Old Yorker

  • Annie Hall

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Woody Allen (1977)

    The story of the relationship between a neurotic comedy writer and stand-up called Alvy Singer and the eponymous Annie (Diane Keaton), which Woody Allen co-wrote with Marshall Brickman, is very clever and charming.  The title refers to both the leads:  Diane Keaton, who was Allen’s partner in the early 1970s, was born Diane Hall; anhedonia – the film’s working title, echoed in its eventual one – is what Alvy/Allen suffers from.   It’s a good movie – partly because the context of the terrific dialogue is a love story which is psychologically convincing.  Alvy helps the daffy, desperately self-conscious Annie out of her reclusiveness but his killjoy jealousy breaks them up.  Like Manhattan, Annie Hall is a film I saw on its original release but hadn’t seen since.  Second time round, I started off thinking it was supremely entertaining but I got a little bored as it went on (although not irritated, as I became with Manhattan).  Maybe the piece seems wan only because a protagonist so obviously based on Allen has become so familiar in the decades since Annie Hall but there’s no way of seeing it other than in retrospect and therefore no getting round this problem.

    Diane Keaton’s famous performance still seems fresh after all these years, though.  She’s such a strong and secure dramatic actress that she’s able to supply Annie with a serious core that gives depth to, but never gets in the way of, her delightful comic style.  She’s unobtrusively brilliant in the way that Annie’s mien changes according to the social situation she’s in – when Alvy and Annie are having dinner with her posh WASP family, Keaton is hunched beside her imposing mother (Colleen Dewhurst).   Seeing the two films again this week made me realise I’d forgotten how emotionally open Woody Allen could be too – in the last scene with Mariel Hemingway in Manhattan, in the sequences to camera which open and close Annie Hall.  Most of the non-verbal comic techniques he uses here work very well:  wheeling on Marshall McLuhan to tell an annoying man behind Alvy and Annie in a cinema queue for The Sorrow and the Pity that he’s got McLuhan’s ideas all wrong; inserting the grown-up Alvy into a reminiscence of his primary school days (a winning admission of the egocentricity of Allen’s films) or the child Alvy into Disney’s Snow White (as a kid, he had a thing for the Wicked Queen rather than the heroine).  The first time they meet, Annie tells Alvy he’s what her grandmother ‘would call a real Jew’:  there’s a justly famous visual gag at the meal with her family (they’re eating ham) when Alvy feels the old lady’s eyes on him and he turns momentarily into a rabbi.   The verbal side of things is also inventive:  the subtitles that express Alvy and Annie’s thoughts and contradict what they’re actually saying; the conversations between them across a split-screen divide.

    It’s fun to see actors who soon became big names in small parts here.  Christopher Walken is Annie’s weird, death-wishing brother; Jeff Goldblum registers with his one line as a man at an LA party phoning his guru (‘I’ve forgotten what my mantra is’).  According to the cast list in the BFI programme note, Sigourney Weaver appears momentarily (but unrecognisably – in long shot) as Alvy’s new date when he and Annie, after their break-up, bump into each other outside the cinema (The Sorrow and the Pity again).  Allen’s anxieties about his lack of height are amusingly realised through a succession of notably leggy girlfriends – for Paul Simon, as the music industry man who lures Annie from New York to Los Angeles, as well as himself.  The cast also includes Carol Kane as Alvy’s first wife, Shelley Duvall as a pea-brained, celebrity-crazy journalist, and Tony Roberts as an easygoing actor friend of Alvy.  Woody Allen’s evidently guilty feelings about the theft of biography for purposes of fiction may have found its funniest expression in the success that Dianne Wiest’s Holly eventually enjoys as an ‘author’ in Hannah and Her Sisters but there’s a sequence here that runs it a good second.  Alvy writes a stage play which lifts dialogue we heard between him and Annie wholesale.  The adaptation parts company from the source material at the point at which, in real life, Alvy and Annie went their separate ways and, in the theatre, their counterparts realise they’re made for each other.

    At the height of his prestige and success in the late 1970s, Woody Allen was quoted in a Newsweek interview as saying:  ‘When you do comedy, you’re not sitting at the grown-ups’ table, you’re sitting at the children’s table’.  I don’t know when exactly he said this:  it’s striking both that Annie Hall’s Academy Awards (Best Picture, Director, Actress, Original Screenplay) might seem to contradict him and that this film was  followed by his Bergman hommage-pastiche Interiors. There’s no doubt some truth in his complaint but I’m not sure whether he ever acknowledged the prejudice was helpful to him. Even in 1977, Allen’s persona was well enough established for much of the audience to regard Alvy Singer as Woody Allen and Alvy was well described by Pauline Kael as ‘a compulsive, judgmental spoilsport’.  Yet the audience likes Alvy – he may be a spoilsport but he comes out with great one-liners:  his character is both expressed through comic means and made less troubling as a result of the comedy medium.

    The way in which Woody Allen transmits his obsessions has a similar effect:  a good example is death because it’s an obsession shared with Bergman, Allen’s beau idéal of film-makers.  Except in Interiors, Allen puts his horror of death on the screen in the form of jokes about it – usually verbal and often brilliant.  Alvy’s buying Annie books about death early in their relationship and her handing them all back when they split hardly compares with Mickey Sachs’ morbid hypochondria in Hannah and Her Sisters but in both cases the comic register serves to take the sting out of death.  Because Allen is primarily a comedy artist you don’t feel either there’s a sting in his having to resort to jokes as a way of dealing with fear of death.  This makes his films more easily pleasurable and popular than they would otherwise have been.  If you took Alvy Singer entirely seriously, you wouldn’t like him much.  If you identified Alvy with his creator, you’d probably not like Woody Allen much either – you’d almost certainly not fancy seeing his alter ego back on screen year after year.   There are benefits to a man of comedy being condescended to.

    6 January 2012

  • Reds

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Warren Beatty (1981)

    Reds is epic in length (three-and-a-quarter hours) and ambition, but not in substance.   The story of John Reed, the author of Ten Days That Shook the World, and his wife Louise Bryant works well as a love story but Warren Beatty, who also produced, starred as Reed and co-wrote the screenplay with Trevor Griffiths, aimed for much more.   A mainstream Hollywood picture chronicling the history of left-wing political movements in America in the second decade of the twentieth century was an improbable project thirty years ago; since the idea seems incredible now, Reds is all the more likeable in retrospect.  But this is a chronicle in the nearly pejorative sense of an extended narrative record that lacks an interpretative underpinning – the underpinning which is needed to animate, and make dramatic, historical reconstructions.   There are many sequences, in America and Russia, of angry exchanges between rival factions and individuals at rallies and in committee rooms.   They’re well staged and the acting has a vigorous naturalism but the sound and fury don’t mean a lot because the characters aren’t developed, except for Reed himself.  Even he, although he has plenty of political things to say, doesn’t engage us in these passages in the way that he does when he’s arguing with Louise.   Beatty probably wanted – with good reason – to get away from both the declamatory excesses of the Hollywood historical epic and its clumsy attempts to convey historical moment through supposedly natural conversation (the pleased-to-meet-you-Lenin-my-name’s-Trotsky school of screenwriting).  As a result, though, he loses any sense that political urgency and seriousness were as natural as breathing to the likes of John Reed.   Jerzy Kozinski, as Zinoviev, gets that quality across but the character is underwritten.  The only satisfying combination of individual personality and political animal is Maureen Stapleton’s Emma Goldman:  Stapleton makes you believe in a woman who, even at her most conversational, couldn’t stop making speeches

    Beatty’s attempts to get away from the old way of historical-political storytelling on screen gradually run out of steam.  Once the action switches largely to Russia, at the time and in the aftermath of the Revolution, Reds ­– although it’s always visually interesting – becomes a conventional, even clichéd narrative.  Entering its last hour, the film looks to have suffered a terminal loss of momentum, although it recovers eventually.  The drama of whether the ailing Reed and the gallant Louise, who stows away on a ship from New York to Europe and seems to traverse Eurasia in search of her husband, is involving – but in the way that the Yuri-Lara love story in Doctor Zhivago is involving (that is, without the political or moral passions of the pair counting for much).   There are many good actors in Reds but all except Stapleton are upstaged by the amazing cast of real-life witnesses whom Beatty interviewed, over a period of several years, and whose recollections of Reed, Bryant and their circle punctuate and eclipse the bulk of the movie.  The thirty-two witnesses include Oleg Kerensky, Henry Miller, Adela Rogers St John and, best of all, a double act of Dora Russell and Rebecca West.  All these people are dead now (as, of course, is Maureen Stapleton):  capturing them in vivid, lucid old age on film is the lasting achievement of Reds.

    Warren Beatty’s acting is highly intelligent and sensitive although his hagiographic attitude towards Reed makes him too gentlemanly:  Beatty is terrific when he allows Reed to be annoying but he often holds back from this.   Diane Keaton’s speech rhythms often sound anachronistic and she may be more fundamentally miscast as Louise Bryant, whose qualities, by all accounts, didn’t include a great sense of humour.  Still, Keaton’s humour is very welcome and she does some great things – she has in this role a tense, deliberate walk that gets her inside the mind and body of a woman who seems to have been congenitally angry and desperately self-assertive.   Although the moment on a Russian station when Louise is desperately hoping to see Reed step down from the train is obviously conceived, Diane Keaton’s quicksilver emotionality transcends the obviousness and makes the scene very affecting.  (She’s very good too in the final scene in the hospital, where Reed dies.) Eugene O’Neill is an unusual role for Jack Nicholson and he gives a thoughtful performance yet it comes over, I assume inadvertently, as disrespectful to the man he’s playing:  Nicholson gets the most out of the lethally hurtful lines he’s asked to deliver but doesn’t suggest any depth to O’Neill.  (Academy Awards for Best Director, Supporting Actress (Stapleton) and Cinematography (Vittorio Storaro); in spite of its considerable limitations, Reds would have been a much more deserving recipient of the Best Picture prize than that year’s ludicrous winner Chariots of Fire.)

    11 July 2010

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