Spoiler alert: proceed with caution.
A Woody Allen picture usually feels less like a finished movie and more like an idea for one. This isn't always a bad thing, if the idea has the right kind of hook shape. The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985), Bullets Over Broadway (1994), and Sweet and Lowdown (1999), for example, are developed from tricky-but-uncomplicated sketch-comedy premises, which keeps Allen's talent in its most felicitous range while allowing his overqualified actors—Mia Farrow, Jeff Daniels, Dianne Wiest, Jennifer Tilly, Chazz Palminteri, Tracey Ullman, Jim Broadbent, Sean Penn, Samantha Morton—to bring subtextual nuance or bold comic elaboration to their roles. These movies are more risk-takingly imaginative than even the best of the old-Hollywood contenders in the broad category of backward-gazing entertainment, e.g., Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942), Meet Me in St. Louis (1944), Funny Girl (1968), and less cloying than even the Debbie-Reynolds-infested Singin' in the Rain (1952). (The only movie in the category that they fall short of is Pennies From Heaven (1981), Herbert Ross's Americanized adaptation of Dennis Potter's 1978 BBC miniseries.) In these movies Allen's creatures skitter across impeccably reupholstered fantasies of the past, and his work falls in the great American comic-movie tradition of writers and directors who keep the characters within vividly legible outlines so that the players' talents appear even more concentrated.
In his more ambitious phase post-Annie Hall, many people have come to prefer Allen's movies when he doesn't appear in them. The underlying intuition is that he needs to get over himself, though not in the way he thinks, by confronting the bleaker aspects of life and tippy-toeing to reach a supposedly higher plane of discourse. In Zelig (1983), for example, Allen starts from a great comic premise, a title character who takes on the characteristics of whomever he's around—mostly the physical characteristics (brown skin, Native American features, obese girth), but also mental characteristics. Next to a Frenchman he speaks French; talking to Eudora Fletcher (Mia Farrow), the hospital psychiatrist intent on getting to the root of his strange disability, Zelig speaks as if he were the doctor.
Zelig becomes a pop celebrity in the 1920s and '30s and Allen's cinematographer, designers, and special effects crew miraculously insert him into archival newsreels and fake the rest of the movie to look like old footage, while the audio snippets of Zelig talking to Dr. Fletcher crackle with the flaws of the recordings of the era. It's a feat of trompe-l'oeil, and of trompe-l'oreille, too. Allen's technique in Zelig is like Guy Maddin's replication of bygone styles of moviemaking, including their technical limitations, without, however, Maddin's genius for infusing those styles and technologies with his openly excessive love for them. Maddin's infatuation with the pop of the past festers into madcap, morbid, obsessional-confessional camp (see my review of The Saddest Music in the World (2003), although Cowards Bend the Knee (2003) may be even farther gone); Allen's work in Zelig is "faithful," more tastefully, and conventionally, fond. The most radical aspect of Zelig is that it's entirely narrated rather than dramatized, and presented as a documentary.
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Article comments
1 - Ruvy in Jerusalem
ENOUGH ALREADY!! Who would have thought that a poor putz who wrote comedy sketches for Sid Caesar a half century ago and did stand-up comedy in the Village FOUR decades ago would get reviews SOOO long? Did Allen die? Were you writing a eulogy, maybe?
Honey! Get me the Tylenol! PLEASE!
2 - Alan Dale
Presumably if Allen had died he'd have stopped making and releasing movies, though you can never be sure.
3 - Andy Marsh
the planet would be a better place if this child molestor had died!
4 - Penny Woods
What's wrong with the long review? I thought it did justice to how bad Match Point was.
5 - Alan Dale
Thanks, Penny, for the back-up. In fact, the review covers four WA movies, so its length is that much more justifiable. (The fact that WA has been working for half a century, as Ruvy points out, is only more reason a review of his work would be longer--there's more work to talk about.)
The question of length comes up for me on Blogcritics periodically, so let me lay out my defenses of the in-depth reviews I post here:
1) some people actually like the fuller discussion possible only by writing more;
2) while the average reader may want no more than short-form consumer advice about what to see this weekend (i.e., thumbs-up/thumbs-down), I'm not writing for the average reader;
3) there's no particular reason any individual reader's attention span should set a limit on the length of movie criticism--i.e., you can stop reading at will, it's a review not homework;
4) this isn't a market so readers can't bring economic pressure to bear on me and thus don't have the complaining rights that a paying readership would; and
5) there's not limited space on Blogcritics as opposed to a print or online magazine, so I'm not squeezing anyone else by writing longer pieces.
6 - Rodney Welch
On the other hand, the enormous length of a review may indicate that the writer is simply long-winded, has no particular talent for persuasion, cogency or boiling an argument or point of view down to its essence, or has simply never heeded the advice "If you can say it in fewer words, you probably should."
7 - Alan Dale
This comment addresses personality rather than principles--it's inherently subjective. "Long-winded" doesn't decide anything; it's just another way of saying you personally think the review sucks. As for heeding advice, what's the difference between "talent for persuasion" and "cogency" (Chambers dictionary defines the latter as "convincing power")?
8 - Ruvy in Jerusalem
Alan, this is going to sound terribly selfish and self-centered.
Allen Koenigsberg is the most famous graduate of Midwood High School (so far, anyway), and a fellow alumnus. I can't admire how this man has lived his life. I'd LIKE to admire his art. But you have tken a long time to say it isn't worth admiring.
Your article may be cogent and display immense talent for persuasion, even if it is a TAD long. But I'm disappointed. Not davka, with you, but with yet another possible hero with feet of clay...
9 - Alan Dale
Hey Ruvy,
I'm not judging WA the man--with the possible exception of his making a second movie about killing an ex-girlfriend, in which the man inevitably crosses the boundary from life into art. And I am not at all saying that his art is worthless. Apparently the review was long enough that the first paragraph hasn't lingered in your mind! In the '70s WA was a hero of mine, my family's, and friends', entirely for aesthetic reasons--we loved his early comedies, we read his books out loud on car trips, and, as I hoped to make clear, I think that The Purple Rose of Cairo, Bullets Over Broadway, and Sweet and Lowdown are classics. By his own admisson he's not an intellectual or a great director. Unfortunately his ambitions lie in areas that require more talent of a certain sort than he's blessed with. That still leaves him with an impressive legacy. (If you rewatched his movies in reverse order you'd probably feel better about his career.) So take heart--one foot of clay, at most. Maybe only four toes.
Thanks for writing.
10 - V
I can't help but be reminded Woody's commentary on that idiot's pretentious rambling in Annie Hall...
"You know nothing of my work...how you got to teach a class in anything is beyond me!!"