Woody Allen (Allen Stewart Konigsberg), b. New York, 1935
1969: Take the Money and Run. 1971: Bananas. 1972: Even/thing You Always Wanted to Know About S«x But Were Afraid to Ask. 1973: Sleeper, 1975: Lace and Death 1977: Annie Hall. 1978: Interiors. 1979: Man-
hattan. 19&0: Stardust Memories. 1982: A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy. 1983: Zelig. 1984: Broadway Danny Rase. 1985: The Pur-pie Rose of Cairo. 1986: Hannah and Her Sisters. 1987: Radio Days; September. 1988: Another Woman, 1989: Crimes and Misdemeanors; “Oedipus Wrecks,” an episode from New York Stories. 1990: Alice. 1991: Shadows and Fog. 1992: Husbands and Wives. 1993; Manhattan Murder Mystery.
“Woody” is by now the most famous film director in America, a reluctant household name as his famed soul-searching took a banana-skin skid into public scandal. Can he maintain his way of working? Is there funding for films whose budgets have steadily risen, and whose audience has never been larse? Gan he be merely amusing when he has drawn so melodramatic a trail through the courts and the public prints? More important, can he develop as an artist? Has he ever shown that unmistakable promise?
I am skeptical. In his films he seems so averse to acting yet so skittish about real confession that he risks dealing in self-glorification by neurosis. As an actor he stills momentum and betrays his films’ reach for reality. Moreover, some of bis films are so small and inconsequential, so much a matter of habit, that they make his productivity seem artificial.
But his sense of movie theatre and narrative intricacy soared in the eighties (along with the budgets and the photographic quality), and there are two films that even this sour spectator adores—The Purple Rase of Cairo and Radio Days, In neither does Allen figure as an actor (he is the narrator of Radio Days). The first is a wonderfully clever, blithely light comedy about movies and dogged real life, while the latter is a new kind of film, a sort of imagined documentary montage, or a notebook of memories and scenes, utterly consistent m tone, a true portrait of a time. Yet Radio Days has not been a seed. Instead, it looks like a random brainwave in the night.
Can he break out of the claustrophobic self-regard that has always threatened to make yet more “Woody Allen” films? Can he hold his small but influential following, when they are the group most quickly (or automatically?) offended by reports of “incorrectness” in an idol? Part of Allen’s problem is only sharpened by the very messy battle with Mia Farrow and his own undeniable humiliation. For he always insisted on making movies about his own angst as a cunning diversion from true self-examination. For years, there had been an air of dissociation in his work that now seems fulfilled by some of his remarks during the year of public scandal. Has this authority on sensitivity ever trusted his own feelings or been their authentic victim?
Despite the fun of Sleeper and Bananas, Allen has never made a film free from his own panic. He has been a Chaplin hero for the chattering classes, yet he is trapped by something like Chaplin’s neurotic vanity. No director works so hard to appear at a loss. The thought of his making a Bergman movie (and the thought runs from Interiors to Shadwus and Fog) is grotesque. He is so near to Bergman already, yet so timid about the Swede’s strength of commitment.
Allen is heset by certain death, elusive sex, the farfetched theory of romance, the immorality of pleasure, and the fracturing of cultural and personal ties that are replaced with chains. It sounds like respectable angst, but perhaps the ideals and the dismay were always precious and adolescent. The note of complaint in Allen’s work is shrill and even frivolous because it prefers the quick flash of one-liners and mocked stereotypes. Woody is so jumpy he has no patience with developed humor. Though his films have gained in polish and visual depth, the humor remains in the words and the meetings. There is very little sense of purpose, principle, or character in Allen’sway of looking at the worlds he creates. Thus we cannot escape the feeling of being trapped in an elevator with people who talk too much.