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Site updated July 10, 2010 |
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Film Comment, 1989
Though it's taken me a few years, I've come to some satisfaction about the end of "Hannah and Her Sisters". As much as I admired the film, I could never swallow that rosy roll of Thanksgiving dinners where passion and security blossom together and guide each couple through the years in the bosom of their gracious family. To my relief, Woody Allen's "Crimes and Misdemeanors" suggests a way out of the treacle. Gooey finales, he says, are what movies are for. We go to them, at least in part, to ride challenges and dangers through to the satisfying ends that don't pan out in life. In this light, one can see Allen winking at his viewers with the very improbability of "Hannah's" ending: he and we know the soothing finale is suspect (certainly we can't expect the likes of it in life) but we want it anyway. We suspend disbelief and the balm helps us along no matter how preposterous or concocted it is.
None of this is overt in "Hannah" beyond the wink of the unlikely ending; it is explicit in "Crimes". While many of Allen's films in the last ten years have broached this function of film (more broadly, the function of fantasy and imagination), none has so ambitiously pitched the assurances of cinema against the frequent injustices of life. Next to "Crimes", "The Purple Rose of Cairo" is a primer, a first run.
Set among loosely connected friends and families in contemporary New York, "Crimes" begins with small betrayals and infidelities sneaking through the verite dialogue that has warmed Allen films since "Annie Hall". A happily married and well-respected opthalmologist (Martin Landau) has an affair with a flight attendant (Anjelica Houston). An earnest documentary filmmaker (Allen), bored with his wife (Joanna Gleason), tries to seduce a young television producer (Mia Farrow); his sister (Caroline Aaron) a warm, dependable but lonely woman, is disturbingly mistreated by a boyfriend. In the course of the film, none of these wrangles comes to a reasonable or just solution. The sister doesn't find a nice guy; Cliff (as Allen's character is called) rips up his marriage only to have Farrow reject him for an affable but superficial producer (Alan Alda). Most grotesquely, Judah (Landau's opthalmologist) murders the clingingly desperate stewardess in some confused, egocentric effort to avoid fessing up to his wife, and he gets away with it. As if this weren't enough, the film's most deserving and generous character -- a rabbi, no less (played by Sam Waterston) -- suffers from an intractable eye disease and goes blind. All the best guys finish last.
Throughout this gravest of Allen plots, the characters ponder whether good is eventually rewarded and evil punished. Can we rely on God, or at least on some prevailing moral force? Allen is agnostic; it certainly doesn't appear that good and evil get their due. The opthalmalogist, Allen's the most pointed example, prospers in the face of his crimes, content at home and work. To rub it in, the final shot of Judah captures him embracing his adoring wife under an archway that echoes the Jewish wedding canopy, this film's most potent symbol of happy endings. Yet agnosticism, however realistic, is too harsh a vision for living. Cynicism, according to Allen, is insufficient, and we construct our fantasies to avoid it.
Whenever Cliff needs a lift from life's disappointments, he spends afternoons at the movies, and in a roundabout way at the end of the film, explains the "fix" to Judah. "Crimes" closes with the marriage of the rabbi's daughter where, in one of those "I'm on the groom's side, you must be on the bride's" conversations, Judah offers Cliff a plot for a movie where a man commits a murder and is never found out. Cliff rejects the story, insisting that the murder affect the man's life lest there be no tragedy -- at bottom, no film. For Cliff, Judah has missed the point of fiction. In the myths and fantasies we create, actions with only ramdon effects are quite useless. We construct fictions precisely so that we may slip -- if only for the duration of the novel or film -- into a world that runs along some rational, ethical form. Patently clear in movies where the bad guys are dashed and the hero gets girl and gelt, it's also true of, say, films about the horrors of war (or, in the case of "Crimes", Cliff's documentary on acid rain). On first viewing, they evince an unjust, irrational universe -- like Judah's movie -- where malice goes unpunished. Yet beneath the brutality lies the assumption not only that war is evil but that we all agree that it is. Grounded and protected by consistent principles, we leave the theater feeling very good about how bad we feel at the sight of suffering. The world seems an orderly place.
A murder and frequent misdemeanors comprise "Crimes"'s "reality" and in it, no score is settled; neither the small misbehaviors nor tragedies get their deserts. But the final chat between Cliff and Judah assures us that we have the right to comforting closure, at least in fantasies and myths -- and that is a happy ending all its own.
Allen risks one more point in "Crimes", suggesting that soothing closure is a proper purpose of religion -- not an opiate but a legitimate salve -- and "Crimes" is Allen's most forcefully religious work. Most at peace at the end of the film is the rabbi, who confidently says that faith in an overriding justice makes life not only bearable but joyous, and he dances at his daughter's wedding, dark glasses notwithstanding. Judaism here is not the nostalgia of "Radio Days" but a pertinent system of thought and a persuasive way to order one's life. Like (other) myths and fictions, it offers an understanding of the world that is ultimately reliable and just, and so comforting. It doesn't matter, any more than it matters that movies are not real, that doctrine cannot be proved. If you jump, into the swim of a storyline or religion, you have already lept into faith. Suspension of disbelief is, after all, belief, however intermittent.
Allen recognizes that religion and cinema are not interchangeable precisely, and gives the rabbi a buoyed calm that eludes the filmmaker Cliff. But you can't fake faith, and if you don't believe in a presiding God you have to... well, you have to go to another movie.
***
Hardly a film has gone by in the last decade in which Allen hasn't considered the uses of fictions. "Stardust Memories" (1980) is devoted entirely to the discrepancy between the lark we believe stardom to be and the embarrassing tumult that it is. Yet as Allen confesses to his viewers the "real" disarray, he tells a tale of anti-glamour in which he stars as the anti-hero -- in short, he spins a second fiction. Audiences are as much assuaged by identifying with Allen, scrambling away from Felliniesque crowds and failing to get a handle on things (who hasn't has days like that?) as they would be identifying with the Barrymores, for as the film winds to a tidy close, they're given the sense of having a grip on their own hectic lives.
Those who criticized "Stardust" as egregious self-aggrandizement on Allen's part also came away massaged by it: if you can't join the rich and famous beat 'em. Allen's critics were offened that he -- their smartalecky buffoon -- dared to portray himself as a romantic lead. Wanting him to remain jester to their court, they mocked his filmmaking when they couldn't mock the character. In the end, those who laughed at Allen the director gave themselves the same boost as those who laugh at Allen's many roles. He is someone we can feel better than. In his scripts that toe the line, he obliges by doing the mocking himself. The 1983 "Zelig", for instance, set him up as clown and the brunt of every joke.
Inserting the made-up character of Leonard Zelig (played by Allen) into the great photo-ops of the Twenties, the film boosts its audience in at least two ways. On one hand, Zelig is our representative who does join the elite (and takes us with him); on the other, he's a ridiculous twerp and we can feel quite superior to this nebish rubbing shoulders with Freud and Mussolini. Best, we feel superior to Freud and Mussolini, who become ludicrous by association with Zelig's tweaky figure and finally are reduced to farce.
Beneath all this play, Allen exposes the sweep of fiction. The moment we cram events (in this case, those between the world wars) into newsreels, evening tv, or memory -- much less movies or books -- we make stories of them. With arbitrary beginnings, middles and ends, we mold them to the meanings we want. Insinuating the ficticious Zelig into history reminds us that we regularly make "reality" into lore that suits and soothes us. "Zelig" and "Rashomon" end on the same note. A minor character in "Crimes" says this it this way: in a flashback to Judah's youth, an aunt remarks that had Hitler won the war, people would think very differently of the Holocaust. The Nazis would've told the story their way, wrapped with their own happy end.
Allen goes on exploring fiction and fantasy in the 1984 "Broadway Danny Rose", a salute to the stand-ups of the Borscht belt resort circuit. These guys made funny stories out of life's lumps, frequently playing the fool, as Allen does, for their audiences' pleasure. In fact, "Broadway Danny Rose" is itself a tall tale -- the rosied reminiscinces of a bunch of comics gulping pastrami sandwiches between gigs, telling (again) the one about the two-bit manager named Rose(Allen) as though his incompetent fumblings were grand adventure. He even gets the shiksa (Mia Farrow) in the final reel.
In 1985, Allen followed with "The Purple Rose of Cairo", perhaps his sweetest homage to fantasy. In the Albany of the Depression, an abused, wimpering, wife (Farrow, again) takes to the movies to get away from her loutish husband, and who should walk into her life but the hero of her favorite melodrama (titled "The Purple Rose of Cairo"). Literally off the screen and into her arms to save the day -- in the movie in her mind. In "Crimes", Allen simply asks the next question: who's to say her solution is any worse than the rabbi's? No wonder they called those chivalrous gents matinee idols. Two years later in "Radio Days", Allen did for Forties radio what "Purple Rose" did for studio-era romances, pitting his noisy, low-brow family against the (imagined) glamour of radio stars who dangle ebony cigarette holders against slinky lamé gowns as they slide through deco halls and the likes of the Rainbow Room. Most of all, Allen pays tribute to the jazz of his youth that no doubt lured him into hours of lavish fantasies.
"Hannah and Her Sisters" (1986), unlike these earlier films, is set in contemporary Manhattan among characters who resemble their audiences, and marks Allen's shift to composing gratifying finales even for realistic plots. In workaday New York, a man who was reckless enough to have an affair with his wife's sister (as the Michael Caine character does) would likely lose both women in a bloody divorce, but in "Hannah" the tangles pan out in the best of all possible worlds, which includes the equally improbable marriage of the third sister with the first sister's former husband "many years later," as Allen lyrically puts it. If this isn't a vote for happy endings, nothing is.
The 1987 "September" was most notable for its sniffly murkiness, but on one point it is clear. Of all the friends and relations who weekend in Vermont, only the show-biz mom, with an overactive capacity for fantasy, has any clue to happiness. Played by Elaine Stitch, this mom believes what she tells herself and tells herself what she needs to hear, a strategy that makes her cheerful and energetic. Her new husband finds her a boon. In a candid bow to the Lana Turner story, it turns out that Stritch's onscreen daughter (Farrow) years ago shot one of mom's boyfriends, or perhaps mom shot him and daughter agreed to take the blame to keep her mother out of jail. In either case, Allen more than raises an eyebrow at this twist of plot. Mom was able to heal old wounds by imagining a happier "rest of her life" (perhaps one needs an overactive imagination to survive such a trauma) but never saw to it that her daughter had as buoying a vision -- no movie in her mind to soothe away fear or flicker images of an easier loved life. Grown, the daughter limps from one unsuccessful love to another, incessantly blowing her nose. As I recall, the rest of the humorless lot (Diane Weist, Sam Waterston, and Denholm Elliot) also love mournfully in performances with the emotional range of post-nasal drip.
Two unhappy women become foils -- or films -- for each other in last year's aptly titled "Another Woman". Gena Rowlands plays a successful but rigid college professor who one day overhears, through the heating vents in her apartment building, a young woman (Farrow) talking to her therapist. Rowlands literally begins by hearing Farrow's story. When the women meet, Rowlands tells her own story, and Farrow reads out of Rowlands' past the "movie" that she needs. With steadied confidence, Farrow leaves therapy; in turn, Rowland's spirit improves as she watches Farrow's tale to its end. She returns to her life with an ease and generosity she hasn't known in a long time -- a resolution that smacked of unreality and suggests a finish rigged for the photo.
Though no one could have seen it at the time, "Oedipus Wrecks," Allen's segment of the "New York Stories" triptych, now seems like a kitsch rehearsal for "Crimes". The emphatic Jewishness is there along with the insistence on happy ends -- in fact, being Jewish is the happy end. Allen's inimitably neurotic Sheldon Millstein has no peace till he gets rid of that shiksa (Farrow) and settles down with a wife his mother could love (Julie Kavner). However much a nebish, he's the only hero we have and he gets the (nice Jewish) girl in the end. Millstein may not have found faith but he has tucked into the fold, a security as sure belief.
Audiences roared at "Oedipus Wrecks," which gave them such delightful assurance that, however troubled, they're not as meshugge as Millstein. Jewish audiences laughed a second time, for nothing is more bolstering than a finale, however joking, where You are best. Who will forget the moment when Millstein, having been given "a little something for later" from the zaftig Treva, lifts a shmaltz-covered drumstick to his lips as the violins soar?
***
A passage in the Passover Haggadah, or prayerbook, tells the story of five rabbis who, one Passover night, became so absorbed in discussing the Exodus of the twelve Hebrew tribes from Egypt that they stayed up till dawn and their students had to nudge them when it was time to stop for morning prayer. The moral of this short tale, the Haggadah tells us, is that whoever elaborates the story of the Exodus shall be heaped with blessings.
The rabbis who snuck this bit into the Haggadah were not encouraging their congregants to recount the Exodus for rote's sake -- the story isn't so hard to remember after one telling, even in an oral culture. At least part of the value of repetition is the pleasure of the telling itself. Exodus has a gloriously happy ending for a people who, by the time of the Haggadah's compilation, were into their second diaspora and looking at centuries of persecution. No doubt these Biblical chapters serve the traditional religious function of inspiring faith in a just God who, having bailed the Jews out of their oppression in Egypt, would save them again, eventually. But the story qua story is an up.
The rabbis, then, offered their people two balms to their suffering: faith in God and the respite of happy endings. One might believe the Almighty would ultimately reward good and punish evil, or one might suspend disbelief and believe it for the duration of the tale. "Crimes and Misdemeanors" comes to the same point.
Though Allen has looked at the uses of myth and fiction in both his Jewish films -- those out of Jewish experience and sensibilty -- and his secular ones, his inquiry is most serious when he is most Jewish. The idiom suits. "Crimes" is better developed than "Hannah", for instance; "Danny Rose" better than "Purple Rose"; and "Radio Days" much better than September or "Another Woman". Casting myths that counter worldly corruption with eventual justice is long a Jewish tradition -- commenting on them, an even longer one. It can be no surprise that the (until lately) universal underdog would relish chewing this bone.
Jewish lore overflows with tales of righteous men blessed in the afterlife after having been beggars in this one. Though this simple soothing developed into the more elaborate heaven, purgatory and hell under Catholicism, the Jesus who promised that the meek will inherit the Earth was a Jew talking to Jews under Rome's boot. Contrast this with the Protestant notion of "grace," born among the richest countries and classes of 16th-century Europe, where worldly wealth indicates post facto one's spiritual goodness. Only Jews, in their unique spirit of fantasy, would say year after year at the Passover meal, "Next year in Jerusalem" (where presumably they'd be free of ghettos and pogroms) when, except by expulsion, most hadn't left their shtetls in centuries.
Self-deprecating humor, classicly Jewish, boosts its audience as much as happy endings. Storytellers made self-doubting fools of themselves so their listeners -- other Jews who had no reason to feel better than anybody -- could have someone to feel one-up on, if only for the span of the joke. Similarly, Allen's viewers most likely feel as insecure and inept as his characters, but as he exaggerates his gaffs and lets us laugh at his expense we're assured we couldn't be as awful as that. If you've ever wondered why so much grief and tsuris flood Jewish humor (or why the Holocaust peppers so many of Allen's scripts), it's because, next to all that trouble, how bad could your life be? The Jewish talent for exaggerating life's bumps is the other side of fabricating impossibly smooth endings. Either way, audiences sigh a little in relief. (You'll recognize the sigh, too, as the archetypical Jewish response. Should some dour neighbor or relative sigh too deeply, as if to say life is indeed that bad, the story and the joke fall flat.)
Neal Gabler understood this taste for fantasy in his "An Empire of Their Own: how the Jews invented Hollywood". With their skills and appetite for storytelling, immigrant Jews went to town in the encapsulated worlds of their studio lots, concocting happy-ending extravaganzas out of their movies and lucky lives. They made Hollywood into the grandest dream machine on the planet because they had such long-requited dreams. No doubt, much of the Pollyanish tone of American cinema in the studio years was a response to the Motion Picture Production (or Hayes) Code (pressure for which came mostly from Catholics, especially the Legion of Decency, themselves a minority with their own interests in redemptive endings). Yet the Jewish studio heads who mollified Mr. Hayes did not have to go to such giddy lengths to avoid his scissors. Having been under the gun for millennia, they were going over the top.
Allen's twenty-year body of work is a kitsch-en sink of Jewish storytelling, with the self-mockery and the paranoid, hypochondriacal exaggeration of difficulties thrown in, along with a taste for endings where evil is trounced and the good guys win -- even spectacled shlemiels like Allen. These tropes bend the course of the secular "Hannah" and "Another Woman" as surely as they do "Danny Rose" or "Radio Days", but in the former, the tradition and motive behind Allen's impulses aren't explicit. No one turns to the camera in "Hannah" and says, this adulterous mess may end hellishly in life but I need a happy ending onscreen so I'm going to conjure one up.
At one of those beaming Thanksgiving dinners, Allen holds his new onscreen wife (Dianne Weist) and, chatting into a mirror with his face reflected back at the audience he asks, isn't it amazing that a couple gets divorced and much lonliness follows and years later the man meets his ex wife's sister and they fall in love and get married? Such an ending is preposterous, but in "Hannah" Allen doesn't say why he goes for it anyway. Three years later, in "Crimes", he does. The characters wonder out loud how to grapple with evil that flourishes and good that's punished, and Allen answers that fiction is the only way he knows to get by. Cinema provokes, challenges and discomfits as well as it soothes. But sometimes, call it faith or film, one needs a fantasy track.
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© marcia pally, new york 2005