Woody Allen has made so many movies over the course of so many years that his work defies the broad categorizations we might apply to other filmmakers. In Allen's oeuvre, there aren't so much coherent early periods and late periods as a series of steps forward and throwbacks, advances and regressions, feigning unamity. Allen seems to delight in trying on different vehicles to express his art through. There are his freeform, gag-heavy first films (Take The Money and Run; Bananas); his first gestures towards marshalling his effects to the service of a plot (Sleeper; Love and Death); his metropolitan romances (Annie Hall; Manhattan; Hannah and Her Sisters); his attempts at finding a classically 'dramatic' base for his concerns (Interiors; September; Another Woman); and so on. Often, as one can see, Allen doesn't probe a certain kind of film too much for too long; ten years passed between Interiors and his next stab at straight dramatic filmmaking, September.

In the '90s, we saw several faces of Allen assert themselves only to retreat and make way for another variant, another interruption, or another complication of our idea of what this filmmaker is all about. Alice, Mighty Aphrodite, and Everyone Says I Love You were charming fantasies with an inclination towards the supernatural; they were Allen's most optimistic visions, sacrificing realism and plausibility to construct a perfect universe where everything works itself out. Husbands and Wives, Deconstructing Harry, and Celebrity were coarse, rough, angry movies, with Allen in a highly self-critical mode but also disgusted with the world around him.

At the start of the 2000s, Allen had seemingly returned to unabashed farce with a series of light, seemingly inconsequential comedies--Small Time Crooks, The Curse of the Jade Scorpion, and Hollywood Ending--each distributed in the U.S. by Steven Spielberg's company, DreamWorks. On one level, the decision to return to the Woody everybody loves and to team with a distributor of DreamWorks' size and prominence must be seen as an attempt on Allen's part to reconcile his filmmaking with the commercial realities of the box office. But the films themselves are too idiosyncratic and too doggedly up to their own thing to be written off as a late-career sellout (and it's worth noting that the commercial returns on these films has been in line with those of other Allen pictures.)

While Small Time Crooks--with its satiric study of class differences and astonishing performance by the great Elaine May--seems to me the most all-around successful of these films, all three of them offer tangible pleasures. Hollywood Ending, for example, stands as a report-from-the-front on Allen's perilous state in contemporary filmmaking. The final shot of Hollywood Ending rivals that of Annie Hall in its evocation of personal failure (for we too often neglect to remember that Annie Hall, at its core, is the story of a failed relationship) amidst a world going merrily along its own oblivious way. In Hollywood, we see embittered filmmaker Val Waxman (Allen) and his ex-wife (Tea Leoni) jump into a car, head down a quiet street in the New York springtime, and are on their way to France--where Val's latest picture, despised in the U.S., is a hit. Allen lingers on the shot until the car is far in the distance. In an essay published in Film Comment several years ago, David Thomson identified the long-take style Allen has preferred in the years since his collaboration with cinematographer Gordon Willis ended as similar to that of Otto Preminger. And it can't be denied: Allen's penchant for long takes, which tend to pan and zoom instead of cut in these films, brings to mind Preminger. The final shot of Hollywood Ending recalls the final shot of Preminger's Such Good Friends, with the heroine walking stridently into Central Park, finally free but in a newly unsure world.

This fall's release of Anything Else doesn't sooth those looking to get a handle on where Allen is heading anytime soon. It couldn't contrast more sharply with the three films which preceded it or, really, any film Allen has made in years. Let's begin with the most noticeable difference and, bizarrely, the one not a single print critic I'm familiar with has yet commented upon: Anything Else is Woody Allen's first movie in 'Scope since Manhattan twenty-four years ago. This change in aspect ratio (1.85:1 to 2.35:1) has had a profound and, in my view, positive impact on his mise-en-scene. The long takes are still here, but when he wants to punctuate a scene he's less likely to zoom than to dolly in. (In fact, I can't recall single zoom in the entire picture.) He also seems to be relishing the opportunity the space of the frame offers him to stage elaborate pieces of slapstick (the prime example being a scene featuring an ingenious, perfectly timed three-way split screen, divvying up the action in neat units.)

But most importantly, Allen is making meaningful use of close-ups for the first time in what seems like ages. A striking example is to be found in a flashback sequence in which the film's protagonist, Jerry (Jason Biggs), is introduced to Amanda (Christina Ricci), who becomes his girlfriend and to whom he is instantly attracted. Allen begins with an extended master shot showing Jerry and his current girlfriend, Brooke (Kaydee Strickland), walking along a sun-dappled sidewalk in spring in New York. They walk towards and then past camera and Allen pans with them as they turn a corner. They then run into Jerry's friend Bob (Jimmy Fallon) and Amanda, who is at this point in time Bob's girlfriend. As the quartet chatters, Allen breaks from the master shot to crosscut between several close-ups of Jerry looking at Amanda and Amanda looking, alluringly, back.

Because Allen uses close-ups so infrequently in his oeuvre as a whole and within the specific context of Anything Else, they have a particularly powerful impact when he chooses to deploy them. The crosscutting between Jerry and Amanda instantly makes credible Jerry's infatuation with her, while at the same time emphasizing a distance between them (they don't occupy the same space during these shots) which is a harbinger of things to come. Similarly, the scene in which Amanda is first introduced to the audience--again, in flashback--emphasizes her faults and her charms at the same time. Jerry waits for her taxi to arrive on a rainy summer night in the city. As it pulls up, Allen pans to the pavement whereupon Amanda exits and spills the contents of her purse all over the ground; we see this action before we even see her face and it becomes emblematic of the chaotic nature of Jerry and Amanda's relationship.

Above I write of "the things to come" in Jerry and Amanda's relationship. Paranoia and suspicion are two prominent themes in Anything Else and they are encouraged by the character Woody plays, an unhappy, possibly psychotic school teacher named David Dobel. David is an aspiring comedy writer, as is Jerry, and the two have a strained father-son relationship, the much older David pushing and prodding Jerry down eccentric and possibly dangerous paths. At one point, David encourages Jerry to purchase a rifle. When Jerry is forced to explain this purchase to Amanda, Allen again is masterful in the way he blocks their confrontation: we see Jerry talking literally to a wall since Amanda is in another room. If episodes such as this make Anything Else sound a bit schizoid--with its study of a decaying relationship on the one hand and attempts at over-the-top humor on the other--I don't think it's any more so than a canonized work like Annie Hall. That picture, as you may recall, was well-oiled enough to have room for the wistful final shot I discuss above and the outlandish sight of Tony Roberts putting on a space suit-like contraption (to keep the sun out) in Los Angeles.

All through the body of Anything Else, Allen encourages us to see Dobel's constant stream of advice as morally, ethically, and logically disreputable, even dubious. He encourages Jerry's suspicions of Amanda's infidelity. He discredits Jerry's loyal, Danny Rose-like agent (Danny DeVito), and advises Jerry to dump him; when Jerry does so, the agent nearly dies of a heart attack (in a scene which manages to contain the two disparate strains of Anything Else rather gracefully: it begins as melancholy and gradually switches to outrageous.) Most dubious of all, however, is Dobel's plan for he and Jerry to leave New York and accept employment as comedy writers in Los Angeles. We know this is dubious because we are so familiar with Allen's cinema; it is a maxim that Los Angeles is the root of all evil just as New York City can do no wrong. There is some sort of genius in the way that Allen plays with our expectations; in the end, when Jerry summons the courage to head out for L.A. alone (after Dobel meekly backs out), it is transformed into a moment of possibility, not sadness or sell-out. Allen has never been so self-critical, not even in Deconstructing Harry; as Jerry sits in the back of a cab heading for the airport, and a new life, he is leaving behind some of the principles upon which Allen's philosophy is built on and yet the tone is optimistic.

There is one scene in Anything Else which I am certain will come to join Mariel Hemingway's final line (and Woody's reaction to it) in Manhattan as one of the keystones of the challenging, always mutating cinema of Woody Allen. After a knockdown dragout argument between David and Amanda, Amanda's mother (a wannabe cabaret singer played by Stockard Channing) comes into the room and sings a song on the piano. Allen begins this sequence with a locked-down master shot looking into the living room from the kitchen; David and Amanda wander in and out of frame as they bicker with each other. It is only when Amanda's mother enters the living room that Allen allows movement of the camera; he dollies in several feet and, metaphorically, allows the sublime to briefly enter this hectic, unhappy universe. In formal terms, it is a masterstroke for Allen to only allow the shot to come "alive" once she enters the room. Jerry sits and listens; Amanda has stormed away. But as Channing sings "There'll Be Another Spring," Allen breaks from the master and cuts between close-ups of Biggs and Ricci (in different rooms, in different worlds, but experiencing the same sonic space). In terms of sheer command of mise-en-scene, I've not seen a better sequence in any American film all year.

                                                                 © FILM JOURNAL 2002