Looking for the Allen Key

You know, sometimes I wonder if it’s really worth writing about some of the films that get mentioned here – often because they’re so vanishingly obscure or disposable that I can’t imagine anyone else being interested in reading about them. Here of course the dreaded ego kicks in and I entertain fond hopes that people will stick around simply because they are captivated by my prose style (quiet at the back). In the end I only write at all for the pleasure of it, and I enjoy discussing a Prehistoric Women just as much, if not more than a Prometheus.

The latest bout of soul-searching was occasioned by going to see an art-house documentary that is basically the theatrical release of something that was a TV show in America – we really are pushing the boundaries of what qualifies as cinema here, I think. The project in question is Robert Weide’s Woody Allen: A Documentary.

If you can’t figure out for yourself what this film is about, I suggest some kind of professional help and/or extensive immersion in American culture of the past half-century is in order, because surely everybody knows who Woody Allen is, even if they’ve never actually watched one of his films. That said, one of the great virtues of this film is that it takes someone who has, to some extent, become an unremarked fixture of world cinema, and really makes you focus on his achievements and body of work, and realise just what a remarkable career Allen has had.

I’m not really a big-league Allen fan, only having seen eleven-and-a-bit of his movies (I started watching Everyone Says I Love You but gave up in despair about half an hour in), but I still thought I was quite au fait with the great man’s CV – even so, there’s a lot here which really surprised me, mostly about his career prior to becoming a film director. The film tells the story breezily: about how he started selling jokes to newspaper columnists while still at school, was earning more money than his parents as a professional comedy writer by the time he was sixteen, became (somewhat against his will, judging from how this film depicts it) an effortlessly brilliant stand-up comedian, and then parlayed this success into a movie career which continues to this day.

On the face of it, while not a series of unalloyed triumphs, it’s a career path which overwhelmingly suggests success and personal fulfilment. That the film is clearly the work of Woody Allen fans behind the camera is perhaps indicated by the fact that this is much more a celebration of his work than an objective analysis of it – the ‘early, funny films’ prior to Annie Hall are looked at in some detail, and Annie Hall and Manhattan are also enthusiastically praised by critics who contribute. What’s delicately skipped over, to some extent, is the run of mostly dodgy films which Allen has been cranking out at the rate of one a year for most of the last decade – I saw 2010’s Whatever Works myself and was distinctly underwhelmed, and while last year’s You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger was hailed as a return to form, I couldn’t find many nice things to say about that one, either. (It has become a bit of a running joke that every new Allen movie is now hailed as a ‘return to form’ by his supporters, and when Midnight in Paris – the biggest hit of his career, as the film eagerly informs us – came out last year, I suspected the worst and went to see Real Steel instead. Hey ho.)

In any case, the view of Allen as a deeply flawed artist is firmly represented in the film, by Allen himself. His obvious lack of affection for any of his work becomes quite funny, considering how much everyone else is completely in love with it – at one point he recalls begging the studio to let him direct another film, unpaid, if in return they would allow him to scrap the completed Manhattan, which he decided he really hated (let us recall this is a movie which ultimately won the Best Film BAFTA, along with several director’s awards for Allen, and received multiple Oscar nominations). While Allen claims to be a different person from the persona he adopts in most of his films, one has to wonder – he claims to have been a very happy child, until the age of five, at which point he became aware of his own mortality. One also gets a strong sense that Allen invests his film with such prominent philosophical (and often misanthropic) ideas largely as a means of catharsis – at least this way they’re not cluttering up his personal life.

Speaking of which… The film does address what’s still basically the elephant in the room when it comes to talking about Allen’s life, namely the circumstances in which his relationship with Mia Farrow came to an end. Farrow declined to appear in this movie, which is sort of understandable, but it does mean the section on Allen’s eighties output seems a little lightweight given her prominence in his films throughout this period. Other frequent collaborators and performers from his films all seem happy to appear – John Cusack, Sean Penn, Tony Roberts, Scarlett Johanssen, and of course Diane Keaton, amongst many others. The affection all of them clearly have for Allen is obvious, and infectious.

I’m not sure how well this film will play beyond the Allen fanbase, but anyone who’s seen and enjoyed one of his movies (and let’s face it, you’ve got over forty to choose from) will probably find it as charming and fascinating as I did, both as an account of one man’s remarkable development as a genuine artist, and also the portrait of an endearingly flawed and self-deprecating human being.