Part of the appeal of Woody Allen movies for a teenager like me, twenty-five years ago, was that they offered a glimpse into a sophisticated, very adult world. No, the characters don’t make smart decisions in their love lives. Yes, they’re damaged and sometimes pathetic. What I enjoyed was everything that surrounded these people. I was watching their rooms and their walls and the places they go.
In Woody Allen’s upscale New York City everyone is well-read. Everyone has strong opinions about classical music and about every art trend of the past several centuries. They know film history. They go to the opera. Their Manhattan apartments are lovely mazes of books and tasteful vintage art reproductions. Everyone is close friends with a novelist who’s well-regarded in The New York Review of Books. Even Juliette Lewis’s 20-year-old college writing student comes off as cultured as Marie Ponsot.
Allen is comfortable in this setting. Everything about it seems to come out easy for him. I would guess, from my spot here in the peanut gallery, that the characters in this film are accurate reflections of the sort of people with whom he hobnobs while he dines at The Russian Tea Room or plays his jazz gigs every Monday night.
And I ate that up when was 16. The world of this movie couldn’t have been more different than the world I lived in if it was set on Mars and I loved it for that. I rented it at least three times on VHS from a Blockbuster in a trashed-out Dallas, Texas suburb. Flat, sun-baked. The store shared a parking lot with an Auto Zone and was across the street from a Taco Bell and a used tire place. Woody Allen’s intellectuals would have needed a Silkwood shower after one minute in my stomping grounds, but that Blockbuster was where I got my fix of his Upper West Side hoity-toity types in their big city bubble.
Seeing this film again as an old fuckface (it’s been at least fifteen years), I still love it, but for different reasons.
I’m over my teenage fascination for these people and their tickets to Mahler symphonies and their discussions about Russian literature. Today, I even think that Allen lays on his high-culture references too thick (that anecdote that Mia Farrow tells about her work crush Liam Neeson reciting Yeats poetry while weeping at an office party! Yeesh!) He emphasizes over and over again these characters’ rich educations in the Humanities. It’s like he’s trying to prove something. (Even people of great cultural literacy can be stupid about love, maybe?)
Nevertheless, what makes it hold up as a great film for me is something that I had to get older to understand, and that’s what a harrowing take it is on those go-nowhere couples arguments, where little spats turn nuclear in a split-second and nobody ever wins. Allen’s writing cuts clean through the flesh and bites at the bone. He knows all about petty jealousies, stifled grudges, and how we all say that we want honesty in our relationships but we really don’t—because the truth tends to hurt. Moments of this film made me wince because they were so dead-on.
A master of economy, Allen gets right to it immediately. First scene. Mere minutes into the film. Two couples who’ve been close friends for a long time—Woody Allen and Mia Farrow, Sydney Pollack and Judy Davis—are about to go out for dinner. Just before they leave though, Pollack and Davis have something to say. Cool, calm and rational, with smiles on their faces, they announce that they’re splitting up.
No big reason. Just a lot of little things. It might not even be permanent. It’s just something that they’re trying out.
Meanwhile, Mia Farrow is devastated by this. She’s insulted that they never confided in her beforehand. She doesn’t like this upset in the order of things. Most of all though, their separation touches a nerve… because her marriage with Allen isn’t going perfectly, for a variety of reasons. Next thing you know, she and Allen are having the severe arguments that Pollack and Davis don’t seem to be having. (This film has a similar skeletal structure to Paul Mazursky’s great Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice from 1969, but this is a whole other story.)
From there, Allen writes the hell out of this scenario, piling on many venomous little ironies. In his typical style, this film is not heavy on plot. It’s loose and easy to follow. Allen writes characters and then lets them lead the way.
Along the way, this also becomes one of cinema’s most potent films about the divorce culture. All of the major characters here were born in the 1930s, 40s and 50s, when divorce was rare. Sometime in the 1960s, it hit an upward trend and now today, about half of all marriages end in divorce. Divorce is Diet Coke now. It’s mainstream and not going away. Part of what this film does is explore, without moralizing, how that switch got flipped.
Two of the film’s most cutting pieces of commentary on the matter slip out casually:
There’s the moment in which Judy Davis (whose performance throughout this film is a monument, just explosive, vulnerable stuff) talks to Mia Farrow over lunch about how happy she is being single after her many years with her husband—we shortly learn that she’s a complete wreck, is a comically awkward date and is lying to herself—and lets slip that she’s afraid of becoming like her parents, pre-divorce culture people, who stayed together through thick and thin and, she implies, are unhappy.
Then we have the scene where Sydney Pollack dissects Woody Allen’s character—Allen’s a novelist of note and a Columbia University creative writing instructor with a penchant for short-lived affairs with difficult, crazy women (“Kamizake women”, as Allen describes them)—and Pollack theorizes that his friend’s major malfunction is that he’s damaged by movies and literature that portrayed love as big, exciting drama and left him perpetually let down by reality.
So, you have a generation who are wary of making the same mistakes that their parents made and who grew up with idealized visions that they took seriously of a future that was inevitably going to disappoint them.
Story checks out, if you ask me.
The faux-documentary approach of this is an inspired touch. There’s very little music, plenty of jump-cuts and the hand-held camera whips, shakes and wobbles in every scene. (Meanwhile, the film is still visually beautiful with an abundance of Allen’s favorite weather conditions: overcast, rainy, autumnal, all lit by the late, great Carlo Di Palma, my favorite of Allen’s past go-to cinematographers.) Then there are the interview segments in which most of the characters tell their side of the story, sometimes contradicting hearsay from the previous scene.
Allen goes out of his way to make this film as objective as possible. Yes, there’s a script and actors, which means that a point of view can’t help but seep into the affair, but no character here is burdened with being the hero or the villain. Allen rarely writes about real villains. He writes about the casual weaknesses of normal people. He writes about why it’s sad and why it’s also funny. This is one of his very best stabs at pulling off that complex trick.
It was bold, caustic, refreshing stuff in 1992 and it still is today.