Let’s just say it: Woody Allen doesn’t have Wallace Shawn to kick around any longer.
Oh, Shawn is still very much with us. In fact, the diminutive, hair-challenged, nasally voiced playwright-actor has the starring role in Allen’s latest film, Rifkin’s Festival, released in theaters and on streaming platforms on Jan. 28. But that’s just the point: In their previous films together, Allen used Shawn strictly as the butt of a joke. Decades ago, New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael chastised Allen for “using actors smaller than he as his romantic rivals,” pointing to Shawn’s memorably dweebish appearance as Diane Keaton’s purportedly virile former lover in Allen’s 1979 masterpiece Manhattan. Suffice it to say that Shawn’s subsequent cameos in Allen films, as the unlikely voice of the Masked Avenger in Radio Days or an insurance investigator in The Curse of the Jade Scorpion, confirmed that Woody, like the rest of us, did not see in Wally the makings of a leading man.
Now we come to Rifkin’s Festival, the first Allen film produced in the wake of the filmmaker’s high-profile cancellation at the hands of the #MeToo movement, which, contradicting all available evidence, revived long-dismissed accusations that he abused his and former paramour Mia Farrow’s adopted daughter. This has real casting implications. Since Allen’s previous film, A Rainy Day in New York, was cast prior to the commencement of the #MeToo campaign against him, the filmmaker attracted the usual array of top-flight performers, including Timothee Chalamet and Rebecca Hall — subsequently among a legion of actors who, succumbing to public pressure and presumably the advice of public relations flacks, have since expressed regret over their association with Allen. In preparing Rifkin’s Festival, then, Allen had to pick from what was presumably a far smaller pool of interested actors.
So, against all odds, Wallace Shawn has transitioned from bit-part player to full-blown star — one of the very few times, apart from his “role” as himself in Louis Malle’s classic My Dinner with Andre some 41 years ago, that he’s headlined a picture. Here, Shawn is asked to carry the film as our cranky hero Mort Rifkin, a former film professor longing for the days when Bergman and Fellini were all the rage. Mort is married to Sue (Gina Gershon), a go-getter movie press agent. The pairing of the svelte, sexy Gershon with short, paunchy Shawn is not least among the film’s flights of fancy, but if Woody had played the part himself, a perfectly justifiable artistic choice, he would be asking for the sort of unwanted attention one can assume he’s seeking to avoid in the era of #MeToo.
Not that anyone would mistake Rifkin’s Festival for anything but an Allen picture. In fact, the film unapologetically borrows the setting (a film festival) and basic format (an aging, cinema-obsessed nerd looking back on life) from the earlier, superior Stardust Memories. Here, Mort and Sue are guests at the San Sebastian Film Festival: Sue is there to represent a supercilious young French director (Louis Garrel), with whom, in a reversal of her May-December relationship with Mort, she may or may not be carrying on an affair. Mort is there as excess baggage, and he spends much of his time moaning as he meanders through bucolic San Sebastian. He’s alternately frustrated by his failing marriage and excited at the unlikely prospect of a romance with a comely female physician (Elena Anaya) he is seeing for a series of increasingly less credible ailments. “I just can’t wait until we get to Paris so you start me on Lipitor,” Mort says to his doctor, in one of numerous nifty Allen one-liners. No one since S.J. Perelman has been as quick with quips.
Mainly, though, the plot provides a pretext for Allen and his great cinematographer, four-time Oscar winner Vittorio Storaro, to recreate the various art-house classics that loom large in Mort’s mind and through which he seeks to make sense of his life. A daydreaming (or literally dreaming) Mort imagines himself playing parts in numerous masterpieces. On cue, Storaro’s camerawork effortlessly shifts from color to black and white, and the frame shrinks from widescreen to the square aspect ratio of films of days gone by. For example, an episode from Mort’s childhood is realized in the style of Citizen Kane, with Mort mourning the loss of one Rose Budnick rather than “Rosebud,” while thoughts of dread lead him to imagine an encounter with the character of Death from Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal, a nice bit by Christoph Waltz. Allen and Storaro clearly had a ball evoking these films’ aesthetics, and Shawn, who appears game for anything, is especially funny when deposited into scenes inspired by Jules et Jim. Critics may charge that these fantasy sequences are nothing more than confirmation of Allen’s irrelevance. It’s impossible to imagine that many contemporary audiences still worship these midcentury art-house staples as he does. Yet Allen may be past the point of caring. Perhaps he was liberated by knowing that Rifkin’s Festival was unlikely to secure wide distribution in the United States, or maybe the presence of Shawn, paradoxically, freed him from worrying about even trying to appeal to anyone under 70. In the past, Allen struggled when casting younger, hipper stars in “his” roles — remember Jason Biggs in Anything Else? — but here, the filmmaker is unburdened by such pressures: Shawn, sometimes donning the same sort of military-style field jacket Allen has been known to wear, is undisguisedly meant to be Woody.
At times, the film suggests a living catalog of Allen’s best-loved films, preferred philosophies about life, and some of his favorite people: After all, anyone who agreed to appear in Rifkin’s Festival — the supporting cast includes previous Allen collaborators Steve Guttenberg, Tammy Blanchard, and Douglas McGrath — must have had some regard for the man who, in a normal world, would remain among America’s most celebrated filmmakers.
In the end, Rifkin’s Festival has the feeling of a private party Allen threw for himself and any friends still willing to show up. But strangely enough, it’s not an insular affair. The film is lively and intelligent, and its performers are superb: Shawn, with his ingratiating grin and soothing voice, is funny throughout, Gershon can give as good as she gets, and Garrel plays just the sort of pretentious, bongo-playing fool Allen loves to send up. Anyone who has feasted on Allen’s many past masterpieces is welcome to join the celebration.
Peter Tonguette is a frequent contributor to the American Conservative, National Review, and the Wall Street Journal.
