Robert B Weide (2011)

This film, introduced by the director at BFI, was originally made for PBS television, where it ran for over three hours.  This cinema cut is less than two.  The forthcoming DVD will be the PBS version.  The greater length may reveal greater complexity in Robert Weide’s approach to his subject but I doubt it.   Woody Allen:  A Documentary is hugely enjoyable but ‘Woody Allen:  A Celebration’ would have been a more accurate title.  Allen allowed Weide to follow him round for a year and a half.  That must have been a treat for Weide as a fan but his ‘unparalleled access’ to Allen doesn’t yield as much as you might hope.  There are a few cherishable things, like Allen explaining the history of the typewriter that he bought sixty years ago and on which still writes all his scripts (and his distinctive low-tech cut-and-paste technique).   But although he’s great to listen to and there’s much more biographical detail than I’d heard before, Weide’s interviews with him aren’t that probing.

I don’t mean by that that they evade the subject of Soon-Yi Previn.   The heading of Peter Bradshaw’s review in The Guardian is ‘A new documentary has everything you always wanted to know about Woody – but is afraid to ask about just one thing’.   I think Weide’s less afraid to ask about the Soon-Yi scandal than about, for example, the critical consensus of recent years that Allen’s best days as a film-maker are behind him.   There’s a glancing reference to negative press for Interiors (although the film was nominated for five Oscars, including direction and screenplay) and rather more about the hostile reception of Stardust Memories.  But those movies were made more than thirty years ago:  the run of poorly received work through most of the last decade is virtually ignored.  The critic F X Feeney describes these movies as ‘wandering … but still interesting’.  Feeney considers Match Point (2005) as a triumphant return to form, as did many other critics at the time. That such a poor picture was so overrated says a lot about how fast and far Woody Allen’s stock had fallen.  If Weide asked what Allen felt about that, or even about filming in England or Spain after so long in New York City, this film doesn’t include the answer.

Possibly because of cuts Weide has made to the PBS version, few of the interviewees make contributions that build.  It’s a pleasure to hear lots of good actors who evidently love working with Woody Allen saying so but their contributions are repetitive and (already) unmemorable.  It was more interesting to hear Douglas McGrath, who co-wrote Bullets over Broadway, talking about the difference of opinion between him and Allen over the casting in the movie of Dianne Wiest (who shared McGrath’s conviction that she was miscast).  Because her experience of him is much more various, Allen’s sister Letty Aronson registers relatively strongly.  Because of Allen’s long-running hate-hate relationship with the God he doesn’t believe in, so does the Catholic priest and film critic (and Allen fan) Robert Lauder.

It’s a pity that the sequences of Allen’s film-making in action take place on the set of You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, a deserved flop.   It’s equally fortunate that Midnight in Paris was becoming a merited hit just as Weide was completing this documentary.  The success of Midnight in Paris supplies an almost quaint happy ending to this film but the whole thing makes you pretty happy.  It’s not just a further reminder, after BFI’s Woody Allen season in January, of his wonderfully varied body of work.  Seeing short clips from the films makes them more consistently enjoyable.  (I didn’t like either Broadway Danny Rose or The Purple Rose of Cairo in its entirety but the excerpts from them here were fine.)  While there’s plenty to celebrate in the life of Woody Allen, this film left me feeling not only undernourished but also disinclined to invest in the DVD because I suspect it’ll be more of the same for another hour and a half.  Weide’s too simply admiring treatment of Woody Allen ends up doing the latter a disservice – by giving the false impression that there’s nothing more to be said about him.

7 June 2012