Woody Allen (1985)

An odd way to end the last nineteen days, which have included nine visits to BFI to see Woody Allen films.  This was the only one of the nine without him in it:  The Purple Rose of Cairo was the second of his movies and the first comedy in which he didn’t appear (the previous non-appearance was Interiors).  This was also the only one of the nine films I strongly disliked – a surprise as well as a disappointment.  This is one of Allen’s most widely admired pictures (at the time of its release Pauline Kael reckoned it ‘the most purely charming’ of his thirteen features to date) and it’s a lovely idea.  Cecilia, a woman living in New Jersey during the Great Depression who gets her only pleasures from watching show after show at the local cinema (the Jewel), finds her world transformed when Tom Baxter, the pith-helmet-wearing archaeologist hero of the latest film she sees there (‘The Purple Rose of Cairo’), spots her in the theatre audience – for the third time that day and the fifth all told – and steps down from the screen and into her life. Tom’s romantic impulse is a showstopper for all concerned.  The audience has nothing to watch but the other members of the movie’s cast sitting around bitching about their co-star’s irresponsibility and waiting for him to return so the action can resume.  Gil Shepherd, the ambitious actor who plays Tom Baxter, flies from Los Angeles to New Jersey to try and sort things out and this is the trigger for an unusual love triangle – involving Cecilia (played by Mia Farrow), Tom and Gil (both played by Jeff Daniels).

Woody Allen is more interested in the jokes that the situation offers than in a rigorous working out of it.  Movie bosses in Hollywood are worried Tom’s walkout is going to spark an epidemic of similar behaviour in screenings of ‘The Purple Rose of Cairo’ across the country but there’s no indication of what the commercial consequences of that would be.  What happens at the Jewel doesn’t bring crowds flocking to it but doesn’t empty the movie theatre either.  The audience there seems to be as stranded as the other actors in ‘The Purple Rose’, kvetching about the stasis on screen.  This casual approach to the logic of a film’s premise isn’t unusual in Woody Allen, though, and sometimes adds to a film’s charm (as in Love and Death).  What’s objectionable in The Purple Rose of Cairo is Allen’s treatment of the Depression.  It’s one thing to illustrate the vital importance of movies as escapism during the period but Allen reduces the Depression to the context of the movies so that, for example, the groups of unemployed men at the margins of the action are little more than set dressing.  But one unemployed man is treated very differently – Cecilia’s slob husband Monk, who abuses his wife verbally and sometimes physically, and is unfaithful to her when he gets the chance.  This character might be crude in any setting; his brutality is jarringly incongruous within the film’s attenuated world.  You can sense Danny Aiello’s discomfort in the role but Woody Allen shows Monk no mercy: there’s not a hint that it’s his situation that might be bringing out the worst in him.  (In the scheme of the movie, it’s almost as if Monk is a thug because he doesn’t go to the movies enough.)

The best things in The Purple Rose of Cairo are Cecilia’s two suitors.  There is some suspense in which of them Cecilia will eventually choose and the intersection of their two personalities provides the film with its best moments and its most interesting theme.   Gil Shepherd – at first and at last – is vain, anxiously preoccupied with his reputation and career prospects, but, when he’s in a music shop with Cecilia and sings ‘I’m Alabama Bound’, accompanying himself on a banjo, Jeff Daniels hints at a sweetness of nature in Gil that chimes with Tom Baxter’s thoroughgoing affability.  The effect is genuinely charming and you understand, as Gil sings, Cecilia’s confused feelings about him and Tom.  Woody Allen seems to be speculating here about what actors bring of themselves to their roles – and perhaps raising the question of how much a character on screen is the creation of the writer who conceived him or the actor who interprets him.

In the case of Cecilia, however, this idea gets muddied – largely because of what Mia Farrow meant to Allen at the time.  Farrow gave some good performances working with him but she’s arguably not strong enough to play the lead or hold a film together (although she manages to in Rosemary’s Baby, where her waiflike vulnerability is integral to the momentum of the story).   Mia Farrow can play comedy but she isn’t an instinctive comedienne the way Diane Keaton or Dianne Wiest is – she isn’t funny in herself.   In this film Woody Allen doesn’t seem to expect her to be funny – he rather assumes that she’s delightful.   In the early scenes we see Cecilia working as a waitress in a diner:  she’s so inept, as she yatters film facts and gets orders wrong, that I soon found myself sharing the proprietor’s impatience with her but Woody Allen clearly feels that Mia Farrow beatifies the role she’s playing.  I suspect he also thinks that his feelings about her exclude the possibility of condescension in his treatment of Cecilia but, if so, he’s wrong.   Cecilia eventually chooses Gil in preference to Tom – reality over fantasy – but Gil has tricked her.  (When Tom loses Cecilia, he returns to the other side of the screen and allows Gil’s career to continue.)  At the end, Cecilia is presented as virtually Chaplinesque – the pathetic, plucky little loser – a persona which Woody Allen has always, thank goodness, resisted for himself.

With the exception of Daniels and Karen Akers (as the club chanteuse with whom Tom Baxter falls in love on screen before deserting her for Cecilia), the actors playing actors in the stalled movie – Zoe Caldwell, Edward Herrmann, Milo O’Shea and John Wood – are archly knowing and unfunny.  Although Dianne Wiest brings a bit of friction to the role of a prostitute who takes Tom to the brothel where she works, the scene there fizzles out because, once Woody Allen has delivered the essential joke (Tom is of course utterly innocent and the hookers are incredulous), he has nowhere to take it.    The film is treading water until Tom Baxter breaks the fourth wall and the dialogue is sometimes so calculated to be charming that it’s deadly.  Tom hears what Monk does to Cecilia and says that if he got the chance he’d punch her husband in the face.  ‘Oh, would you really?’ asks Cecilia.  ‘Yes’, replies Tom, ‘it’s part of my character’.    Other lines, which might well be funny issuing from Woody Allen, are rendered cute spoken by Mia Farrow, as when Cecilia describes Tom to a friend:  ‘He’s fictional but you can’t have everything’.

As Gil heads back to Hollywood, his guilty feelings about deserting Cecilia momentarily come through; Jeff Daniels’s darkening face gives the film a shot of emotional truth that cuts through the sweetly sad fantasy and is almost mysterious.  The Purple Rose of Cairo should have ended at this point but Woody Allen has to return to Cecilia, once more in her seat in the Jewel, her life back to dreary normal but even sorrier than it was before because of the exciting interlude.   Then Top Hat comes on the screen and her face lights up.  That’s a very natural reaction to Top Hat but this conclusion – because Allen is so focused on Mia Farrow’s luminous hopefulness – comes across less as an illustration of how movies could (still can) banish the blues than as a sentimental underlining of the idea that Cecilia can find happiness only in make-believe.

21 January 2012