Woody, p.29
Woody, page 29
Some initial reviewers were ecstatic: Vincent Canby wrote in the New York Times that Manhattan was “extraordinarily fine and funny.” He continued, “As Isaac Davis is Mr. Allen’s most fully realized, most achingly besieged male character, so is Manhattan his most moving and expansive work to date.” He praised the “marvelous scene set at a soda fountain” when Isaac breaks up with Tracy and wrote, “The movie is full of moments that are uproariously funny and others that are sometimes shattering for the degree in which they evoke civilized desolation.…” He concluded, “Mr. Allen’s progress as one of our major filmmakers is proceeding so rapidly that we who watch him have to pause occasionally to catch our breath.”
Robert Hatch in The Nation had both praise and reservations; Allen was still, he wrote, “the quintessential New Yorker, exhausting his days and nights in a treasure hunt for the meaning of life, which he believes must surely be hidden somewhere east of Fifth Avenue.… There is a good deal of honest concern in Allen’s wrestling with the Angel, not to mention that he is a man of uncommon charm and wit … [but] all in all, I doubt that Allen can get much further by plucking obsessively at his own bosom.” As for Woody, he was characteristically self-critical with a dash of melancholia. He told William Geist of Rolling Stone in 1987 that he didn’t have “any extra regard” for either Annie Hall or Manhattan.
Manhattan was the deeper portrait that Allen began in Annie Hall and a long way from the cartoonish characters he once drew. It’s a leap from Interiors so astonishing that it seems to have been written by a different person. Allen can both see himself more clearly and has the confidence and objectivity to look beyond himself at the people around him, most notably Tracy, as well as Mary and Yale. And he grows: He is a different person at the end of the film than he was at the beginning.
In Phillip Lopate’s view, “As in Annie Hall, once again I felt that the pain of the human situation was being muffled and aestheticized more than I felt comfortable with. And the whole unpleasantness of this older man hitting on this high school girl is finessed. I think that on the one hand he’s brave to deal with these taboo things, and on the other hand, he almost always seems to sweep them under the rug.
“What was really at stake?” Lopate continued. “What did the Woody Allen character really want? Allen is often protective of the Woody character and makes him the only one who can deliver aphorisms, who has a shred of self-insight, while the other characters tend to dither on. In other words, he certainly protects his own character. Diane Keaton’s character is full of clichés and platitudes. So that didn’t seem fair. It was not an even playing field. Both Annie and Manhattan had the trappings of the art film, but they were pandering to the audience, playing to the audience’s prejudices.”
What is unquestionable is that, unlike the WASP world of Interiors, Allen knows the smug, insular upper-middle-class intellectual subculture that nestled around Elaine’s very well. He catches the inane patter around him perfectly. Manhattan reaches the level of Renoir’s Rules of the Game as a high-comedy work.
There still remains the problem (pinpointed by Pauline Kael) of Isaac’s judgmental insistence in voiceovers that “he saw New York as a metaphor for the decay of contemporary culture.” What exactly does that mean? How does this intellectual babble differ from the pretentious proclamations he satirizes in Mary and so many others? Allen expressed more of it in interviews, saying that the context for the film was a society “desensitized by television, drugs, fast-food chains, loud music and feelingless, mechanical sex.” Isaac also speaks into his tape recorder a common plaint of Allen’s (and a more grounded one) that “people are constantly creating these unnecessary neurotic problems for themselves because it keeps them from dealing with the terrible, unsolvable problems of the universe.”
Allen took on the role of intellectual scold when he told an impressed Natalie Gittelson that “until we find a resolution for our terrors, we’re going to have an expedient culture.” She was so taken with this exhortation that she (or her editors at the Times Magazine) used it as an outtake caption at the top of the article. In addition, the magazine asked, could this be possible: “Is this Woody Allen speaking? Yes, the new Woody Allen … an uncommonly serious artist at work.” Actually Allen shows what he is talking about much more clearly in his art, when in the film both Mary and Yale are all too eager to shed whatever integrity they think they possess for expediency: Mary, working on a novelization for a movie; Yale, prizing that Porsche above his book and his magazine.
“A Comic Genius: Woody Allen Comes of Age.” Allen’s picture was on the cover of Time with that headline on April 30, 1979. It was written by one of Allen’s most astute critics, Richard Schickel. He said that Manhattan was “tightly constructed, clearly focused intellectually … a prismatic portrait of a time and place that may be studied decades hence to see what kind of people we were.”
“We have to go at it the hard way,” Allen told Schickel, “and come to terms with the fact that the universe seems to contain only the grimmest possibilities. We have to develop structures of our own that encourage us to believe that it genuinely pays to make the moral choice just from the pragmatic point of view.”
The late Charles Joffe told Schickel that Allen could be “extremely arrogant and extremely hostile. He has to be goddamn comfortable with you before he’ll show it, and it’s not really related to his ego. It’s related to the demands he makes on himself.”
In one of the best character portraits of Allen ever drawn, Schickel wrote: “Everything is submerged into his work, at which he labors compulsively, since it is the vehicle through which he exercises his self-determined imperative to keep growing intellectually and spiritually.”
Allen was forty-three years old.
7. The Woman Who Saves Leonard Zelig
BEGINNING IN 1980 and continuing to 1994, Allen made a series of mostly great and remarkable films—one a year, year in and year out. After the problematic Stardust Memories, in which he seemed to flay both his fans and his enemies alike, and the radiant A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy, the masterpieces and near-masterpieces practically cascaded over themselves: Zelig, Broadway Danny Rose, The Purple Rose of Cairo, Hannah and Her Sisters, Radio Days, Oedipus Wrecks, Crimes and Misdemeanors, Alice, Husbands and Wives, and Bullets over Broadway. Soon he would have yet a third wave: Mighty Aphrodite, Everyone Says I Love You, Deconstructing Harry, Anything Else, Match Point, Cassandra’s Dream, Vicky Cristina Barcelona, You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, Midnight in Paris, and Blue Jasmine.
These films, Richard Schickel wrote, “constitute one of the great runs of movies ever made by any director in a relatively short span of time.” There were also three disasters: September, Another Woman, and Shadows and Fog, although Schickel didn’t think so, and Manhattan Murder Mystery, the kind of film Woody might describe as one of his “baubles.” Woody wouldn’t be Woody without some fumbling attempts at higher meaning. As long as he stayed centered, as long as he stuck to what he knew or could conjure up out of his own experience and imagination, he was terrific. And many great films would come still later—and there isn’t the slightest indication that they will end soon.
First in line was Stardust Memories, a flawed film, but one that proved to be a watershed for Allen: It was the first time that he openly expressed ambivalence about fame and celebrity, and especially about his fans, for whom he seemed to have contempt. The film’s protagonist and point of view feel so close to the real Allen that his denials were not very convincing. (There had been actual retrospective cinema weekends like the one depicted in the film, conducted by film critic Judith Crist, honoring Allen.)
Stardust Memories begins on a crowded train car and seems to depict a dream. Allen is seated with a group of very sad, ugly, desolate-looking people. He peers out the window and sees a train on a parallel track. It is filled with glamorous, beautiful women and couples, drinking and carousing. One of them, the young Sharon Stone, blows him a teasing kiss. Bates springs up and desperately tries to open the door so he can cross over to the other side, but the door is firmly locked. He is stuck with the uglies. When the train finally reaches its destination, the protagonist, Sandy Bates, finds himself in a garbage dump, the final destination for the people in both cars. There are Holocaust echoes here, but the scene more specifically evokes thoughts of Allen’s comments about life itself being a Holocaust—a point of view that I have never understood.
Bates, a famous comic filmmaker, is trying to leave his comic films behind and strive for something more serious, but his fans constantly tell him they loved his films the way they were, “especially the early funny ones.”
He is attracted to three women, two of whom are borderline mental cases: the skeletal Dorrie and the bisexual, manic-depressive Daisy—the kind of women Allen has always asserted he is drawn to—and the more grounded Isabel, who has two children and about whom Bates cannot make up his mind. Allen has insisted that the film is about Bates going through a breakdown. And that it is really partly a series of Bates’s dreams, anxieties, and fantasies, partly scenes from the new movie he is unveiling at the hotel, and partly realistic moments that occur during that weekend at the Stardust. It is difficult to know which of these elements various scenes represent. Allen has said that the film might have been more successful if he had not appeared in it, since his fans confused the character of Bates with the real Allen.
Its atmosphere of brittle bitterness and sour dislike of Bates’s fans hurts the film. It feels misanthropic. Bates does not encounter a single person among the throngs of fans for whom he feels any liking or respect. They are always loathsome, stupid, envious, self-seeking grotesques. They want to use him for charitable or social causes; they want to feed off him and somehow profit from his success. The fans are damned if they praise him or if they criticize him. They are stupid either way. Bates does not see himself in the glorified way his fans see him at all. He doesn’t share their worship. Sometimes the atmosphere is leavened by a light, perceptive touch: the young woman who turns up in his bed with a Woody/Bates T-shirt. Bates asks her if her husband knows what she’s doing, and she replies that he’s sleeping in the van downstairs, and he would be honored if Bates would fuck her. Bates lectures her about the emptiness of anonymous sex. She replies, “Listen, empty sex is better than no sex, right?” and flicks off the bedside light. The scene rings true about the nature of fandom. On the other hand, did this actually happen to Allen? Probably more than once.
Another nice note is the arrival of aliens from outer space who also badger him about no longer making funny movies. The film does have these highlights, including the childhood friend who turns up, filled with self-defeat and jealousy of Bates. Bates tries to console him by telling him that life is all a matter of luck and chance; that if Bates had been born in Poland during the war, he would have ended up as a lampshade. But this is precisely the Allen philosophy of life. It reinforces our awareness that Bates represents Allen, despite his denials.
Another clever scene illustrates one of Allen’s often-expressed dilemmas with women. Two women lie unconscious on operating-room tables. Sandy, dressed as a doctor, says he’s never been able to find the perfect woman. He touches the head of one of the women, Doris, who has a great personality and is a wonderful woman, but doesn’t turn him on. He touches Rita, the other woman and tells us she’s nasty, an animal, “trouble. And I love going to bed with her.” After sex, he says, he always wishes he were with Doris. He decides the answer is to put Doris’s brain in Rita’s body. He performs the operation and switches their personalities. “I took all the badness and put it over there,” he says. “And I made Rita into a warm, wonderful, charming, sexy, sweet, giving, mature woman.” And then, he says, “I fell in love with Doris.” Again, this is the same Allen we know from scores of his accounts of his experiences with women. A scene that seems prescient is of Bates’s fantasy of being murdered by an adoring fan who first tells him that he loves him. Ten weeks after the film’s release, John Lennon would be murdered by a fan in front of the Dakota.
Allen would later tackle the subject of celebrity more successfully in Zelig and Celebrity, a film that successfully combines elements of comedy and humor with pathos, and in which his character is portrayed by Kenneth Branagh. But Allen’s presence is not the stumbling block in Stardust Memories, nor is it burdened by its obvious debt to Fellini’s 8½. Allen has often managed to pay homage to films he has admired without imitating them. The real problem in the film is the deep ambivalence of the filmmaker, an almost unguarded expression of sour contempt that lingers long after the film is over. “One critic said my audience’s left me,” Allen told Sean Mitchell of the Los Angeles Times in 1992, “but the truth is I left my audience. The backlash really started when I did Stardust Memories. I still think that’s one of the best films I ever made. I was just trying to make what I wanted, not what people wanted me to make.”
Pauline Kael would have none of it. “Woody Allen calls himself Sandy Bates this time,” she wrote. “But there’s only the merest wisp of a pretext that he is playing a character; this is the most undisguised of his dodgy mock-autobiographical fantasies.… Allen degrades the people who respond to his work and presents himself as their victim. He seems to feel that they want him to heal them; the film suggests a Miss Lonelyhearts written without irony.…
He’s trying to stake out his claim to be an artist like Fellini or Bergman—to be accepted in the serious, gentile artists’ club. And he sees his public as Jews trying to shove him back down in the Jewish clowns’ club. Great artists’ admirers are supposed to keep their distance. His admirers feel they know him and can approach him; they feel he belongs to them—and he sees them as his murderers.… If Woody Allen finds success very upsetting and wishes the public would go away, this picture should help him stop worrying.
John Simon was equally tough: “Almost everything we are told or shown about Sandy Bates is true of Woody Allen, yet with enough deviations from strict autobiography to allow Allen to declare it presumptuous to equate him with his protagonist.… [The fans] are all such super-Fellinian grotesques and behave like stampeding pigs … the kinds of loathsome pests that do not leave you a private minute … when Bates-Allen mentions ‘Art and masturbation—two areas in which I am an expert,’ I say there is no doubt about it—he just has difficulty figuring out which is which.”
Kael and Simon could not have foreseen that Allen’s finest achievements—another lifetime’s worth—lay ahead of him.
* * *
Allen’s relationship with United Artists dissolved after the financial failure of Stardust Memories, and he began to look elsewhere for financing. Steven Bach was eager to keep him, but with Arthur Krim’s departure for Orion Pictures, there was little doubt that Allen would join Orion. Allen would have left UA in 1978 when Krim formed Orion, but he was always true to his word and honored the original contract.
Steven Bach met with him at the Russian Tea Room and tried to persuade him to stay with UA. Allen told him, “You’ve been wonderful … everyone’s been wonderful.” He continued, “But it’s not about business, exactly.”
“It’s about loyalty,” Bach said: It was about Krim.
Allen nodded. “It’s not possible sometimes not to disappoint somebody. I don’t want to disappoint anybody.”
Several weeks followed. During that time Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate, which would prove to be one of the greatest financial film disasters of all time, opened to reviews so terrible that UA’s very survival came into question. (The film did, in fact, soon sink the studio.) Allen could not have been unaware of what had occurred, but there was no question that he would not have gone with UA in any case. He would not betray Krim. He called Bach with his regrets.
In December 1980 a contract was drawn up with Orion. Allen signed to make three films over the next five years, and to star in at least two of them. The new contract gave Allen 15 percent of a film’s gross receipts, which he would share with his producer, Robert Greenhut, and Rollins and Joffe, instead of first waiting until the studio had recouped its costs.
It was during this period that Allen first met Mia Farrow in 1979 at Elaine’s. Michael Caine and his wife had taken Mia to dinner there—she was appearing on Broadway in a play by Bernard Slade called Romantic Comedy—and spotted Allen at another table. When Mia expressed interest in him, the Caines urged her to send him a note. He quickly came over to meet her, and invited her to his New Year’s Eve party. Allen and Farrow didn’t actually get together until April 1980, when he invited her to dinner at Lutèce. By this time, the still-angelic-looking Farrow had two marriages with famous older men—Frank Sinatra and André Previn—behind her. She also had left in the wake of her second marriage a devastated ex-wife who was hospitalized for a breakdown.
* * *
Maria de Lourdes Villiers Farrow, born in Beverly Hills on February 9, 1945, was the fourth child and first daughter of the actress Maureen O’Sullivan and the director-writer John Farrow. She was show-business royalty; the gossip columnist Louella Parsons was her godmother and the director George Cukor her godfather. She contracted polio at nine and spent three weeks in an isolation unit in Los Angeles. Her brother Michael died in a plane crash at thirteen. When she was seventeen, her father died of a heart attack.
She had been involved with older male celebrities her entire life, beginning with Kirk Douglas and Yul Brynner. She had a platonic relationship with Salvador Dalí; they ate butterflies in the Terrace Room of the St. Regis Hotel in Manhattan. The writer Michael Thornton told Sarah Rainey of the London Daily Telegraph that Mia was “very intelligent, tremendously attractive and underrated. She was neither one sex nor the other. She was androgynous. She looked like a denizen of another planet. And she was very young—not mentally, but to look at.”
