David Matthews

The Woody Allen documentary that recently aired on PBS in its American Masters series provided two of the most delightful evenings I have enjoyed recently, right up there with poetry readings with Lisa Wible and Di Weide in the 3 Friends: Caffeinated Art series; as one among the cast of thousands, if  you will permit a bit of hyperbole, for Curtis Whitecarroll’s Chapbookzooka at Marino Adriatic Café; dinner with Sylvia at Caffe Allora; and modest dining, coffee, and wandering adventures in Bellingham, Washington, and Vancouver BC. Now that I think about it, the past month has been pretty eventful for a fellow who usually does not get out all that much.

I do not come to Woody Allen with an open mind. He is among those who most inform my work as poet, through the evolution of a sensibility, as a source of myth, with a feeling of spiritual kinship, however much or little merited. I would not be who I am or write as I do apart from my encounter with a company that includes Keats, Dickinson, Rimbaud, Paul Éluard, Robert Desnos, Gregory Corso, among the poets, and among others Bergman, Fellini, Dostoevsky, Camus, Nietzsche, Chagall, Bob Dylan, and Woody Allen. As my old philosophy professor Dr. Matsen used to say, we follow in the footsteps of giants.

Woody is among our foremost filmmakers. We might quibble over whether he has made a singularly great film that stands with, say, The Seventh Seal or Amarcord. Woody himself says he is still trying to make the great film that has thus far, in his own estimation, eluded him. We may accept that assessment without backing off one whit from our awe before the remarkable and rare achievement marked by his incredible body of work, a film a year for forty years, among them–off the top of my head–Annie Hall, Manhattan, Hannah and Her Sisters, Match Point, Vicky Cristina Barcelona, and Midnight in Paris. Upon going to a list of his films, I hastily add Love and Death, Interiors, Husbands and Wives, and Crimes and Misdemeanors as special ones that deserve to be singled out. I imagine others would subtract from my list and add to it to make up their own. Even the lesser films, the ones that are more purely comedic or just do not quite measure up, have their moments of humor and poignancy.

What do you suppose it says about Woody Allen’s public persona that it comes more naturally to refer to him by first name than by last? Perhaps in part this is because for so much of his career Woody played the male lead in his films, so that rightly or wrongly we tend to identify the protagonist with Woody the person. In the later films I find myself seeing Larry David, Josh Brolin, Owen Wilson, as the “Woody Allen character,” sometimes thinking, probably unfairly, Woody would have delivered this line differrently, that line better. Woody’s protagonists tend to be anxious, overly reflective, cognizant of mortality and life’s fleeting nature, sometimes morbidly so, calling to mind stereotypical intellectual figures while never being reduced to stereotype. The capacity to direct witty barbs at themselves and their foibles as well as at others enables them to retain a certain affability, to be likeable even at their whiniest.

Woody gleefully harpoons the pretensions of intellectuals without coming across as in any way anti-intellectual himself, as in the scene from Annie Hall where the man standing behind Alvy and Annie in line to see The Sorrow and the Pity drives Alvy to distraction as he pontificates ad nauseam about the shortcomings of Fellini and Beckett before going on and on and on about Marshall McLuhan, moving Alvy to speculate what he wouldn’t give for a large sock with horse manure in it, then producing McLuhan himself to refute the windbag. It is not just that this fellow prattles on as he does that grates on Alvy; it’s that he gets Fellini, Beckett, and McLuhan all wrong. It is worth noting in the context that The Sorrow and the Pity, a four-hour documentary about Vichy France collaboration with Nazi Germany from 1940 to 1944, is not exactly middlebrow fare; thus Alvy’s determination to see this film, which if memory serves he had already viewed on a number of occasions, might itself indicate a bit of pretension.

Woody has been graced with the good fortune to be able to devote his life to his work, and he has made the most of it. At age fifteen he began selling jokes to New York columnists such as Earl Wilson. He moved on to write for talk shows before his agents, Charles Joffe and Jack Rollin, convinced him to do stand-up and tell his own jokes, for which he had no inclination at the beginning, and his performances were uneven at best. (Among his role models as a stand-up comic was the wonderful Mort Sahl, known for his political and topical humor. I recall Sahl’s dry one-liner satirizing conventional, 1950s, early 1960s, notions about women: “A woman’s place is in the stove.”).

Woody’s success as a comic led to his being approached to write a script for What’s New, Pussycat? for which he would have a moderate role as a character in the film. The experience with What’s New, Pussycat? was not altogether a good one. He felt that if he had called the shots, the film would have been funnier but probably made less money. From this he concluded that he would work on a film only if he had complete control. He went on to write, direct, and star in Take the Money and Run, and the rest, as they say, is history. Through it all he remains indifferent to commercial success except insofar as that each film be sufficiently successful to enable him to find someone willing to invest in the next project. The day Woody completes a film, he puts it behind him and sets to work on the new one. As I write this, with Woody a week away from his 76th birthday, the 2012 film, Nero Fiddled, with a cast that includes Ellen Page, Penélope Cruz, Alec Baldwin, Roberto Benigni, Judy Davis, and Woody himself, is in post-production. I look forward to it.

David :: Nov.25.2011 :: House Red: Film :: 2 Comments »

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