It's been a long time since Alvy Singer wooed Annie Hall: on December 1, Woody Allen will be 70. But while that may make his boomer audience feel old, he himself isn't giving much ground to the Grim Reaper. You can still set your watch by his production schedule: almost every year for nearly four decades he has written and directed a new picture—the Joyce Carol Oates of the movies—and this year has been no different. He is set to release his latest in December, the excellent Match Point, a moral thriller, featuring Scarlett Johansson, Emily Mortimer, and Jonathan Rhys-Meyers, which he shot in London during the summer of 2004.
And on a dull August morning in 2005, he is in London again, on Craven Terrace in Bayswater, reshooting a scene from Scoop, his 36th feature as a writer-director, which will be released sometime next year. It's a newspaper comedy, also starring Johansson, along with Hugh Jackman, Ian McShane, of Deadwood fame, and Allen himself. (He won't divulge the plot, but says it's not based on the Evelyn Waugh novel of the same name.) The scene in question, first attempted some days earlier, was marred by a sentence of dialogue Allen doesn't like, and so the crew has returned to the street for another try. It's an extended walking-talking shot in which Allen is caught in animated conversation with Johansson, who is wearing an open white shirt over a gray tank top. The scene ends up inside a launderette. Switching back to director mode, Allen says "Cut!" and then, "Good take, but the mike popped out of her cleavage, so we didn't get sound. We have to do it again."
Dressed down and wearing spectacles, Johansson looks like an altogether different person from the bombshell she plays in Match Point. At the end of their second collaboration, she and Allen have achieved an easy camaraderie. Full of energy, she bounces up and down in front of him. He steps backward in mock alarm, muttering, "Watch it—I'm fragile." She even has an array of affectionate nicknames for him, variations on "Woody," like "Woodrow," and "Woodness." Despite his attempts to make her look like a normal human being, she radiates beauty and youth. Under a slate sky, her blond hair fairly shimmers and throbs; she looks like a visitor from another, better world, plopped down into this drab London neighborhood populated mostly by Middle Eastern immigrants. Allen blends into the street scene rather more easily, but that doesn't stop a considerable number of locals from recognizing him. They flock around him, requesting autographs and photo ops, which he grants with considerable grace. It is clear his appeal extends well beyond the borders of Manhattan, famously his natural habitat.
There are financial reasons this quintessential New York filmmaker has been shooting in London, but the move also feels karmically apt, a kind of symbolic exile. His American audience has dwindled over the last decade, the Hollywood studios that once treated him like a prince have turned cold, and even New York film critics, heretofore his staunchest allies—the hometown fans—seem to greet each new picture with a collective yawn. It's as if this filmmaker, who in the 1970s and 80s and well into the 90s seemed to connect effortlessly with an influential if rarefied slice of urban America, has slid into irrelevancy.
All of this was dramatized in an extraordinary and venomous front-page piece printed three years ago by The New York Times. The paper's culture pages had once functioned as a virtual Allen house organ, but on June 5, 2002, under the headline "Curse of the Jaded Audience: Woody Allen, in Art and Life," two Times reporters with no particular expertise in film drew readers' attention to the fact that "a grand total of eight people showed up yesterday for the matinee of Woody Allen's latest movie, 'Hollywood Ending,' one month out of the box and now playing in exactly one theater in Manhattan, a $4.95-a-ticket discount house in Times Square." The ostensible occasion for the piece was a lawsuit Allen had filed against his former longtime friend and producer, Jean Doumanian, for an alleged $12 million owed him. But the article's prominence and snarky, gloves-off tone seemed to suggest a larger agenda: to take Allen down. The reporters quoted the opinions of various courthouse hangers-on—"His sense of humor is sort of frozen in the 70's. He appeals to an older crowd"—and even made fun of his physical infirmities. They concluded that "for Mr. Allen … after more than 30 years as the on-screen embodiment of angst-ridden, urbane New York, his long moment as cultural icon may be over." Within Manhattan's hothouse film and media circles—the world which Allen both lives in and often skewers in his films—this was the equivalent of a stoning in the public square.
Allen has become an artist without honor in his own country—not, unfortunately, an anomalous situation. Many of his heroes have shared this fate. Akira Kurosawa found it nearly impossible to obtain Japanese financing in the twilight of his career; feeling himself shabbily treated by the Swedish government for a few years in the 1970s, Ingmar Bergman refused to make pictures in his homeland; and in two of the most egregious American examples, Charlie Chaplin found it expedient to leave the country altogether in the early 1950s, one step ahead of Red-hunting squads baying at his heels, while Orson Welles in his later years was reduced to shilling for Gallo wine. Still, one would hope that in most countries a national treasure like Allen, especially one who toils in a profession wherein selling or burning out is an all too common occupational hazard, would be showered with distinctions, lionized, and fêted.
After all, Allen's body of work is without precedent in quality and quantity, not measured against just other American filmmakers but worldwide. At the risk of hyperbole, or of sounding like a lunatic, it could be said that there is no such thing as a bad Woody Allen film—weaker ones, certainly, pictures that do not work consistently from beginning to end, comedies that aren't quite funny enough, dramas that are solemn and lugubrious, but never a stupid picture, one that is begging to be walked out on. Even his aesthetically unsuccessful films are better than most of the pictures that come out of Hollywood. If you play the parlor game How Few Outstanding Films Are Necessary to Create the Reputation for Being a Great Director, you arrive at a surprisingly low number. Look at some of Allen's contemporaries: Bob Rafelson, one (Five Easy Pieces); Peter Bogdanovich, two (The Last Picture Show, Paper Moon); William Friedkin, two (The French Connection, The Exorcist); Robert Altman, four (M*A*S*H, McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Nashville, The Player); and so on. Even Allen's beloved François Truffaut directed only three masterpieces, all early in his career: The 400 Blows, Jules and Jim, and Shoot the Piano Player. By this standard, Allen is an auteur among auteurs. Among his 35 films, there are a good 10 that can hold their own against any of those just mentioned: Annie Hall, Manhattan, The Purple Rose of Cairo, Broadway Danny Rose, Zelig, Hannah and Her Sisters, Crimes and Misdemeanors, Husbands and Wives, Bullets over Broadway, Deconstructing Harry, and now Match Point, not to mention a slew of very good second-tier films and one-offs, such as "Oedipus Wrecks," the only true gem in the anthology film New York Stories.
But perhaps it's all for the best that Allen hasn't been embalmed by the Kennedy Center or dubbed an American Master on PBS. He insists that although he doesn't read his reviews, good, bad, or indifferent, he's aware the ardor that once burned hot in the breasts of the Times and the national critics has at best cooled, and at worst been extinguished, but that he doesn't care: "All you can say about that is, when you're in the public eye, that's what happens. And you know, there's nothing you can do." Except, in his case, make another movie.
