Bamboo: Essays and Criticism

Woody Allen

I have seen Woody Allen in the flesh three times in my life. I’ve never actually met him but the encounters remain vividly memorable, not to say poignant. I regard myself as a committed fan, though not an uncritical one, and my acquaintance with his work began with his very first film as a writer and director, Take the Money and Run (1969).

I saw this film as a teenager in an open-air cinema one evening in Ibadan, Nigeria, in 1970. I’d gone to the cinema — casually, uninformed — expecting vaguely to catch some American thriller. Instead I was presented with a wry, knowing, absurdist, comic vision of life that seems to have emerged fully formed and that has really hardly changed over the subsequent thirty-odd years. As the moths and other night insects dipped and dived through the projector’s beam, scattering their ephemeral shadows across the screen, I found myself laughing, first incredulously, then out loud, then painfully, at the Allen persona — nerdy, intellectual, inept, randily heterosexual, angst-ridden. I was eighteen and such first encounters with an artist you come to revere and admire remain embedded in the memory, anchored there by something close to shock: a shock of recognition — the pure thrill of finding your own sense of humour, your own view of the world, replicated by an artist in an art form. At that age empathy and identification are the shortest route to aesthetic pleasure. Who is this Woody Allen? I wondered. Where can I see more of his stuff?

As it happened I didn’t have to wait long, nor have any of us. By my count he has made thirty-four feature films as writer/director and (mostly) actor since that debut. A Woody Allen film is as predictable as spring or autumn — every year sees a new launch, new debate about its quality, new speculation about the stellar cast. Until this year, that is. Woody Allen’s latest film, Anything Else, was released in the US in August, indeed it’s available for purchase there on DVD and video from the end of this month. You can currently see it in cinemas in France but not in the UK. A British distributor, it appears, may or may not be imminent, but why the delay? It is some sort of ominous signal when the new Woody Allen film, as far as his UK fans are concerned, risks going straight to video. One reluctantly starts to wonder: have audiences begun to fall out of love with the Woodman?

The first time I actually saw Woody Allen was in New York. It was 1981 and it was my first visit to the city. I stepped out of my hotel and wandered north up Park Avenue gawping at the skyscrapers and the other New York clichés that were on display. Then the biggest cliché of them all came sauntering down the avenue towards me: Woody Allen in trademark baggy chinos and combat jacket. Even better — he was arm in arm with Diane Keaton. I stopped still and tried not to stare too intently. They were laughing and chatting freely, apparently unaware of the ripples of interest and rubbernecking their passage provoked. They passed close by me. Was I rocked slightly by the turbulent wake of their renown and charisma? Yes: it was an epiphanic moment and in a way I now expect to see Woody Allen every time I go to New York. It was almost as if the sighting had been arranged for first-time visitors by the New York tourist board, so synonymous is Allen with the city. And to see him strolling its streets within hours of my arriving there, with his co-star and lover to boot, seemed both a serendipitous blessing and unbelievably appropriate.

This sighting occurred only a few years after Annie Hall (1977), remember, and I suppose that film still survives as his trademark, signature work. So many Woody Allen tropes were established there, and to such an extent, that later films that have gone back to the source suffer badly in comparison. This is all too true of the latest: Anything Else is a kind of poor man’s Annie Hall but without its freshness. Two other actors — Jason Biggs and Christina Ricci — replicate the Allen and Keaton roles but are hopelessly handicapped by our knowledge of their forerunners. Biggs (of American Pie fame) is seriously miscast and Christina Ricci (a wonderful actress) seems strangely lost, out of sorts — as if she were too aware of the ghostly redolence of the earlier film and of her vain efforts to recapture its allure. I loved Annie Hall when it first came out and decided to re-watch it last year. I stopped after five minutes, not wanting to spoil the memories of those earlier viewings. Age has not been kind to it. Furthermore it has had a baleful influence on American comic acting — what you could call the Friends school of acting. Allen’s furrowed-brow, hesitant, stuttering, self-regarding delivery and Keaton’s ditsy, kooky, stuttering, self-regarding delivery have spread like a pestilence through American drama schools. Pale shadows of Allen and Keaton throng American TV sitcoms (Friends being the most culpable in my opinion — but the disease is spreading over here too — fast). Anything Else is a ghastly depiction of the malady. Jason Biggs can’t get out three words without a pause, a “mmm,” a “huh,” a twitch, an “I mean.” “No” emerges as “N-n-n-n-n-no.” Beside him even Woody Allen himself sounds as sonorous and articulate as John Gielgud.

But I don’t think Allen minds his occasional turkeys and flops. His working practice is simply to work and work again and carry on working and he seems indifferent to criticism, positive or adverse. Like old-school film-makers he is concentrating on producing an oeuvre, a body of work. Out of the thirty-plus films he has made so far there might be six comic classics: a success rate most artists would kill for (think of Manhattan, Stardust Memories, The Purple Rose of Cairo, Hannah and her Sisters, Husbands and Wives and Bullets over Broadway to name the first half dozen that spring to mind — there are another six that could also be contenders). But such a relentless output has a built-in fault mechanism: it’s impossible to maintain excellence with that level of productivity — whatever the art form you are working in. Allen’s yearly film prescribes that some will inevitably disappoint and fail. But something else has happened recently. I find myself less intrigued by the recent movies: I haven’t seen Celebrity (1998), The Curse of the Jade Scorpion (2001) or Hollywood Ending (2002). It’s not just a question of overproduction. I worry that it’s a question of over-familiarity — with the man himself.

The second time I saw Woody Allen was in 1995. I walked into a Madison Avenue bookshop and there at the rear I could see there was a small book-launch party going on, twenty or so people with glasses of wine and canapés in their hands. Customers were still allowed to browse, so I did and after a minute or two looked up to see that I was browsing beside Woody Allen. A little way off Soon-Yi Previn was standing. The whole Soon-Yi scandal, Allen’s humiliation and Mia Farrow’s despair and outrage, has changed our perception of Allen in a disastrous way, I feel. The confusion between the man and the roles he played in his films was one he deliberately allowed to take place — and it was creatively very effective: whatever the name of his character you felt you were watching, in essence, Woody Allen. But it was funny and ambiguous and self-deprecating. And then we found out it wasn’t: the court appearances, the memoirs, the suits and counter-suits provided us with too much unsavoury information — we came to know too much about the man and that knowledge has begun retrospectively to shadow the work. It’s very hard now to watch a film like Manhattan, for instance, or Husbands and Wives, and watch Allen lust after his young co-stars and remain in the state of benign, amused ignorance you were in when they first came out. As I stood beside him in that bookstore that day he looked much older and frailer than I expected. Then Soon-Yi called him over and he rejoined the guests.

In the latest film, Anything Else, Allen permits himself no unseemly sexual dalliances with much younger women. He’s a wiseacre, wannabe comedy writer dispensing laconic aphorisms about the human condition and worldly advice to his younger alter-ego. On a scale of ten the movie probably rates a four: it doesn’t really work — the dialogue seems strangely clunky, the situations appear reheated and mannered and we never engage with the central couple. I suspect Allen will chalk it down to experience. His next film, the Untitled Woody Allen Fall Project (2003), is in post-production (awaiting a title) and will be released in 2004. And then he’ll make another.

The third time I saw Woody Allen was in the spring of last year. I was in Manhattan, sitting in Bemelmans bar in the Carlyle Hotel one evening having a drink. On my way out to dinner I paused in the corridor between the bar and the Café Carlyle and squinted into the cafe through the glass door at the live show that was performing. A small jazz orchestra was on stage and there, in the second row, was Woody Allen playing his clarinet. I watched him for a minute or two. He seemed a contented man.

2003