Husbands and Wives (January 2012)

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Judy Davis, Mia Farrow, Woody Allen

This is a Jaglom-style film from Woody Allen:  lots of talking by highly-educated New Yorkers about how difficult it is to be married and retain your own identity.  It is shot in a quasi-documentary style, with characters at times speaking direct to camera in response to questions from an off-screen inquisitor.  There is a lot of jerky, hand-held footage – so stylistically it is somewhere between a 60s documentary in cinema-vérité mode and a quasi-Bergman meditation.  But it is very talky and does not actually cut very deep.  It is difficult to feel much interest in any of the characters in the film – all of them so busy making excuses for how miserable they feel.

It was released in 1992, which was probably just before Woody Allen and Mia Farrow split up.  It is quite queasy watching them play a bickering married couple in this film.  Farrow plays an insecure but passive-aggressive woman who wants another child – strikingly similar to the persona that emerged from the publicity around their real-life break-up.  More disconcertingly still, we see Allen flirting with a 21 year old student – although he does back away at the end from any kind of sexual involvement.

The dialogue is copious and there are plenty of stuck-on references to Strindberg, Ibsen and Mahler, but it does not really convince.  There is no real bite or wit but plenty of mildly amusing wisecracks.  There is never a real sense of drama or tragedy.  These people will just go on talking and talking while their lives continue to drift.

Judy Davis plays perhaps the strongest character in the film.  She never manages to say the right thing, almost as if she is afraid of giving in to her passions of the moment.  Something is holding her back all the time.  She can go so far with Liam Neeson but no further.  Lysette Anthony as the new-age bimbo is perhaps a caricature but she is genuinely ridiculous in the ardour of her stupid but very firmly-held convictions.  She is the only light point in a troubled, confused film.

Bullets Over Broadway (January 2012)

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Damon Runyon, Dianne Wiest, Woody Allen

Every so often, Woody Allen makes a period film. Bullets over Broadway is set in new York in the 1920s – in the worlds of gangsters and glamorous Broadway stars. Woody Allen does not actually appear in the film but it is clear that the role of David Shayne – the would-be playwright – was written with him in mind. He is full of the verbal complaining, the tics, the obsession with being artistic of the standard Woody Allen character, with the exception that he is not Jewish. John Cusack does a reasonable job in the circumstances but you wonder why the writers – Woody Allen and Douglas McGrath – did not set him a different, more rewarding challenge. He could only ever be Woody Allen-lite.

It is a common enough storyline – a mobster puts his bimbo girlfriend into a high-brow play – but given a twist that not even Damon Runyon played. Cheech, the hood assigned to look after her, turns out to have greater dramatic flair than the playwright and actually manages to save the play. In a brutal irony, he is so upset about the bimbo’s inability to play the part that he even rubs her out. It is a Runyonesque storyline but, sadly, it lacks the sting in the tail of all real Runyon stories. Jennifer Tilly, as Olive Neal the bimbo, plays her part in the time-honoured way: a mix of Jean Hagen in Singin’ in the Rain and Judy Holliday in Born Yesterday. At one point, we even catch her playing patience – surely an echo of the latter film.

The texture of the film is filled out with various side-plots. The discussions amongst Shayne’s bohemian friends about how the “artist” makes his own morality, and about how they only write or paint in order to have the pleasure of not achieving success etc, would probably have expanded if Woody Allen had appeared in the film. Apart from the bimbo, the main female role is played by Dianne Wiest: a legendary Broadway grande dame, maybe modelled on someone like Laurette Taylor or Tallulah Bankhead, whose career is on the slide and who drinks too much. Her part is, sadly, underwritten. It never really develops beyond an alcoholic egomaniac who seduces the writer in order to get him to alter her part favourably. Admittedly, Dianne Wiest plays it well: from her earlier Allen films, it would be hard to conceive that she had sufficient hauteur to play this role.

What you do notice though is the crudeness of the wit. In the scene where Wiest sets out to seduce Shayne, she orders two martinis. He thinks one is for him but, in fact, they are both for herself. The leading man in the play is played by Jim Broadbent. The way we see him compulsively eating food, storing chicken legs in his coat pockets, stealing dog treats etc, is way overdone. The first time we see Tracey Ullman as the soubrette, she cracks jokes about breast-feeding her chihuahua. It seems as if she is modelled on a scatty English comedienne such as Beatrice Lillie but this is a style of humour that grates in this context.

The music also grated. It seems as if we might have to blame Dick Hyman for playing Bix’s account of “Singin’ the Blues” under Dianne Wiest’s seduction scene – a truly crass choice because no one can compete for attention against Bix. They re-used exactly the same recording of “Let’s Misbehave” that opened Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Sex But Were Afraid To Ask. But the real pity is that the writers did nothing with the dramatic situation. Having killed Olive, Cheech must know that his boss will exact vengeance – even if he does not actually suspect Cheech, he will regard him as culpably negligent. But they did nothing with this. They preferred to go out in an anodyne way by having Shayne admit he is not a real artist and decide to return to Pittsburgh with his girlfriend. There is even a rather stupid scene where he harangues Cheech for being a monster by rubbing out Olive. It is a classic example of a scene that was written for Allen the performer.

Chazz Palminteri is easily the most solid performance in the film. It is a shame that the writers did not use him better. They could have tried for pathos but took the easy way out. So it is not a film that is either massively amusing or which plays with your emotions. It is a bit of a mis-fire.

Broadway Danny Rose (January 2012)

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Mia Farrow, Woody Allen

Maybe the early 1980s were the most creative part of Woody Allen’s film career.  In Zelig, Radio Days, Purple Rose of Cairo, he did things with film that he had not done before; and would seldom do again.  He moved away from the parodies that lay behind Sleeper, Play it Again, Sam, or Love and Death.  They are not pastiche Fellini or Bergman films like Stardust Memories, Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy etc.  They are free from the egocentricity, the desire to present the director/star as a savvy Manhattanite that appears in Annie Hall, Manhattan, Hannah, Crimes….

Amongst this group of assorted, eclectic films, Broadway Danny Rose stands out as the most eccentric.  It is completely sui generis in his career, not least for the fact that it establishes its own filmic universe, not one borrowed from Fellini, Bergman, classic photos of New York, other films.  A shot of Mia Farrow looking at herself in a mirror might be an echo of Persona, but it is not used in the same way.  It is a look, a style that he never used again, sadly.  It verges on the Chaplinesque and, when this film came out, I did think and hope that he would pursue this route.  But he did not.  The other influences sketched above came back into play, plus an increasing reliance on talkiness that recalls the films of, say, Henry Jaglom.

Broadway Danny Rose is closer to the Chaplin of The New Janitor or The Bank than to any other Woody Allen film.  The character he plays is a charming hustler on the fringes of show business, responsible for the careers of a bunch of bizarre no-hopers.  He puts everything he has into these acts but, if they achieve any measure of success, they leave him.  The basic scenario instantly sets it apart from the normal Woody Allen film.  It is not about him.  He is an ever-optimistic, chirpy failure: a Chaplinesque figure rather than the usual Allen hero.  And then, at the end, when Tina seeks him out to apologise for scheming with Lou Canova to get him on the books of another agent, there is a scene worthy to be compared with the recognition scene in City Lights – a parallel that I do not think any critic pointed out at the time.  There is real pathos here, a depth and intensity of emotion rare in Allen’s films.

It is told and shot in a very unusual way.  A group of comedians meet in a deli and swap stories until, finally, one of them tells his favourite Danny Rose story.  The film is mediated through this narrator – a device that emphasises both how low in the economic pecking order Danny Rose and his acts were, but also the esteem and affection in which these people hold him.  The look of the film is also unusual.  This is not the glossy black and white of film noir.  It is not the stylish art deco black and white of musicals.  This is the grimy, dingy black and white of 50s television and newsreels.  The deli is a deli, not some glamourised, gleaming restaurant.  Danny’s apartment has paint peeling from the walls.  It has a texture of authenticity.  The sequences set in resort hotels remind you of old TV variety/cabaret programmes – “live from the Coconut Grove” etc.

The film plays with the screen persona of Mia Farrow.  Her elfin features are obscured behind large sun-glasses for most of the film.  She is pushy and mouthy in a way she never was in her earlier films.  It reinvented her screen career, showing that she could be more than just a teenage victim or a bit of decorative fluff.

Two further sequences deserve mention.  When they visit Danny’s apartment to collect his things, he learns of Tina’s desire to go into interior design.  His supportive, building instincts immediately click into action.  The scene rounds out his character – he really does like to help people to realise their potential.  The other scene involves Barney Dunn, a hopeless ventriloquist.  To escape from the mobsters, Danny gives them Barney’s name, in the belief that he would be out of town or in Puerto Rico.  But he is not.  They find him and beat him savagely.  Danny visits him in hospital and promises to help.  A low-key scene, full of pathos:  Chaplinesque.