(03/12/2000)
'I can only play two things," Woody Allen said recently "I
can play a bookworm, an intellectual. And I can play a lowlife.
The funny part of it is, the lowlife's closer to me." In Small
Time Crooks, his latest film, which opened in Britain this weekend,
the lowlife is once again in the ascendant: Allen plays Ray Winkler,
an incompetent criminal from New Jersey, who tries to rob a bank
with a gang of equally hapless associates. The robbery itself is
a flop, but - in a typical Allen twist - the cookie store that Winkler
sets up as a front for the heist becomes a roaring success.
Allen has always shown a penchant for British actors, and his new
film is more Brit-heavy than most. Tracey Ullman, the British comedienne
who Allen calls a "comic genius", plays Winkler's resourceful
wife, and Hugh Grant is a smooth-talking art dealer with his eye
on the cookie fortune. Despite the relentless pace of Allen's film-making,
and the notorious meagreness of his fees, he still has no difficulty
pulling in the stars: a role in one of his films brings its reward
in artistic kudos.
Since his messy break-up with Mia Farrow, however, Allen has had
problems pulling in American audiences (Small Time Crooks is being
marketed in America as a comedy first, and an Allen film second).
The details of the case both transfixed and divided Woody's army
of fans. For years, Farrow and Allen's relationship seemed the ideal
of American bohemianism: he lived in his auteur's pad on the east
side of Central Park, and she lived on the west side, enveloped
in children and pets.
In 1992, Farrow discovered - through finding nude Polaroids of the
girl on his mantelpiece - that Allen was having an affair with her
adopted daughter, Soon-Yi Previn. In the vicious custody battle
that followed, she accused Allen of child abuse against their other
children: none was proved, but Allen lost access to Satchel, his
natural son with Farrow.
The troubled sexual questing of Allen's bespectacled film persona
- and his warm portrayals of furiously argumentative families -
were suddenly touched with unease. The shadow of the compulsive
transgressor hovered above that celebrated witticism: "In prison
the psychiatrist asked me if I had a girl and did I think sex was
dirty. I said: 'It is if you do it right.' " In France, Italy
and Argentina, however, his fans were utterly unmoved by the scandal:
there, they expect their film-makers to be embroiled in sexual misdemeanours.
His films now do better business in all three countries than in
the States.
Allen's last film, Sweet and Lowdown, was about a fictitious musician
called Emmet Ray, whose flawed personality was only redeemed by
the beautiful exuberance of his guitar playing. But he rejects the
notion that artists have carte blanche to behave as badly as they
like: "If you meet someone who is a terrific musician or painter
and they're a lousy person, it doesn't redeem them. That only works
if you don't know them."
Yet, in the eye of the storm, Allen displayed a curious kind of
detachment. Even as he was vilified, his inner film-maker was quietly
relishing the scene: "I did think, amusingly at the time, it
was the beginning of a very good movie where someone walks into
a lawyer's office and says 'Hey, you've gotta take this case. I'm
being accused of running off with my girfriend's daughter and she's
adopted and . . . the cards were so stacked it would have been funny."
He followed his war with Farrow by making a series of lighthearted
confections, including Bullets over Broadway and Everyone Says I
Love You. Then, in real life, he wrote a romantic-comedy ending
for his own film noir: he married Soon-Yi, and they have adopted
two children of their own.
Allen is the indestructible bag of neuroses: the flakey worrier
who never actually collapses. He still plays clarinet every Monday
night with his New Orleans Funeral and Ragtime Orchestra at New
York's Carlyle Hotel; although he turned 65 last Friday, he still
churns out new films with astonishing regularity. He doesn't look
at his old films: "I just finish them and put them out. It's
no big deal."
He has spent decades in the company of analysts, but his compulsive
film-writing is clearly the best therapy of all: leaden anguish
meets New York Jewish wise-cracking, and turns it to the gold of
box- office advantage. Has he got problems? Yes, and - hey - he's
also got a new plot: things are really looking up.
Middle America might have turned away from Woody Allen, but New
York never can. In the eyes of the world, Allen is the city. His
films map his obsession with its sidewalks, its sluggish traffic,
and its apartments crammed with crazy grandfathers and attention-seeking
children. He started his career when he was a schoolboy, writing
50 jokes for newspapers and comedians after school each day. Soon
he was doing his own stand-up act, telling the audience: "I
cheated doing a metaphysics exam at NYU: I peeked into the soul
of another student."
In Allen's films, women come and go: the romantic insanity of falling
in love is invariably followed by painful disillusionment. Without
a woman, he is a mournful creature, a wandering Kermit the Frog
lacking an emotional pond. In Crimes and Misdemeanours, a melancholic
Allen laments: "The last time I was inside a woman it was the
Statue of Liberty." None the less, his films represent the
triumph of the nerdy, funny guy over the square- jawed class jock.
The Allen character always gets the beautiful girl, even if she
leaves him in the end: Allen, not the jock, is writing the script.
His other loves, however, have the virtue of constancy. Allen is
much more attached to places and eras than to people: the romance
of walks in Central Park, or the hectic glamour of the jazz age,
never wither for him. He is, he says "fascinated by a number
of periods - the turn of the century, the Twenties, Thirties and
Forties. I'm in no way fascinated by the Fifties on. The Sixties
mean nothing to me."
The image of America which he has exported to Europe is gorgeously
rose-tinted - and yet so is the view of Europe which he presents
to America. He makes no apology for it: "That's how I see things."
He finds modern life "charmless". In Paris on last New
Year's Eve, he was disappointed by what he saw: "When you think
of the turn of the last century, it was belle epoque, with carriages,
restaurants, Metro stations and all that. Now it's people wearing
synthetic fabrics, zipper jackets; it's cellular phones, McDonald's
. . . something's been lost."
Allen might reject modern fashions, but he has defined something
much more fundamental: modern speech. When Annie Hall came out in
1977, only Woody Allen talked like Woody Allen. Audiences - especially
British audiences - were enchanted by his strangely confident self-depreciation,
his tireless self-analysis, and his witty exploitation of anxiety.
Today, Woodyspeak has colonised the world. In the big-selling comedy
shows, everyone now talks like Woody: the confused kidults on Friends;
Dr Frasier Crane, the psychiatrist on Frasier; and the emotionally
disturbed lawyers in Ally McBeal. In Britain, as in America, public
self-analysis has become the national game: only the witticisms
are missing.
Meanwhile, Allen has given up visiting his analyst. Last year, he
announced that, after 40 years, he was leaving the therapist's couch.
It could be that Allen just got tired of talking about himself.
Three therapy sessions a week might have helped him understand what
he was doing, but - as his affair with Soon-Yi showed - it certainly
didn't change what he did.
He hinted, however, that the contentment of his life with Soon-Yi
had rendered therapy unnecessary. His recent films have moved the
spotlight away from his personal life. But the scripts are unlikely
to dry up: even contentment can be tough. As Woody, the ultimate
survivor, says in Everyone Says I Love You: "Survivor guilt,
that's the worst thing that can happen to you."
