Woodyworld

I've been watching a lot of Woody Allen films lately -- mostly his dramas, several of which (September, Another Woman, and Interiors) are currently available on Netflix streaming video.  I recently saw his latest, You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, in the theater, and felt it deserved more credit than most of the critics have been giving it.  If Allen's bleak nihilism -- increasingly unleavened by his own presence, with his comforting stand-up-comedy one-liners -- is sometimes wearying, it's still hard not to admire the crisp precision with which he lays out his characters, assigns personality traits and motivations to them that exemplify carefully-delineated themes, and weaves them together in plots whose complexity is belied by the tossed-off simplicity of the directing style.  Even this latter is often not as tossed-off as you think -- a couple of key dramatic sequences in Tall Dark Stranger are shot in elaborately blocked, meticulously rehearsed long takes that seem to channel the theatrical spirit of Jean Renoir without an ounce of self-consciousness.  Watching Stranger, I felt myself in the presence of an old master who may not be trying too hard but whose craft is so baked into his bones by now that he doesn't need to try too hard to produce something that entertains, stimulates thought, and occasionally even enlightens.  Is that not something to value?  Someday Woody will be gone, and we will all talk about how perhaps we ought to have appreciated him more while he was still here, cranking out films at a feverish pace as though trying to outrun the grim spectres he always evokes in his work.

Allen now shoots his films in Europe and doesn't star in them, but his most familiar and characteristic style comes from his evocation of New York City and the way he uses his own persona to undercut the Bergmanesque heaviness of his themes.  He first hit upon this strategy (well, minus the New York part, anyway) in 1975's Love and Death, where the contrast was particularly acute, placing his bespectacled, nervous, irrefutably modern self against the backdrop of a Tolstoy epic.  Later films adopt a more realistic style, but the basic juxtaposition remains: Allen's characters are always talking about alienation and angst, the ultimate meaninglessness of it all, the pitiless horror of an indifferent universe (his themes and preoccupations are startlingly consistent over a 35-year period), yet they are usually having these conversations in elegant Manhattan bistros or well-heeled cocktail parties among pleasant, nicely-dressed, educated, deeply bourgeois friends and family.  And every time Allen brings up the Dark Truths of Reality, he immediately undercuts himself with a Groucho-style one-liner as if to say, "it's okay, you can laugh, everything's normal, we're all modern neurotics who live in a world of television and automobiles and psychiatrists and squash games and taxi drivers." 

The formula's uniquely suited for a sort of self-congratulatory comedy in which the audience is included in the joke -- by name-dropping Kierkegaard and then tossing in a throwaway Borscht-Belt one-liner, Allen lets us feel erudite while still being entertained.  He lets us glimpse the terror of the cosmos and then quickly retreat to the pleasure of a good meal in a cozy Upper East Side eatery.  And if the philosophy underlining his work is something any undergraduate had already explored in a few drunken dorm-room chats by the age of 20, one of the intriguing things about Allen's films is that even undergraduate despair can be hard to refute.  Now in his mid-70s, Allen at any rate doesn't seem to have moved beyond it -- he in fact embraces it more nakedly than ever.  Life is random; there is no moral structure underlying the universe; most successes are attributable to luck rather than to talent or persistence.  It's all so very adolescent, but I'm not sure it's inaccurate; and if Allen once alloyed it with that bourgeois coziness and Groucho humor, he now uses a different approach -- relying on a quiet, affectless narrative voice, a limpid clarity of perspective, to strip his stories of any unseemly melodramatic gestures.

Allen and Meryl Streep

But it's Allen's films between the late 1970s and early 1990s that I keep coming back to -- roughly, the stretch between Annie Hall and Husbands and Wives.  Middle Allen, if you like; although by that yardstick he has been in Late Allen for so long that we may need to make a new category, Later Allen or Post-Late Allen or somesuch.  As with many prolific artists possessing a distinctive voice and style -- Dickens, for instance -- Allen's films tend to combine and congeal in the mind, so that it's difficult to remember where one ends and another begins -- a sort of uber-text combining a hundred smart-aleck characters, a hundred long-shot walks down Lexington Avenue with some jazz track playing in the background, a hundred apartment interiors with tasteful, slightly cluttered, professorial decor, and packed bookshelves casually panned over by a restless camera.  I like to inhabit Woody World because it seems a permanent, comforting, persistent place, a haven for a certain type of elevated middlebrow who is educated enough for cocktail-party chat about philosophy and art and all that, but who is still predominantly concerned with the basic business of life, of money, of love and sex.  And it's comforting that he writes about characters in their 40s and beyond, who still pursue giddy romantic flings, still wonder what they're going to do with their lives, still seem not to have arrived at anything like a final point of repose or completion.  That comforted me even as a teenager because it was as if Allen was saying I had decades of adventure before me; now that I'm close to 40 myself, I cling to that comfort all the more.  One of the alluring paradoxes of Allen's work is that on the surface he seems persistently preoccupied with death, but his characters are so defiantly, urgently alive, grasping, greedily pursuing their own fulfillment, whatever their age, that the specter of death never seems very near or very material.

I've included a few frames from Manhattan (1979), probably Allen's most visually dazzling film, thanks to the superb black-and-white cinematography of Gordon Willis.

Allen and Mariel Hemingway

 

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