather than laugh lines, are the essence of screen comedy.  (Extracts from an interview with Richard Schickel, included in the BFI programme note, seem to confirm this.)  It’s a variation on the clown-wanting-to-play-Hamlet syndrome:  a stand-up wanting to be Chaplin or Buster Keaton or Harold Lloyd.  But the essence of Woody Allen is words and the highlights in Sleeper are word-based, notably the bits when the rebels are taking Miles through traumatic events in his past.  There’s a reconstruction of a Brooklyn family meal with Luna and the macho rebel leader Erno (John Beck) doing amusingly bad Jewish accents (and gestures).  Even better is the A Streetcar Named Desire sequence with Allen as Blanche Dubois and Keaton as Brando as Stanley Kowalski.  And maybe best of all is a sketch in a different part of the film:  Miles’s visit to an automated clothing store:  ‘Ginsberg and Cohen: Computerised Fittings since 2073’.  The proprietors are a couple of robots but their conversation is that of Jewish gents’ outfitters of an earlier century.  There are one-liners in Sleeper that are justly famous:   Miles’s response to the news that his brain is to be ‘electronically simplified’ (“My brain?  That’s my second favourite organ!”); the closing dialogue, when Luna asks him what he believes in and he tells her sex and death (“… two things that come but once in my lifetime, but at least after death you’re not nauseous”).

    A futuristic parody setting might seem to offer the guarantee of ready made laughs but Woody Allen is rather careless of the possibilities.  At the same time, Sleeper is more tethered than it need be to its sci-fi adventure plot:  I could have done with a more cavalier disregard for sticking with the storyline – especially when Allen’s heart isn’t really in doing this.  Sleeper stops rather than ends and some promising jokes don’t lead anywhere along the way (for example, when Luna’s party guests arrive, the robot Miles takes their coats and puts them in what he thinks is a wardrobe but turns out to be an incinerator but there’s no follow-through to this in terms of the guests’ reactions).  The film is altogether less nourishing than Love and Death but it was impossible not to be struck watching it by what audibly sustained pleasure Woody Allen’s work is giving to the more or less full houses coming to see his films in this month’s BFI season.   The many white-coated members of the cast include Marya Small, whom I remember as one of the girls McMurphy gets into the asylum in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.  The highly enjoyable accompanying music is played by Allen and other members of the Preservation Hall Jazz Band.

    18 January 2012

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