Crime and Punishment

Woody Allen's late career has been marked by incongruity. Not only in the quality of his films but within the films themselves. There are highs (Match Point, Vicky Cristina Barcelona) and lows (Whatever Works), and the films themselves are airy and shot beautifully while thematically being quite dark and cynical. In his latest reimagining of a classic philosophical narrative, Irrational Man stars Joaquin Phoenix as Abe Lucas, a drunken philosophy professor whose aimless nihilism is confronted with a Dostoyevskian dilemma. Emma Stone plays Jill Pollard, a diaphanous and idealistic student who becomes dangerously enamoured with Lucas' fatalistic apathy, misinterpreting it for romantic suffering. 

Phoenix goes against tradition of other Allen's leading men by avoiding mimicry of Alvy Singer, the protagonist of Annie Hall. Instead, Phoenix's brooding grunts and naturally slurred speech reflect a character that has crumpled under the weight of life and its harsh realities. Suddenly, Lucas (Phoenix) sees a chance at redemption and more crucially, revitalization. Overhearing a sad, although unrealistic, tale of a single mother and cruel judge, the aimless, depressed philosophy professor channels his inner Raskolnikov and convinces himself he must murder the judge, saving the poor woman from a terrible fate.  

The film's initial lightheartedness disabuses the audience into thinking this is all just a fantasy, something naughty to awaken the curiosity of the disaffected and moribund professor. But quickly the tone turns very dark. What seemed like a trifle is made urgently real. Echoing his '80s Bergman influenced period, particularly his masterpiece Crimes and Misdemeanors, Allen again challenges the traditional notions of guilt and redemption, and how they are subverted.  

Irrational Man is not a masterpiece and probably not even one of his better later works, due mainly to problems with execution. It's quite clumsy in its climax and denouement, as if Allen thought after creating the characters and coming up with the initial conceit that the rest would work itself out on its own. But it does leave the viewer contemplating how our concepts of the "greater good" seem to conveniently align with our selfish motives.

Moonlighting in the South of France

After nearly fifty years of filmmaking, it's safe to say that we pretty much know Woody Allen's attitude towards all things supernatural.  Religion, God, afterlife, are all concepts that have borne the brunt of Allen's obtuse scorn over the decades.  And yet, as the writer-director pushes 80, it seems he has begun to deconstruct if not incrementally rollback his notoriously rational outlook.

Allen's latest film, Magic in the Moonlight, stars Colin Firth doing what Colin Firth does best: playing Mr. Darcy. Firth plays Stanley Crawford, a magician in 1920s Europe, whose sneering arrogance is eclipsed only by his vicious contempt for all things that can't be unmitigatedly proven by the cold calculations of science.  When word reaches him of a rich American family who has fallen under the spell of a psychic, he quickly travels to the south of France -- where they're summering at their waterfront chateau --  to expose the fraud.

Hoping to inflict as much humiliation as possible, Crawford begins jabbing Sophie Baker (Emma Stone) with sarcastic barbs immediately.  But regardless of his iterations of the impossibility of anything existing outside of empirical proof, Baker's effortless charm and uncanny clairvoyance slowly begins to win over the master skeptic.

This is not one of Allen's classics, but the Côte d'Azur setting and the classical score, including Stravinsky and Beethoven, make for a lovely diversion on a Sunday evening.  Allen became a legend filming in the confines of Manhattan, but his latest European period has proven he is equally adept at filming the radiance and splendour of the Mediterranean. I also appreciated the supporting characters of Caroline (Erica Leerhsen) and George (Jeremy Shamos), who seemed to be taken directly out of Fitzgerald's Tender Is The Night.  This and other Lost Generation literary allusions worked much better than the crudely amateurish caricatures of Allen's recent megahit, Midnight in Paris, which in many ways felt like Woody Allen had taken over the Back to the Future franchise.

Crawford/Darcy/Firth's intense rationality sets him up for a comeuppance, even as he continues to spew on about the cold bleakness of life, and death.  Much like his main character, it seems like the great director is softening in his dotage.  Yes, everything Crawford says is true, he's not debating that, but rather he's advocating for a kind of selective amnesia.  Maybe in the face of unimaginable dark nothingness, the key to survival and indeed happiness is to try placing existentialism on the back burner for a while and permit some magic into our lives.  Who knows, if we're lucky perhaps we'll get to experience the greatest magic of all:  love.

A Streetcar Named Retribution

One of Ingmar Bergman's most overlooked and theatrical films is The Devil's Eye.  Released in 1960 and sandwiched between classics like Wild Strawberries and his Trilogy of Faith (Through A Glass Darkly, Winter Light, The Silence), it's easy to see how The Devil's Eye has become lost in modern film circles.  But it's one of Bergman's most inspired works.  The film opens with Don Juan seducing a young maiden only to have his conquest fizzle into nothingness at the moment of consummation.  You see, Don Juan is in hell, and his eternal punishment is to replay this Sisyphean game of seduction, without respite. 

Jasmine, played to neurotic snobby brilliance by Cate Blanchett in a likely Oscar nominated role, shares a similar fate.  The titular character in Woody Allen's Blue Jasmine, Blanchett is a cold, condescending gold-digger whose sole talent in life is to attract and gracefully seduce obnoxiously wealthy men.  This is in extreme contrast to her sister, Ginger (Sally Hawkins), a simple woman drawn to salt of the earth types.  Their paths intersect when Jasmine's husband, Hal (Alec Baldwin), a not-so-thinly veiled version of Bernie Madoff, loses everything and hangs himself in his jail cell, leaving his estranged wife with no choice but to move from Park Avenue to live with her blue collar sister in San Francisco.

Yes, in Woody Allen's world, San Francisco is representative of a rough-talking, pizza-loving, grease-monkey working class because, obviously, his conception of the City by the Bay is stuck on Sam Spade and The Maltese Falcon. 

Jasmine, destitute, is forced, horror of horrors, to work as a dental assistant, and worse, share an apartment with her sister and two kids.  And yet, by the grace of the 1%, wealthy men find her irresistible.  Blanchett's best moment comes when she's dragged to a Marin County fête whose regal vacuousness quickly reminds her of own glorious Hamptons past.  When wealthy widower Dwight Westlake (Peter Sarsgaard) begins cooing to her of a home by the bay, a diplomatic mission in Vienna, and a potential future in politics, Jasmine realizes she unwittingly has got a live one.  The universe is restoring her innate place at the top of the social order.  The light in her face is reilluminated as she instantaneously spurns her unbalanced self-pity for a confident, alluring, and completely fraudulent air.  Jasmine's transmutation alone is worth the price of admission. Dwight falls for her immediately.

Somewhat clumsily (Allen loves churning out these films with such frequency that sometimes details aren't given the attention they deserve), it all falls apart for Jasmine, via Andrew Dice Clay in an understated performance as Ginger's ex-husband Augie who was burned personally and professionally by Jasmine and her criminal husband, and her dreams are once again fizzled into nothingness just at the moment of material consummation.  It's a classic morality tale of the pitfalls of greed, pride, and selfishness.  Maybe in some seventh circle, Don Juan and Jasmine will find each other.  

Rome, The Absurd City

To Rome With Love is easily Woody Allen's most uproarious film since Deconstructing Harry. 
  
Introduced by a working traffic cop/raconteur, four interspersed -- but not intersecting -- sketches provide a peek into the wild possibilities of the "Eternal City."  The farce that ensues is equal parts Shakespeare and Fellini, tied together by Allen's weightless style.  

Each vignette is imbued with an element of the supernatural or absurd.  Jerry (Woody Allen) is a retired avant-garde opera manager who comes to Rome to meet his daughter's Italian fiancé and his family.  When the future groom's undertaker father begins singing magnificently in the shower, Jerry pounces on his chance to get back in the opera game.  The only catch is, the father (renowned tenor Fabio Armiliato) can only sing in the shower. The gag avoids getting stale, and, in fact, culminates in a most hysterical staging of Pagliacci.

Equally outrageous is the phantasmal story of Jack (Jesse Eisenberg), a young architecture student living in Rome with his girlfriend (Greta Gerwig), who happens upon the renowned architect, reduced to designing shopping malls, John (Alec Baldwin).  John becomes Jack's ghostlike confidante and guide, longingly walking him through the tumult that results when Sally (Ellen Page), the girlfriend's best friend, crashes into their lives with her histrionic, failed actress, pseudo-intellectual, sexual energy.  Baldwin's Jack is an apparition savvy to all the seductress' moves, yet clearly still eager to be vicariously victimized. 

Two Italian language vignettes perpetuate the farce, as Leopoldo (Roberto Benigni) is an average family man and bureaucratic clerk who suddenly, and most nonsensically, becomes the object of the media's lust. The scenes of paparazzi obsession ("Leopoldo, when your head itches, which hand do you use to scratch it?") are like watching Fellini direct from beyond the grave. As always, Benigni crafts the most mundane tasks, like waking up and turning off an alarm clock, into inexplicable hilarity. 

Finally, Anna, a prostitute, as stunning as she is uncouth, is played by Penélope Cruz, whose comedic talents flourish under Allen's lens as brilliantly as her dramatic ones do under Almodóvar's. Anna inadvertently gets sucked into a role of posing as the young wife for a newlywed, Antonio (Alessandro Tiberi), who must impress his big-city industrious uncles in order to secure his financial future.  When the party visits the Sistine Chapel, someone remarks on the breathtaking ceiling art, and rhetorically asks, "Can you imagine working all day on your back?" the response from Anna isn't hard to imagine.

Allen's strongest comedic work actualizes when he unleashes his inhibitions and indulges his farcical roots.  In To Rome With Love, Allen expertly combines the zaniness of his early work like Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex *But Were Afraid to Ask, with the smooth professionalism of his later work. The product is a hysterical, fast-paced, outlandish gem of a comedy. Now back to that production of Pagliacci...

Where Are We Going?

Woody Allen strives to make us laugh.  Yes, he's made a handful of morose films (particularly his Ingmar Bergman phase), but in his soul, he's a comedian.  Allen's success rate in evoking risibility is about the same as Dirk Nowitzki's free-throw percentage.  Typically, his vehicles are subversive word-play, exposure of personal and institutional hypocrisy, and portrayal of sexual congress whose intimacy is akin to a handshake.

Allen's cinematic greatness, however, lies in his uncanny ability to tap into a subtext whose lessons can be universally applied.  They're very basic lessons:  just because the grass looks greener on the other side...it isn't, appreciate what you have, read books, take walks after dinner, God doesn't care and/or probably doesn't exist, don't hurt people.  Sometimes though, his conceits are better merely as a concept than as a financed film.  Case in point, his latest European world-city venture, Midnight In Paris.

In theory, it seems like the perfect Woody Allen film.  Place a typical Allen hero into the eternal city of love, and let the city's magic unfurl upon him.  After New York, Barcelona, and London, surely the most romantic city in the world, a capital of high culture and art, would inspire Allen to majestic heights.  Instead, he delivered a ho-hum Woody Allen version of Back To The Future.  In place of Bobby socks, Studebakers, and Rock N Roll, we get Cloche hats, Isotta-Fraschinis, and The Lost Generation.

Having Owen Wilson (as Woody Allen's cinematic avatar) cavort around 1920s Paris with Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Stein, and the rest is fun, but where is it going?  The joke of Wilson's character inspiring a young Luis Buñuel's absurdism was funny...when it was done to perfection in Back To The Future and Chuck Berry and Rock N Roll.

Feature films by legendary directors surely must be more than exercises in whimsical wish fulfillment.  In Radio Days (1987), Allen similarly looked back to the halcyon days of his youth in 1940s Brooklyn and the vitality of radio culture.  It was a whimsical picture, but it was sweet and nostalgic and had heart.  Midnight In Paris, I'm afraid, is sweet, but it openly mocks nostalgia and rushes way too quickly past the heart, or the point for that matter.  

Yes, Woody Allen wants to make us laugh, unfortunately with Midnight In Paris, he spent all his energies on the elaborate set-up, but left out the most important part of the joke:  the punchline.  

You Will Meet a Short Ginger Cynic

“We are slaves to our desires,” is a recurrent theme in the work of Woody Allen, but with his latest effort, an accurate evaluation of this axiom begs adding the scornful, “and to our satisfaction.” Or dissatisfaction.

In the world of “You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger,” just about every character wants something beyond their reach, a something (mysterious woman, literary success, reclaimed youth, illicit affair) they really have no inherent or moral right to have.  They covet wildly.  Besieged by dissatisfaction and ingratitude, they act out with shameless ambition.  The fear of being caught or found out doesn’t even warrant a pause – guilt and shame are nonexistent qualities.  As typical for most Allen characters, they are all hopelessly cultivated, wealthy, attractive, sexually adventurous and utterly insecure.

 

Roy (Josh Brolin) finished medical school only to spurn the doctorly life for the bohemian romanticism of a literary one.  Trouble is he apparently has only one good book in him – and three really bad ones.  The anxiety of his imminent doom is tempered only by the beautiful woman in red (Freida Pinto) he peeps through his window.  Roy’s father-in-law, Alfie (Anthony Hopkins), abruptly leaves his devoted wife of 40 years because “she was getting old and I refused to accept that.”  Impulsively marrying a rent-girl initially provides Alfie the robust rejuvenation he coveted, but quickly his life descends into bankruptcy and cuckoldry. 

The women show no better.  Roy’s wife, Sally (well played by Naomi Watts) at first comes off as a supportive and caring daughter and wife.  But those illusions fade when her boss chooses to have an affair with her artist friend instead of her, and her mother is told by a charlatan fortune teller that she shouldn’t give Sally the loan she desperately needs to open her own art gallery.  Avarice is rampant, pride a disease. Everyone's miserable. Not even the doe-eyed innocence of Dia (the mysterious woman in red) belies her faultlessness.  She is given to the same irrational dissatisfaction (and desire) as everyone else.

The problem is, even when they get what they want, they end up even more discontent than before.  Lives fall apart, relationships crumble, bank accounts collapse, frauds risk uncovering.  Woody Allen has always leaned cynical, but with ‘Stranger’ he’s promoted cynicism from bemusing leitmotif to central thematic element. He doesn't even bother much to developing the characters save the minimum exposition necessary to parade their selfishness. 

Most of us don’t know what we want, those of us who do figure it out are usually driven by wrongheaded and ungrateful motivations, and then when – always when, never if in Allen films – we do get what we want, we are punished heavily for it, usually by fate.  In the end, only the most delusional have a chance at approaching happiness.