Babes in the woods (10/5/06)
____________
Scoop. [Woody Allen, 2006.]
The simplest theory of comedy is that it originates in the collision of fantasy with reality. Which makes every comedian at bottom an empiricist, and renders it curiously paradoxical that Woody Allen has so frequently managed to come off like a closet spiritualist. This has usually seemed less a matter of metaphysical principle than a dramatist’s gimmick [more or less as the gods in Homer look to the modern eye like a kind of shorthand]: Shakespeare might, e.g., have pissed away two or three expository acts letting Hamlet gradually puzzle out the facts of his father’s murder and the necessity of revenge, but chose instead the more economical device of confronting the prince of Denmark with the dead king’s ghost; similarly though one might affect Freudian prolixity about the maternal origins of [male] Jewish sexual neuroses, it is more succinct [and much funnier] to ruin your protagonist’s rejuvenated sex life anew by letting him throw open the bedroom window to discover his departed mother’s visage hanging inexplicably in the skies over Manhattan like Halley’s comet or the Goodyear blimp. — And thus, also, we have the literal appeal to Deus ex Machina in
Mighty Aphrodite, the turn-of-the-century spiritualistic mechanisms in
A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy, the aliens showing up to speak the conclusion in
Stardust Memories [the only gag that actually works in that wretched piece of shit], the guy walking out of the movie screen in
The Purple Rose of Cairo, and the frequent encounters not simply with the recently deceased but with Death Personified [a character for whom Woody has an obvious fascination] in
Love and Death.
— And the strange but ingenious and amusing device with which this narrative commences: ace British journalist Ian McShane, a veteran of Nixon’s enemies’ list, a man who once bribed his way out of a beheading at the hands of the Taliban, the life of every party-after-the-war, and the nemesis for a generation of anyone who ever tried to hide an uncomfortable truth, has just finished drinking himself into an early grave; and is taking that last boat ride across the River Styx through night and fog to The undiscover’d country, from whose bourn/No traveller returns, when, striking up a conversation with one of his companions, a charming young lady — too young, surely, to be here — who until her untimely demise had been personal secretary to Hugh Jackman, handsome scion of the British nobility generally assumed to be destined for political greatness, he discovers she’s convinced Jackman poisoned her when she was about to unmask him as the notorious Tarot Card serial killer; meaning that only here, on the ferryboat to Hades, has McShane been tipped off to the biggest story of his career: the identity of the 21st-century Jack the Ripper.
Obviously he simply cannot let this matter rest, even if he has to come back from the grave to pursue it; accordingly, he jumps ship [whether the silent hooded sickle-bearing helmsman notices this or not isn’t clear], and makes a ghostly apparition during the London show of lowrent stage magician Woody Allen [whose act is predictably lame but who boasts an admirably fluent lowlife line of patter], dropping the bombshell on audience volunteer and aspiring Woodstein Scarlett Johansson — a pushy and fast-talking but thus far rather poorly focussed wannabe who, it has already been established, is more than willing to fuck her way to the top, but is having difficulty figuring out exactly whose zipper conceals the springboard to success.
The revelation serves to unite Woody and Scarlett as an ersatz father-daughter pair, and makes them constantly squabbling partners in an investigation which owes less to the cinema of suspense than to screwball comedy [Rosalind Russell is indeed mentioned, and there’s no doubt but what Scarlett could be that good], during which they take the shortordercook’s tour of the life of the upper classes — passing on the foxhunt [though a younger Woody surely would have jumped on this one], but taking in private clubs, fancy dinner parties, country estates whose gardens contain sculpted shrubberies so absurdly elaborate that one must conclude these are people so rich that they keep Edward Scissorhands on retainer, and fathomless mansions with galleries full of ancestral portraits, endless hallways, bottomless stairwells, innumerable servants, and many many Evelyn Waugh characters with Oxbridge accents drinking cocktails and chatting one another up about affairs of moment; and providing Woody with the opportunity to drop some of his best lines in years [starstruck erstwhile dental hygienist Johansson on meeting Jackman: “You have wonderful enamel” — Woody to Scarlett on the principles of investigative journalism: “You worm your way in like a roach” — Woody on religion: “I was born into the Hebrew persuasion, but as I got older I converted to narcissism” (he’ll shoot his next feature in Boulder) — Woody to Scarlett when she admits she’s contemplating marriage to Jackman: “You come from an Orthodox family. Would they accept a serial killer?” — Woody on why he can’t live in London: “It’s not just the language problem” — Woody on his paranoia: “Not everything in this world is sinister. Just practically everything.” — Scarlett to Woody on his obsessive pursuit of Jackman: “What are you putting in your Metamucil?” — Woody pretending to be a journalist investigating the latest victim of the serial killer is asked what paper he works for, and says the Washington Post; then claims to have been “the short one” in
All The President’s Men — Woody to the passengers on the Ship of the Dead: “Don’t think of being dead as a handicap.”]
Inevitably Scarlett hoses the irresistible Jackman — who turns out, naturally, to be both guilty and innocent [not necessarily in that order] — and the secret though concealed in a basement is not [another Hitchcock reference, see
Notorious] in the winecellar per se, but in an adjacent locked climate-controlled storage room where the future Lord keeps his collection of Stradivarii.
At the last McShane’s shade can rest in peace: the wicked are punished, the ambitious are rewarded. — Woody’s character gets killed off almost as an afterthought, but it doesn’t spoil the triumph of his heroine — because, the buddy relationship notwithstanding, he’s the expendable comedy sidekick here, and he knows it. — Though he has for a long time been the best vehicle for the delivery of his own material, Mr. Allen is a writer first and an actor second. And for the first time he seems comfortable with this realization. — So this is Scarlett’s movie, not Woody’s. Which is as it should be. — The director is the magician, all right. But the magician’s best trick, as Woody seems finally to realize, is gradually to make himself disappear.
____________The Jung and the restless (8/23/06)
