We hear regularly of the concept of a living constitution. Now, we seem to have entered a time of living books, films, and pieces of music.
Pieces of art were once firmly rooted in their time and place, but now, they are handcuffed to their creators and are reevaluated accordingly.
We would love a world in which all great artists are honorable and virtuous people, but in the absence of such a reality, what do we do with art?
Few artists offer a better case study of the difficulties of reconciling the personal and the professional than Woody Allen, who, for much of his career, was revered by critics, tastemakers, and Oscar voters as a kind of whiny, phobic counterpart to European masters on the order of Fellini, Bergman, or Rohmer. More recently, paying the price for conduct, actual and alleged, in his private life, Allen has been exiled to the moviemaker equivalent of the Island of Misfit Toys. Yet, the actual qualities of his work — to my eyes, most of his 49 films have immense charm, sophistication, and intelligence — have remained unchanged.
Allen, who was born in New York in 1935 and was a proudly unsuccessful student, possessed an unlikely resume for a future film giant. He was a stand-up comic and writer of light comic fiction, and once he turned to screenplays, he loved sticking it to pompous, artsy types (recall the deployment of Marshall McLuhan to deflate a pompous college professor in the movie theater scene in Annie Hall).
Yet Allen’s decidedly un-cinematic background, mixed with his encyclopedic grasp of cultural and literary references, burnished his reputation as a filmmaker with a difference: Who, the critics supposed, was likelier to offer devastating send-ups of the smart set — Woody or the latest film brat from Southern California? When, in a 1983 article on Zelig, New York Times film critic Vincent Canby noted that Allen was based in New York, “doesn’t hang around Hollywood,” and never attended film school, he was being complimentary.
Allen’s progress from silly, slapdash comedies (Take the Money and Run; Bananas) to more ambitious portraits of the romantic life (Annie Hall; Manhattan) to full-tilt dramas that suggested deep study of Chekhov and O’Neill (Interiors; September; Another Woman) was worthy of praise. Here was a director who seemed intent on bettering himself from film to film, and because his fans included studio executives, he had the funding to scratch every artistic itch: If he sought to make an elaborate faux documentary about a man driven to ingratiation, he did (Zelig), and if he decided to document his weakness for old-time radio, well, he did that, too (Radio Days). “One would have to go back to the silents to find any other American filmmaker who has so successfully — and over such an extended period of time — attended to his own obsessions,” Canby wrote.
Allen’s films can be divvied up into all manner of categories and subcategories: There are films that betrayed this reluctant atheist’s belief in the transformative power of stage magic (Oedipus Wrecks; Shadows and Fog); films that indulged his nostalgia for the B-movies of his childhood, particularly those with (as he said in Manhattan) “beautiful women and street-smart guys who seemed to know all the angles” (Manhattan Murder Mystery; The Curse of the Jade Scorpion); and even films that reflected his affinity for cut-rate talent agents and dum-dum felons (Broadway Danny Rose; Small Time Crooks).
His gifts were, crucially, both filmic and writerly. In fact, Allen emerged as one of American cinema’s most gifted practitioners of long takes, which are not only elegant in themselves but lent his work cadence, rhythm, and atmosphere to accompany his one-liners. Consider the flurry of entrances and exits in a scene in Manhattan in which Woody quarrels with his ex-wife (Meryl Streep) and her female lover, or the moment in Hannah and Her Sisters when Hannah (Mia Farrow), listening to her combative showbiz parents at the piano, turns to the camera, which pans up and focuses on her pensive face. Allen’s use of scratchy jazz records for scoring and an old-fashioned typeface for credit sequences were not mere affectations but signs of a carefully crafted, immaculately styled movie world.
And, despite an avowedly pessimistic worldview that was reflected in such frankly nihilistic films as Crimes and Misdemeanors, Allen could be life-affirming, too: The famous ending of Annie Hall suggests that even a failed relationship can be recalled in a nostalgic glow, and the joyous conclusion of his musical Everyone Says I Love You brings together several of life’s most tangible pleasures — namely, going to a Christmas party in Paris dressed as a Marx brother.
All of this is true, but there are those among us who insist that none of it matters in light of lapses, known or alleged, in Allen’s character. Most notoriously, in 1992, Allen was accused of molesting his 7-year-old adopted daughter with his then-companion and collaborator Mia Farrow, Dylan. Following an investigation, the Yale-New Haven Hospital pronounced Allen innocent, but Dylan, now an adult, restated her allegation in a 2014 New York Times piece. Dylan’s account was sufficiently attention-grabbing to generate fresh interest in the case and Allen’s private life more generally.
Prior to the abuse allegation, Allen had initiated a romance with Soon-Yi Previn, a by-then grown daughter of Farrow’s whom she had adopted with her second husband, predating her relationship with Allen, Andre Previn; some years later, having severed his relationship with Farrow, Allen married Soon-Yi. Although Allen’s supporters frequently emphasize that Soon-Yi was not among the children belonging jointly to Allen and Farrow (Dylan; another adoptee, Moses; and their biological child, Satchel, aka Ronan Farrow), the fact remains that the relationship made a hash of what had been a congested but coherent blended family. As Ronan, now the ubiquitous #MeToo journalist, wittily tweeted some years ago: “Happy father’s day — or as they call it in my family, happy brother-in-law’s day.”
Even those sympathetic to Allen must be somewhat heartened by the fact that the truly bizarre Allen-Soon-Yi affair has not been normalized among the public; somehow, the ideal of the traditional nuclear family persists.
Yet the mental gymnastics required to accommodate Allen’s personal flaws and his artistic gifts are too much for some. The dominoes fell one by one: Amazon Studios thought better of a deal it had made to put up the money for Allen’s films, and actors issued mea culpas: Those who had appeared in Allen’s films vowed never to make that mistake again. His memoir was announced by a big-ticket publisher, pulled, then revived by another, lesser house. His latest film, Rifkin’s Festival, with a decidedly low-wattage cast headlined by Wallace Shawn, may or may not be seen stateside, and with the pandemic, God knows when he might make another film anyway.
Last month, HBO began airing a four-part documentary series on the abuse charge, Allen v. Farrow, unambiguously weighted toward the Farrow family and those sympathetic to it.
Let us agree that Allen v. Farrow portrays a tragedy — if the allegations are true, a terrible crime has been committed; if the allegations are untrue, a grave injustice has taken place — but, since that tragedy concerns a maker of films that were, until recently, generally considered to be of superior quality, that episode has inflicted considerable cultural collateral damage.
There are wonderful things in Allen’s films, from Gordon Willis’s black-and-white widescreen cinematography in Manhattan to Dianne Wiest’s high-handed diva in Bullets Over Broadway to the quaint movie-within-the-movie in The Purple Rose of Cairo. But, for an increasingly vocal crowd, they have become as toxic as lead paint: pretty to look at, maybe, but dangerous to one’s health. In the documentary, critic Miriam Bale talks about committing to watch no “new” Allen films on the heels of Dylan’s 2014 piece, a decision memorialized in 2017 in a piece in the Hollywood Reporter.
In the heat of the moment, confronted with troubling assertions about a living artist, it is at least comprehensible that one may find it difficult to “separate the artist from the art,” as the saying goes. But that work is not only essential but inevitable: Charlie Chaplin’s films are uncontroversially beloved today only because the rather wretched scandals that once plagued him, including impregnating and then hastily arranging a marriage to 16-year-old actress Lita Grey, are simply no longer in living memory.
In a funny way, Allen anticipated all of this: In Crimes and Misdemeanors, Alan Alda’s television producer remarks that comedy is defined as “tragedy plus time,” and although the line is intended to indicate its speaker’s total glibness, perhaps it suggests a way forward for the filmmaker. Only with the eventual fading of the tragedies surrounding Allen’s life will his films be perceived more clearly. And a generation of critics, audiences, and indeed Oscar voters were not wrong: Those films were, and are, good enough to deserve such a hearing.
In the meantime, the conservative disposition, with its emphasis on reality, may give some help: The Allen affair reminds us that artists, like all people, are fallen, and the pursuit of a canon purged of fallen artists will end only in frustration.
Peter Tonguette writes for many publications, including the Wall Street Journal, National Review, and Humanities.
