The Woody Allen Atlas
Written by: Lance Carmichael, CC2K Staff Writer
Most film buffs probably plan on tearing through Woody Allen’s extensive catalog some day, but its size (42 films listed on the IMDB and counting!) and rather varied quality (if you’ve never seen a Woody Allen movie before and you happen to catch Melinda and Melinda on HBO, you’re probably never coming back) can be rather intimidating to the casual movie lover. That’s what this handy-dandy Atlas is for. It tells you one Woody buff’s opinion on where lay the wheat, and where the chaff. If you are one of those people who’s only seen Melinda and Melinda (or, essentially, almost anything he’s released since 1994), here’s your chance to give him another try.
Included in the guide is the year of the film’s theatrical release (you may notice a pattern developing) and a “W” or “NW,” which simply tells you whether Woody appears as an actor in the film (“W”) or not (“NW”).
The Masterpiece
Annie Hall 1977 (W)
Smart, neurotic people dealing with adult relationship issues. Great Manhattan locations. Strong, complex female characters. Flashbacks to troubled Jewish childhood. Why single Annie Hall out when so many of Woody’s other great movies share the same elements? Because it was the first. Woody (along with co-writer and charter member of the Art Garfunkle Hall of Fame for Forgotten Collaborators, Marshall Brickman) finally figured out how to become a “serious” filmmaker who could sit at the adults’ table without turning his back on his preternatural comic gifts with this 1977 film, forging the template for all his classics to come. The sense of freedom Allen exults in while mashing up the structural breakthroughs of his idols Ingmar Bergman and Frederico Fellini with the hijinks of his beloved Marx Brothers sends tingles down your spine. Animation, flashbacks to elementary school, subtitles that have nothing to do with what’s actually being said, unexpected direct address, bizarre, esoteric cameos, all in the exploration of a failed adult relationship everyone can find parts of their own life in makes Annie Hall still feel as fresh today as it was the year Star Wars was released. Its influence still reaches us today: a structurally anarchic film like Fight Club is unthinkable without Annie Hall as an inspiration. Annie Hall has inspired a lot of hack filmmakers who think they’re cleverer than they really are to turn out an awful lot of dreck, but it only serves to show who the real master of the adult romantic comedy is.
The Classics
Manhattan 1979 (W)
Manhattan came right after Woody hit his stride with the Oscar-winning, respect-garnering Annie Hall, and then realized exactly what his range was when Interiors–a straight-up Bergman-esque drama–flopped. Commonly–and accurately–called Woody’s “love letter” to the city he loved, full of gorgeous black and white compositions (shot by Godfather cinematographer Gordon Willis) and grand old Gershwin tunes, Woody teamed up with Annie Hall co-writer Marshall Brickman once again to push even further into the serious but funny sophisticated adult relationship movie. Diane Keaton (who plays what her charmingly provincial character in Annie Hall probably ended up as in ten years–a neurotic, over-educated, solipsistic New York writer) and Meryl Strep (playing Woody’s ex-wife, who left him for a woman and is releasing a painfully accurate book about their break-up) trade time putting on an acting clinic on how to knock a trademark Woody Allen scene–an intelligent man and woman arguing about their relationship–out of the ballpark. But the most memorable character is the one with the least acting chops–an 18 year-old Mariel Hemingway, who plays Woody’s 17 year-old girlfriend. Somehow it’s sweet and romantic when the 40+ Woody chooses an underage girl at the end of the movie, which is all the more surprising when you consider how life would imitate art years later. Watch how Woody’s directorial trademarks of exquisitely-framed long shots with no close-up cut-ins for the entirety of long, wordy scenes reaches full maturity here–a style pretty much impossible to be replicated, because only Woody Allen could write dialogue so interesting the casual viewer doesn’t get bored or even notice that the scene isn’t covered like 99% of the other movies they’ve seen are.
Crimes and Misdemeanors 1989 (W)
There is a certain contingent of Woody Allen fans that considers this his best movie, and they certainly have a strong case. This is Woody at the absolute height of his powers, intertwining two barely-related stories just like he does in many of his best films: a comic one involving Woody Allen, and a tragic one involving other actors. The tragic story is just a simple freight train of a story engine: a successful optometrist, played pitch-perfectly by Martin Landau, has his marriage threatened when his mistress (Anjelica Huston) becomes unhinged and threatens to call his wife and expose his infidelity, as well as some financial indiscretions she knows about. Landau becomes faced with an impossible choice: either let his life get ruined by this unbalanced woman, or become a murderer by having her rubbed out. All this is balanced out by the much lighter Woody story. He plays a struggling, pretentious documentary filmmaker competing for Mia Farrow with Alan Alda, who plays an insufferable (to Woody, the audience, and no one else), Aaron Spelling-like TV producer. You’d never know Alan Alda was a genius until you saw him in a Woody Allen film; Allen takes all the innate, wholesome, family dentist-like goodness of Alda and shines a spotlight on his underlying creepiness and lecherousness. The only real criticism that can be lodged at Woody in this picture is that he tends to spell out his themes explicitly in his characters’ dialogue, but Woody at this point in his career was such a master dialoguist that he makes these asides seem perfectly organic to the scenes and in character for his actors. Phenomenal movie.
Hannah and Her Sisters 1986 (W)
I kind of think of this as the warm, beating heart of Woody’s realist Manhattan films. It’s an expansive story (that Woody somehow miraculously fits into his standard 90 minute run-time) of a grand Manhattan family centered around three sisters–the Emotional Rock, Hannah (Mia Farrow); the Neurotic Failure, Holly (Diane Wiest); and the Beauty, Lee (Barbara Hershey)–and their romantic entanglements. Woody plays Hannah’s ex-husband (they’re still on good terms), who ends up marrying Holly. Michael Caine plays Hannah’s current husband, who initiates a desperate love affair with Lee, and Bergman regular Max von Snydow plays Lee’s jilted boyfriend, a reclusive, prestigious artist who says things like, “If Jesus came back and saw all the terrible things being done in his name, he’d never stop throwing up.” It’s roughly episodic, it’s full of great lines and great arguments, and it fits firmly into the comfortable “Manhattan Love Letter” genre that Woody is most famous for. Tons of memorable characters and a real feeling of complicated-but-warm familial ambience makes this a movie I like to revisit about once a year; it makes me nostalgic for a Manhattan I have no experience with whatsoever, having spent a total of ten days there in my life. That’s the magic of the Woodman, I guess.
Husbands and Wives 1992 (W)
One of Woody’s most aesthetically ambitious movies, and probably his last truly great one. Another story where Woody has to choose between his age-compatible wife (played by then real-life wife Mia Farrow) and an inappropriately younger woman (played by Juliette Lewis). The problem at the time of this film’s release was that the news that Woody was having an affair with his and Mia’s adopted daughter, Soon-Yi Previn, had just broken, making the film feel a tad creepy (or so I gather–I was too young at the time to actually be going to see this). But fourteen years later, all that’s water under the bridge, and this is probably his most visceral, warts-and-all dissection of middle-aged love amongst upper class Manhattanites, owing to the very convincing fake documentary style this was shot in. Jump cuts, interviews, letting the camera roll as the fights commence–it’s jarring, it’s intense, and it’s fabulously accomplished filmmaking Woody–an old pro by this point–makes look incredibly easy. Judy Davis joins the hallowed ranks of Diane Keaton, Mia Farrow, and Diane Wiest of legendary Woody Allen actresses with her speed freak-like neuroses. She attempts to date the hapless Liam Neeson when husband Sydney Pollack leaves her for his New Age-y aerobics instructor, all of which leads to a sequence involving a fight outside a party between Pollack and the aerobics instructor and a late night confrontation between Pollack, Neeson, and Davis that ranks up there with anything Woody’s ever put to film. For some reason, I think of Husbands and Wives as the concluding chapter of Woody’s 80s movies about Manhattan (even though it was made in the early 90s, and even though he made other Manhattan movies during the same time period) that started with Hannah and Her Sisters and Crimes and Misdemeanor–somehow, they all share the same creative DNA.