Woody by David Evanier

Author:David Evanier
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781466847620
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

But then there’s the issue of the lamp in the bedroom:

EVE: (glancing at a lamp sitting on a cabinet in the dining area) You didn’t like that in the bedroom?

MIKE: (looking at the lamp) I knew you were gonna say something. I get better use out of it here.

EVE: (walking over to the lamp) Well, if you utilized it in here, that’s fine. It’s meant to be used. It’s just that it’s part of what we were trying to do in the bedroom. (pointing at the lampshade) It’s the shade and the bedspread. They set each off so nicely, I thought.

I have struggled to give some idea of the film’s plot, since I did not care about anyone in it and would have given anything to stop watching it. There are lots of reflections of winter trees on misty windows, gray waves on the beach. It’s all Bergman without Bergman’s touch—and more important without Allen’s touch. How could he be capable of making this?

Three days before filming began, Guy Flatley of the New York Times asked Allen if the film would be “bathed in Bergmanesque misery.” Allen denied it, but did say, “Right now, I’m faced with the pitfalls of half-baked ideas and derivative techniques. I’m feeling my way.”

A private preview screening was held in December 1978. The New York Post reported: “The ever-so-chic private screening audience sat in stunned silence.” The film did not open until August of that year. Louise Lasser complained to Allen that the film was about her family and her mother’s suicide. Actually, if it had been, it might have been a better film. The family in Interiors was a family that Allen knew nothing about.

“Interiors has that dour severity of his other early Bergmanesque films,” Phillip Lopate told me. “It feels too derivative and doesn’t feel like he really knows these people. You just feel Allen’s ambition to be Chekhovian. But his weaknesses as a playwright start to harm that. But there’s this ‘Once-over-lightly’ quality to Woody Allen. A lot of times when I see an Allen film I think, this would have been a good movie with one more draft. This is funny to say, but his lack of a sense of humor harms Interiors as well as September and Another Woman. It’s almost as though Allen’s polarized. He’s either doing humor or he’s doing nonhumor.

“Ingmar Bergman always had a kind of quality of irony,” Lopate continued. “The kind of sardonic quality to the way that people go at each other. Their zest in taking each other to pieces. Woody Allen has done some remarkable work. But that Woody Allen can’t do. Because Woody Allen is still an arriviste in that WASP world. And there’s a part of him that wants to have decorum. So every time he tries to show people who are in that kind of bourgeois WASP world, he shows their repressiveness but he doesn’t know how to show what Bergman shows when they really take the gloves off. He stiffens.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.