Summer Film Roundup, Part 7: Notes on Woody Allen

Café Society (2016)

At first I thought it would be Radio Days about movies instead of radio, but it turned out to be something entirely different. 

I admit that I was disappointed when the film abandoned Hollywood midway and resumed in New York, but then I warmed up to it again. In any case, Woody has never been interested in Hollywood or California (see his caustic portrait of La La Land in Annie Hall) and doesn't really have anything fresh to say about its culture. But I loved all the movie references and settings.

It's one of the most the most ravish-looking films Woody has ever made, thanks in part to the brilliance of the cinematography of Vittoria Storaro, who helped make The Conformist, Last Tango in Paris, Reds, and Apocalypse Now look so good.  It was a relief to see Hollywood in the 1930s presented in electric colors instead of the usual sepia, which has become the default setting for any films set in the 1930s.

A somewhat irritating aspect of the film is Jesse Eisenberg's performance. I don't know if it's the way Woody directs the young actors he now casts as his stand-ins, but they always adopt his vocal and physical mannerisms, making you wish that the young Woody Allen was doing it himself and doing it right. Fortunately Eisenberg drops the Woody mannerisms when he achieves success in New York. The Woody persona implies a nebbish and our hero has become a man.

The horse-drawn carriages through Central Park at dawn look beautiful, but haven't we seen all of that in Woody's films so often before? At least they serve the purpose of prompting us to thank God that Mayor DeBlasio wasn't able to get rid of the horse-drawn carriages.

It was good to see Tony Sirico ("Paulie Walnuts" from The Sopranos) again, even briefly.

Woody knows he could make every line in the film a knockout joke as he did in his "earlier, funnier movies," but these days he distributes his gags sparsely throughout his films, almost as rewards to the audience for sitting through the drama.  Yet he has learned to be a very good dramatist.

Funniest line: "It's bad enough he was a murderer but then he becomes a Christian!"

Funniest line that I couldn't believe the character would actually say: "If Jews had an afterlife maybe they would have more customers."

Woody is a liberal Democrat but has no real faith in politics or ideas. He has trouble empathizing with people who are actually motivated by ideas, so the Communist brother-in-law in Café Society is gently mocked, not so much because he's a communist but because he lives his life according to philosophical notions rather than reality. Woody is fascinated with gangsters because they presumably understand reality -- remember the gangster who turns out to be a better playwright than the film's actual playwright in Bullets Over Broadway?)  Unfortunately they put their understanding of human nature into practice in a rather disagreeable way.

Kristen Stewart is superb as the female love interest who embodies both Woody's idealism and cynicism.  You find yourself loving her even after she's ceased to be the person  you loved in the beginning. 

I was delighted by the ending. Woody often ties his stories into a nice little bow with everything too neatly resolved. This film has the kind of ending but I wish more films had the courage to make, where everything is still unresolved and the last shot fades out on a hero filled with regrets.

Not one of the best  of Woody's films but the most satisfying one in recent memory (Blue Jasmine was not so much satisfying as heartwrenching.  I can easily imagine seeing it Café Society again again and enjoying it just as much if not more; I would be a bit more hesitant to see Blue Jasmine again until I'm in a certain mood.)

Who would have guessed when Woody Allen was making  films like Bananas and Sleeper that the biggest influence on him would turn out to be not Groucho Marx but the short stories and plays of Anton Chekhov.  Yet the raffish smile and upraised eyebrows of Groucho are never far below the surface.