About the only good thing that can be said for HBO’s new docuseries Allen v. Farrow is that it rejects the ham-fisted, stylized imagery that has marred other nonfiction projects of late. Having just endured, for example, the cascade of slow-motion blood drops with which Netflix’s Night Stalker attempted to set its mood, I came to HBO’s saga of purported child molestation ready to behold nonarchival shots of broken dolls and po-faced stuffed animals. Happily, Allen v. Farrow’s directors, Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering, whose previous collaborations include the award-winning documentary The Invisible War, traffic in no such foolishness. Unhappily, their artistic restraint operates in service of one of the most slanted productions in recent memory.
Allen v. Farrow opens on Aug. 18, 1992, the date of the acclaimed filmmaker’s famous press conference at Manhattan’s Plaza Hotel. There, speaking to reporters for the first time since the dissemination of sexual abuse allegations against him, Woody Allen decried former partner Mia Farrow’s “unconscionable and gruesomely damaging manipulation of innocent children” — namely, the couple’s adopted daughter Dylan. According to both Farrow and the 7-year-old, Allen had long engaged in a pattern of inappropriate behavior toward the child, culminating in an act of overt molestation at Farrow’s Connecticut home earlier in the month. Allen denied all accusations at the time and has remained steadfast in his repudiation for the last three decades.
A beneficiary of Farrow’s professional interest in visual documentation, HBO’s series makes use of contemporaneous home videos and photographs as well as retrospective commentary from Allen’s accusers, friends of the family, and assorted journalists. Allen declined to participate. Together, the project’s sources tell a story whose broad outline is not in doubt. Throughout the 1980s, Allen and Farrow conducted a long romance that saw Allen serve as an inconstant father figure to Farrow’s nine children, several of whom had been adopted by Farrow in the previous decade. In the early 1990s, Allen commenced an affair with Farrow’s college-age daughter Soon-Yi Previn, a relationship that continues to this day. Unsurprisingly, the Soon-Yi situation represents a point at which Farrow’s and Allen’s narratives diverge. For Farrow, Allen’s interest in a post-adolescent woman 35 years his junior is evidence of an abiding pedophiliac compulsion. In Allen’s telling, captured in press reports and media archives, Farrow is a woman scorned, an aggrieved fabulist whose accusations are the fruit of a betrayal in love.
Though HBO’s docuseries is firmly on the side of the Farrows, the show breaks little new ground for viewers familiar with the case and contains no smoking gun through its first three episodes. Bereft of hard proof, the program relies instead on the outrage of Allen’s enemies and the misty-eyed accounts of his accusers, who must, according to contemporary standards, be automatically “believed.” The one novel element produced by Dick and Ziering, a never-before-seen video of Dylan’s 1992 allegation, is gut-wrenching but by no means dispositive. Indeed, one could argue that the most effective “evidence” in the series is its footage of Allen and Dylan Farrow at play. Nothing in these recordings supports her claims, of course, but even innocent behavior on the famous director’s part can seem menacing when accompanied by mournful piano music and viewed in the context of purported abuse.
Less manipulative but sillier by far are the program’s attempts to condemn Allen by examining his body of work, an undertaking that combines film criticism with amateur psychoanalysis. According to this way of thinking, Manhattan, which places Allen’s character in a relationship with a 17-year-old, is akin to a signed confession. Similarly suspect are Mighty Aphrodite, Husbands and Wives, and the 2009 film Whatever Works, all of which pair mature actors with younger ingenues. Though the series explores this thesis at painful length, its most absurd moment comes courtesy of Vox’s Alissa Wilkinson, who suggests, in an astonishing sequence, that Allen’s May-December subplots are themselves a grooming tactic directed at female moviegoers. (“Does she think he’s going to come through the screen?” my wife joked.) Among the clips with which Dick and Ziering illustrate the point is an exchange between Martin Landau and Anjelica Huston in Crimes and Misdemeanors. Huston was 37 years old when that picture was filmed.
Fanciful hypotheses to one side, Allen v. Farrow’s gravest flaw may be its failure to treat its subject with the solemnity that it deserves. Consider, for example, an interlude in the second episode in which Farrow’s friends bemoan Allen’s monopolization of her talents for his own movies. This charge, it hardly needs to be said, is grotesquely beside the point. If Allen is a child molester, who could possibly care that he once convinced Farrow to share his agent? If he isn’t, then the grievances on display are mere Hollywood gossip, of interest to no one but film historians and the half-dozen surviving members of the Mia Farrow Fan Club.
It is a measure of Allen v. Farrow’s one-sided story that even leftist critics have taken note of the program’s biases. Hence Sophie Gilbert’s assertion, in the Atlantic, that “the show’s narrative is too determinedly focused for any nuance that might complicate its momentum.” Hence Hadley Freeman’s declaration, in the Guardian, that the documentary “sets itself up as an investigation but much more resembles PR.” Though space limitations preclude a full accounting of the exculpatory details ignored by Dick and Ziering, readers can easily find them in Daphne Merkin’s Vulture profile of Soon-Yi Previn or in Moses Farrow’s 2018 blog post “A Son Speaks Out.” We will probably never know what did or didn’t happen in a Connecticut cottage 29 years ago. But there is far more to the story than is told here.
In the end, the most important question may be whether we, the inheritors of Western civilization, can rightly condemn a man simply because his accusers are unwavering. I, for one, refuse to do so. It is just possible that Allen is a child molester, a liar, and a brazen sociopath. I’ll be watching one of his movies tonight.
Graham Hillard teaches English and creative writing at Trevecca Nazarene University.
