The Reluctant Film Art of Woody Allen by Peter J. Bailey

Author:Peter J. Bailey
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
Published: 2011-12-20T16:00:00+00:00

13

Let’s Just Live It

Woody Allen in the 1990s

HARRY: I’m no good at life.

RICHARD: But you write well.

HARRY: I write well, but that’s a different story because I can manipulate the characters.

RICHARD: You create your own universe, which is much nicer than the one we have, I think.

—Harry Block and Richard in Deconstructing Harry

Let Bullets Over Broadway exemplify the ambivalence of Woody Allen’s attitude toward art in the 1990s. The movie enacts David Shayne’s realization that his only hope of redemption from the corruptions to which artistic ambition is heir necessitates renouncing the theater and fleeing with Ellen to Pittsburgh to become a family man. However, the cinematic vehicle of that dramatic message embodies a contrary judgment. The contradiction is implicit in Julian Fox’s fine description of the cinematic art of Bullets Over Broadway: “The film is a visual feast, from its Times Square opening—actually a black-and-white cut from the period which was digitally colorized to match—to the art deco apartments and hallways, the artily-lit street scenes, speakeasies and news stands, vivid backstage milieu and darkly comic waterfront shoot-outs. It is a highly romanticized recreation of a vanished age, bathed in a deep red, sepia and yellow glow by cameraman Carlo Di Palma, designed and costumed to the nines, the soundtrack awash with the kind of insouciant golden standards which nostalgia buffs adore.”1

As Fox’s generously detailed summary attests, Bullets Over Broadway gives no impression of being a film made by a filmmaker bearing a grudge against his medium; it was Allen’s most expensive production to date, as lushly exacting in its evocation of 1920s Manhattan as Radio Days—Allen’s previous period piece bank breaker—was of New York in the middle 1940s.2 Bullets Over Broadway epitomizes Allen’s cinematic craft in its stability of framing, in the linear nature of its narrative and in its devotion to precise realistic depiction; the film’s formal symmetries and clarity of focus consistently contrast with the moral myopia of the characters’ beatification of art and glorifications of themselves as artists. The distinctive formal coherence of Allen’s work provides its own testimony in favor of artistic craftsmanship as part of the dialectic of those movies, then, even as the content of the film becomes increasingly skeptical about the promises and premises of an artistic vocation. Before proceeding to consider the two films—Husbands and Wives and Manhattan Murder Mystery—which deliberately violate Allen’s characteristic cinematic formal coherence (and which, consequently, were typically interpreted as reflecting the emotional turmoil of the Allen/Farrow dissolution), we will look at something of a synopsis of the complex issue of Allen’s ambivalent position toward artists and his own cinematic art going into the production of the watershed movie, Husbands and Wives.

Allen’s misgivings about art (and about similarly abstract or metaphoric conceptualizations of human experience) are expressed in his films not only through the unfolding of plots, but also through the presence of a number of characters whose primary trait is unrelenting skepticism and whose dramatic role it is to goad the movies’ more visionary protagonists—usually, but not exclusively played by Allen—into questioning the grounds of whatever idealism they possess.

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