Fantasy world

Woody Allen is increasingly out of place in his own films

Woody Allen has completely succumbed to his own shtick. A caricature of the erudite Manhattanite, he is as recognizable an archetype in his thick black glasses and tweed jacket as the Michelin Man or Donald Duck.

Other actors occupy roles, but Allen bobs and darts and jokes with a cartoonish mania that never quite jibes with the rest of the mise en scene. He has begun to look Zelig-like — an improbable persona inserted into movie fiction. His rapid-fire wisecracks and his aphrodisiac appeal for beautiful women are becoming less a believable element of story and more an awkward insertion of his own ego. The resulting film tends to react like a healthy body invaded by pathogen — with great distress.

In the relatively conventional premise of Allen’s latest film, Hollywood Ending, the movie industry has been overtaken by money-minded managers with no concern but for the bottom line.

Enter Val Waxman (Allen), a lapsed but brilliant director with no small resemblance to Allen himself. Hired by his ex-wife (Tea Leoni) to direct a period picture about old New York, the struggling Val sees an opportunity to escape the gulag of geriatric diaper commercials and deodorant ads for quality pictures.

“Val cares about movies,” Leoni intones to an unconvinced power summit of Hollywood big-wigs, including Treat Williams as the Galaxy Studio chief and his perennially tan himbo sidekick George Hamilton. Galaxy decides to take a gamble on the Little-Auteur-Who-Could, but a complication arises when Val is struck blind with a psychosomatic illness during the production. Hiding his affliction from the Galaxy execs, Val has to rely on his Chinese cameraman’s interpreter to guide-dog him through the production.

The scenes of the ultra-serious straight-laced interpreter trying to be Val’s eyes are really the film’s best because slapstick suits the overall vaudevillian absurdity of the film. To its nominal credit, there are also some spicy quips, in-jokes about Peter Bogdanovich, cracks about pharmaceutical-chic and jabs at Hollywood inanity. But when the film diverts from Allen’s knee-thumping slapstick forte, things grind to a rubber-burning halt.

While other directors seem drawn to filmmaking for the ability to create a seamless fictional world of their own invention, Allen’s films exhibit an entirely different impulse. He’s like a kid who wants to wear his Halloween Batman costume all year long as he clearly loves to immerse himself in his film fictions. But for viewers who haven’t warmed to Allen’s particular wormy, narcissistic shtick — his sexual banter with improbably gorgeous women, the jealousy he inspires in men, his directing brilliance — the whole rigmarole can be quite grueling. The entire ambiance of Hollywood Ending is like a sitcom in which Allen has cast himself in a reoccurring role as a loveable, curmudgeonly neighbor living on the most glamorous block in town. The element of fantasy involved in such propositions will be perfectly clear to anyone who has seen the “reality” of Allen’s life — something along the lines of a week at the old folk’s home — as documented by Barbara Kopple in Wild Man Blues.

A film like Hollywood Ending could be taken as farce if Allen didn’t so clearly love, love, love the world and the pretentious debate between Manhattan integrity and L.A. superficiality. And considering the rapidity with which Allen has begun to churn out his films, it is becoming more and more difficult to distinguish between the crass commercialism of Hollywood Allen so often lampoons and his own shtick-by-numbers.??