Woody Allen, who turns 60 this year, is a relic. He may still look young; he may continue to attend basketball games with the adopted 24-year-old daughter of his one-time consort, Mia Farrow; he may still be howered with Oscar nominations, “as he was in February for his farce Bullets Over Broadway. But he is a relic nonetheless, the last remnant of a time in American life when “even the most critically and financially successful purveyors of pop culture longed desperately for the one award they were sure they could never receive: the mantle of seriousness.”
His latest film, Mighty Aphrodite, is a wan little comedy about Lenny Weinrib, a sportswriter who discovers that the birth mother of his adopted son is a hooker and “porn actress. He sets out to save her life, rescuing her from her pimp and fixing her up with a young boxer. The whole movie is so thin and vapid it would hardly be worth noting except for one thing: It features a Greek chorus. Yes, a Greek chorus — 20 men in robes and masks who shuffle back and forth on the stage of an amphitheater, commenting in unison on the plot.
Allen recognizes that the chorus only works as an incongruous comic device. “Lenny, don’t be a schmuck!” the chorus shouts to Weinrib; Oedipus’ mother Jocasta also appears, informing us that “I hate to tell you what my son is called in Harlem.” (These jokes are funnier on paper than they are on screen.) ”
Allen has chosen a perplexing vehicle in which to employ the chorus, because despite its title, Mighty Aphrodite has absolutely nothing in common with a Greek play, whether tragedy, comedy, or otherwise. The movie has been assembled like a pre-fab house from the elements of every other Woody Allen movie in the past 10 years: New York landmarks, big-band music on the soundtrack, lush trappings meticulously designed by Santo Loquasto and beautifully photographed by Carlo Di Palma. The plot is stale and familiar as well: There’s a troubled married couple exchanging acrid barbs, strange uses of flashbacks and fantasy sequences, and the requisite uncomfortable parallels to other movies (in this case, Fellini’s Nights of Cabiria) and Allen’s own life (adopted children).
So why the chorus? The chorus is on display because Allen is clearly unhappy with the movie’s fundamental lack of ambition. He finds it unsatisfying to make a mild little comedy — and indeed, considering how unsatisfying an experience it is to watch Mighty Aphrodite, who could blame him? His solution, as always, is to indulge himself, to load his work up with some absurdly heavy freight. The chorus lumbers about, gesturing weirdly and pantomiming broadly, with the mimetic correctness one expects from a Discovery Channel documentary but not from a major motion picture set on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, circa 1995.
The Greek chorus may be the most pretentious device yet employed in a Woody Allen movie, although in terms of sheer pretension nothing will ever outdo his one-two punch from the late 1970s, Interiors and Manhattan. Interiors, his imitation of Ingmar Bergman’s Cries and Whispers and his first “serious” movie, featured dialogue so wretched that it became clear Allen believes seriousness and humorlessness were ultimately the same thing. ” Suddenly,” one Interiors character says, “I became hyperaware of my body.” Another character denounces her new mother-in-law with this telling epithet: “She’s a . . . VULGARIAN!” Would that be East Vulgaria, or Vulgaria Minor?
But Allen’s masterpiece of pretension surely has to be Manhattan, in which he attempts to make fun of intellectuals but only shows his desperate yearning to be counted among their number. His characters spend the movie dropping names from Thomas Mann to Isak Dinesen; it’s a trait Allen seems to want to parody, but he is more guilty of it than they. “I saw your article on Brecht in the Atlantic Monthly,” someone says to literary critic Diane Keaton; “Yes, I’ve always been a sucker for Germanic theater,” she replies. Brecht is a German writer, not a Germanic writer.
After those two films, Allen’s writing took a turn toward the awkward and flowery from which it has never returned. “It is September,” says a character in Hannah and Her Sisters. “Soon it will be fall.” That would be the general sequence of events, it’s true. In Radio Days, the best of his later movies, characters celebrate New Year’s Eve on a rooftop, uttering fortune-cookie profundities like, “The years! Where did they all go? Time flies. Things change.” It matters that these are all lines spoken by Gentiles; Allen seems to labor under the misapprehension that WASPs are so refined and precious that they don’t use contractions.
Despite all this, there’s something touching about Allen’s pretentiousness, because it suggests that despite his fame, his Oscars, his Bentley, his three collections of stories, his hit plays, he is dtill a New York University dropout, desperate to prove to the college graduates and the Ph.D.s that he is not just some dilettante. “I was thrown out of college for cheating on my metaphysics final,” he once quipped in his wondrously funny stand-up comedy act. “I looked within the soul of the boy sitting next to me.”
That was a joke, but it reflected a deep-seated intellectual anxiety. Like most self-educated people, Allen simply has to let people know that he, too, is well-read. For years, he let interviewers know that he sat around reading the works of the 19th-century German philosopher Schopenhauer “for fun,” and that his original title for Annie Hall was the psychiatric term ” Anhedonia.” He made an entire movie, Love and Death, to demonstrate how well-versed he was in the cliches of the 19th-century Russian novel. (This time, it paid off; Love and Death is one of the six or seven best American comedies.)
This yearning for intellectual respectability was considered a mark of Allen’s importance. In this, as in so many other ways, Allen reflected the aspirations of his loyal New York audience, a world of people who read book reviews as though they were books and whose idea of a profound literary experience is a gussied-up trash novel like Donna Tartt’s The Secret History or Peter Hoeg’s Smilla’s Sense of Snow. For more than a decade, before the taste for post-pubescent girls he revealed on celluloid in Manhattan was made flesh in the person of his semi-stepdaughter, Soon-Yi Previn, America’s foremost wannabe was unquestionably one of the nation’s two or three leading cultural figures.
His stature was largely due to the ministrations of the New York Times, which has long functioned as his in-house PR department; it is a mark of how gingerly the paper treats him that not a single one of Allen’s movies has received an unfavorable review in the Times. Never! And the man has made 24 of them, including such unmitigated stinkers as Another Woman and the unwatchable Alice.
Allen himself has given former Times movie critic Vincent Canby credit for making his career as a director in 1969 with a rave review of Take the Money and Run, and judging from her dishonest review of Mighty Aphrodite, a movie she clearly disliked but still praised, Canby’s successor Janet Maslin is determined to carry on the tradition.
But just as New York no longer dominates American culture, neither do its household gods and their pseudo-religions. Allen lost the Best Original Screenplay Oscar last year to Quentin Tarantino, writer-director of Pulp Fiction, whose position as the hot filmmaker of the moment parallels Allen’s standing in the late 1970s. Even as he was, and is, keenly desirous of appearing to be a highbrow, Allen’s ultimate artistic ambitions were middlebrow — he wanted to write New Yorker stories like S.J. Perelman’s, plays like the Broadway wit George S. Kaufman’s, and movies like Ingmar Bergman’s.
By contrast, Tarantino is unashamedly post-iterate. His influences are the television shows of the 1970s and the Hong Kong action movies of the 1980s and 1990s. He doesn’t want to explore, portentously, the mysteries of the human soul in the manner of Bergman and Fellini; he wants to blow holes in people, in the manner of Chinese directors Ringo Lam, Tsui Hark, and John Woo.
Forty years ago, when Woody Allen made his brief foray into college life, fearsome scholars like Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss were living in New York, teaching works of philosophy to young strivers in their thick German accents while elsewhere in Greenwich Village literary reputations were being made and destroyed in the pages of Partisan Review. That world is no more; Allen and his perpetual sense of exclusion from it are among its last echoes.
The world belongs to the Tarantinos now, and Tarantino is not only a favorite among Academy voters. He is also the perfect creature of the post- structuralist American university campus.
The pointy-heads these days don’t read philosophy and frighten their students; they study movies and suck up to the kids. And their students will go a lifetime without ever knowing there was such a thing as a Greek chorus — unless, that is, they see Mighty Aphrodite.
By John Podhoretz
