Review | Woody Allen: A Documentary

Play it Again, Woody

By Thomas Delapa


Did you hear the one about the documentary that thought it was an artistic infomercial?

It’s no joke. You might think that in a three-hour-plus portrait of comic icon Woody Allen, more than a few discouraging chuckles might be heard. But in Woody Allen: A Documentary from PBS’ American Masters series (now on DVD), director Robert Weide doesn’t stray far from Allen’s corner—as dark as it might be. The result is a profile that’s long on fawning adulation and short on serious criticism. While rousing in stretches, Allen’s long take on life, love and death is a bit of a sleeper.

A TV director (HBO’s Curb Your Enthusiasm) and film biographer of such comedy titans as the Marx Brothers and W.C Fields, Weide has said that his profiles are “personal thank you letters” to his cultural heroes. Allen should send a thank you note back (plus roses) to Weide, who surrounds his uber-private subject with collaborators and ex-partners (like Diane Keaton and Louise Lasser), critics (like Richard Shickel) and a fellow New York director (Martin Scorsese), who only have praise for the famed, partially infamous, writer/director.

Few, if any, American film auteurs have had the staying power of one Allen Stewart Konigsberg, who precociously began writing jokes for national TV shows and newspaper columnists in the early 1950s, while still in his teens. Though obsessively publicity shy, Allen evolved into one of the most popular stand-up acts of the 1960s. In this heady time of such game-changers as Mort Sahl and Lenny Bruce, Allen was something completely different, a bespectacled Jewish joke machine who looked like a cartoon character, yet fearlessly helped drag neuroses, sex and absurdist humor into popular culture.

Weide’s most entertaining bits come early, especially during rarely seen footage of Allen’s TV appearances, whether a 1980s BBC interview, guest shots on friend Dick Cavett’s talk show or, memorably, boxing a kangaroo. Granted a series of unprecedented interviews with the graying, gnomish, still horn-rimmed Allen (now 75), Weide talks to Allen in his office, his bedroom and, most nostalgically, while accompanying him back to his old Brooklyn neighborhood, where he reminisces about his boyhood home and local movie theater.

These trips down memory lane are bright and lively, as are the clips of Allen’s early film forays as writer/director, like Take the Money and Run (1969) and Bananas (1971). For some critics (myself included), Allen hit his artistic peak in 1977 with the bittersweet, stylistically ingenious Annie Hall, which won four Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Director. Practically nonpareil in U.S. filmmaking (not unlike Charlie Chaplin), Allen has managed to exert almost total control over his 40-odd films, from writing and casting all the way to the editing stage.

While Part I of the documentary arguably ends near Allen’s professional apex, there are ominous signs of hubris, if not artistic petty crimes and misdemeanors. Interiors, his hollow follow-up to Annie Hall, echoed with gloomy, derivative Ingmar Bergman—his cinematic idol—while Stardust Memories (1980) dimly reflected Fellini’s trend-setting, autobiographical 8 ½. Yet even though Allen’s career has decidedly alternated between luminous and lackluster over the decades, Weide doctors the spin, inserting comments from gingerly uncritical critics like Shickel and Columbia University film professor Annette Insdorf. One can only wonder whether Allen put any conditions on Weide’s supporting cast, all fans, including Allen’s sister.

Mia Farrow, his one-time leading lady off and on the screen, is naturally not in the building. Weide does treat the scandalous 1992 Allen/Farrow split that led to his marriage to Farrow’s college-age adopted daughter Soon-Yi Previn, but it’s mostly glossed over in fast-forward, as if it were all just a bad movie.

An apparent workaholic, Allen is barely done with one film before he’s on to his next one, especially now since he’s been able to obtain European backing for his latest films/travelogues. He believes in the “quantity theory,” betting that the sheer number of releases will increase his chances for critical and box-office success. This anti-Kubrick strategy has translated into a torrential output of features in recent decades, many flimsy and forgettable, redeemed only by Allen’s reliable one-liners and his near-mesmerizing ability to attract A-list actors, especially dishy leading ladies.

While Allen has assuredly taken a place in the American cinema pantheon, too little has been written about his penchant for arty, arch dramatic pretensions, which he regularly drapes over his scrawny plots like a pair of baggy khakis. Near the end of Weide’s non-definitive chronicle, Allen wistfully rues that he wasn’t born a “great tragedian.”

Seriously, Woody, you’re right.

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11/22/11

American Idle: Adventures in TV Land

by Thomas Delapa



If you want to seriously study the sick state of TV in the age of Fox News, reality shows and infomercials, spend a few days semi-conscious in a hospital bed.

Some 50 years ago, Federal Communications Commission chairman Newton Minow controversially declared television to be a “vast wasteland.” That was when TV was limited to three monolithic national networks. Today, Minow’s diagnosis is no less grim, especially with the metastasizing growth of cable channels into a hundred-headed Hydra monster.

Like a reclined, reluctant tourist in Dante’s Hell, I descended into TV land, armed only with a remote control to temporarily zap the devilish dross I bore witness to. While no one can argue that network TV of the fifties was heaven on Earth, at least the networks sought to edify audiences with such notable dramatic series as Playhouse 90 and Studio One. Where have all the quality dramatic shows gone? A nation turns its lonely, bleary eyes to you, HBO.

In a bloodshot reflection of our splintered society, there’s seemingly a cable channel and program for every interest group, bias, demographic, and gender, all ubiquitously interrupted by a rising tide of noisy commercials. One of the original promises of cable was the absence of advertisements, but that pledge has long been canceled, and is unlikely to ever return in re-runs. Against the swamp of commercialism, PBS remains a lonely oasis of arts and educational fare, despite a notable drop in original content. While the History Channel is a source of informative, if sensationalized, factoid films, the Animal Planet has viciously regressed, devolving the nature documentary into when-animals-attack Darwinism.

Of course, there’s no better advertisement for America’s post-Reagan social Darwinism than the reality show, TV’s version of the Roman bread and circuses—hold the bread. In fact, there’s very little that’s “real” about these spectacles, whether the contrived settings, manipulated action or the exhibitionist participants themselves, who are pre-selected for potential on-camera ballistics. Voyeurism and exhibitionism go hand in hand on these (sur)reality shows, exposing our perverse fixation with the biggest winners of the great American game—as well as its biggest losers.

The only news about cable news is how the 24/7 format serves to both magnify and distort whatever news there is, however trivial or lurid, and often to paranoid extremes. With Fox News, MSNBC and the pioneering CNN now in ratings competition, the battle isn’t for old-school journalistic scoops anymore, but how to out-spin the other with the loudest mouths. On the feverishly right-wing Fox, a scary parade of dolled-up blond pundits march in lockstep with Bill O’Reilly, Glenn Beck, et al., dishing out snide, cynical barbs at anything remotely liberal, intellectual or Obaman. This drone of negativity is best exacerbated when accompanied by a simplistic video prop, like the endlessly repeated disaster-cam shot of the gushing BP oil well, bleeding black gunk in the Gulf of Mexico and killing all those poor pelicans. At no point during the catastrophe did any of Fox’s slick commentators remind us of Sarah Palin’s campaign cry to “Drill, baby, drill.”

Crude is only one of the words that come to mind for most of cable-TV. Outside of the “premium” HBO (which produced the superb John Adams mini-series), the erratic AMC (home to the Emmy-winning Mad Men) and Turner Classic Movies, the small screen’s big picture is a blur of re-runs, inane game shows, old movies, cartoons, semi-pornographic music videos, televangelists, infomercials and, of course, an exhaustively wide world of sports and pseudo-sports, including NASCAR, martial-arts cage matches, and high-stakes poker—my bet as the nerdiest of televised non-events. The Bravo channel, which once merited applause for high-brow fare, has even dumbed down, going gaga for a Lady Gaga photo shoot.

Dazed and discontented viewers may well ask who took the “vision” out of television. It’s become our national id, where egos rule. For every great show like The Simpsons, there are a hundred Hell’s Kitchens or Wipeouts. But in an increasingly insular, bored, home-theater society that wants its TV and MTV, nobody today is yelling “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going take this anymore.” Resistance seems programmed to fail. Like Chauncey Gardiner, the numbed voyeur of Being There, Americans like to watch.

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Originally published in Conducive Chronicle, 8/4/10