Woody Goes West: "Blue Jasmine"

With each film, the whole “career retrospective” thing for Woody Allen proves unavoidable–which is ridiculous, considering how he has a film every year, and, seeing the 90+ year life span of both his parents, may well be active into his 90s. But since watching Blue Jasmine, a fantastic serio-comic study of unraveling materialist Jasmine (Cate Blanchett, staggeringly good) who’s tumbled from Fifth Avenue riches to the modest guest-room of her just-making-ends-meet adoptive San Fran sister Ginger (Sally Hawkins), I’ve been on an Allen kick, going through my collection which plays like ambient background noise as I go about my day. Does this happen with every new Allen release? And if so, isn’t having a 14-day Allen immersion kind of like a seasonal cold? Again I’m delighted with Love and Death, fawning over the Gordon Willis compositions from Manhattan and Sven Nykvist set-ups from Crimes and Misdemeanors, and even struggling to watch the why-so-serious September from beginning to end without falling asleep.

Reviews typically bring up how Allen’s either “lost it” or is “back in good form,” so talk about the macro career while mining the micro details of the new picture on hand is familiar, if distracting, stuff. Yet bridging the hills and valleys of yesterday to what’s new can be a positive exercise. Current movies want to pound us to dust with rapid sensory firepower, immersing us in right now without much perspective. But Allen is bent on reminding us, to quote Midnight in Paris (or rather, William Faulkner), the past is not past.  Maybe the bulk of mainstream films are like Allen’s protagonists, such as Jasmine, overpowered by present temptations that impel her to feign ignorance or reformat history to suit short-lived opportunities (when coping with real history proves too difficult).  Blue Jasmine‘s first image has Jasmine fleeing her past in a grossly obvious CGI airplane, while Allen pulls us back into the pre-digital.  Nearly 80 and bearing the same creative sensibilities of someone who cinematically matured 40-50 years ago, Allen is uncannily old fashioned, maybe, some might say, “out of touch”–I’ve seen Facebook posts complaining about how he uses the phrase “making love,” which I guess people in reality never say anymore. He’s still tirelessly punching out feature-length scripts, presiding at an altar like an existential bishop with sacramental reiterations of perennial themes, humor, despair, and, in collaboration with some of the very best cinematographers (such as Willis, Nykvist, Carlo DiPalma, and in more recent years the likes of Darius Khondji and Harris Savides), unshowy though absolutely impeccable craftsmanship.

I suppose if Allen’s “lost” anything–aside from not scaling the heights of Annie Hall, Manhattan, The Purple Rose of Cairo, Hannah and Her Sisters, and Crimes and Misdemeanors (and you know, like Francis Ford Coppola with his ’70s masterpieces, he really doesn’t have to)–it’s his woman foil, embodied by Keaton in Love and Death and Annie Hall, Mariel Hemingway in Manhattan, and most especially Mia Farrow throughout the 1980s, each case reflecting brilliantly on Allen’s male directorial voice.  The collaboration with Farrow was severed, infamously, with 1992′s Husbands and Wives and in a way he’s not recovered. He’s written wonderful women since that period (Dianne Wiest and Jennifer Tilly in Bullets Over Broadway, Mira Sorvino in Mighty Aphrodite, Samantha Morton in Sweet and Lowdown, Elaine May in Small Time Crooks, Penelope Cruz in Vicki Cristina Barcelona), but they’re marked less for stalwart attributes than for self-deluded silliness, hubris, duplicity, stupidity, naivete, and destructiveness (to be fair, the men can be just as bad). They’re in the irrational vein of Anjelica Huston’s scorned lover from Crimes and Misdemeanors, or the manic Judy Davis from Husbands and Wives.  Farrow might have exhibited negative characteristics, for example as the tough-talking mob moll from Broadway Danny Rose or the aspiring ditzy performer who evolves into a sophisticated diva in Radio Days, even displaying facepalming weakness by choosing slimy Alan Alda over Allen in Crimes and Misdemeanors. But she was still a pillar of assured stability balancing out Allen’s misanthropy, a glimmering sentience in the muck of a world given up for folly. Allen has never created as soulful an image as Farrow’s Cecilia, the neglected Depression-era housewife in The Purple Rose of Cairo, gazing up at the movie screen with adoration and fascination, escaping God’s crapshoot universe. Since Farrow’s split with Allen, we’ve lost Hannah and are left only with her sisters.

Blue Jasmine has Allen’s most remarkable character since Martin Landau’s guilt-stricken eye-doctor Judah Rosenthal in 1989′s Crimes and Misdemeanors, and his most potent woman since Farrow. That’s not to say Jasmine is as lovable or exudes the integrity of Farrow’s best creations, but she’s the richest ink-blemish born from Allen’s antique typewriter in many moons. A woman absorbed in overactive delusions, much like the New Age fancifulness lightly parodied through Gemma Jones in You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, Blanchett dazzles as someone who initially reads like a Blanche DuBois reprint, a hungry ghost assaulted by passing shades of departed happiness.  Her wealth went away with her conniving Madoff-like husband Hal (Alec Baldwin), incarcerated for unethical financial behavior.  Tapped out and babbling incoherently about her life, she pursues an artificial dream.  After Allen opens with the aforementioned CGI airplane, she name-drops Horace Greeley, “Go West,” fleeing her infamy and worn-out prospects, but her spirit is stuck in the past, in Manhattan, and in her wealth.  Even though the government has taken everything she’s got, she’s still somehow splurging, flying First Class with the best luggage and casually giving her cab driver $100.  Unable to be independently prosperous–plagued with the “freedom” of free enterprise– she’s increasingly rattled and alone with the damning consciousness of her self-made undoing.  Allen effortlessly relaxes the film in a perfect rhythm of downward spirals and beaming prospects, through San Francisco’s Inferno with flashbacks of Manhattan’s 1% Paradiso. Through different times, places, and economic conditions, Blanchett could be playing two women. But she’s not.  Indeed, she’s not playing one or three women either. What we come to understand in Blanchett’s performance is that Jasmine is an assorted myriad of drives acting and reacting, groping and adapting. Constructed by the contagion of wealth, there’s not really a “there” there.

***

Predictably, Blue Jasmine continues the director’s long-held Freudian notions of instinct-driven human nature and his commitment to exploring human despair, but, rare for Allen, it’s a topical film bridging present day realities to his protagonist’s madness–in this case, an insane economy enabling amoral privilege for the lucky few.  That might not sound like too novel a framework as it joins a corpus of recent Too-Much-Excess pictures like The Bling Ring, Spring Breakers, the upcoming Wolf of Wall Street, and The Great Gatsby (it also suggests that Woody Allen’s The Great Gatsby would, believe it or not, be much better than Baz Luhrmann’s), but Allen’s loudest condemnation of the ruling class, whom he’s always mocked even as he lives and dines among them (remember Rachel McAdams’ contemptible right-wing family in Midnight in Paris, eager to prosecute their lowly hotel maid for some missing jewelry, McAdams telling her sympathetic nice-guy fiancé Owen Wilson, “You always take the side of the help! That’s why daddy says you’re a communist.”), has an unexpected flavor in tying elites to the most famous enemies of human freedom.

In Hannah and Her Sisters, Allen asked his father “How can there be a God if there were Nazis?”  In Blue Jasmine, the post-2008 world leads him to examine a present day Banality of Evil with Hal and Jasmine. The rich get by moral perimeters with a winning strategy of flagrant, casual sinning.  Hal’s affairs occur as openly as his shady financial dealings, with propositions to sexy lawyers, personal trainers, and decorators in Jasmine’s plain sight.   She pleads ignorance when it comes to her husband’s money matters.  She has her habit, we’re reminded, of looking the other way. Hal, meanwhile, even has that heralded bad-guy Nazi line, “There are ways,” when asked how it’s possible to keep one’s fortune out of the government’s hands.  The casting of Andrew Dice Clay and Bobby Cannavale as the uncouth men in Ginger’s life doesn’t simply tie them to Streetcar’s Stanley Kowalski, a macho demeanor juxtaposed against Jasmine’s pretentiousness, but emphasizes an ethnic barrier between the two worlds.  When Augie (Clay) and Ginger visit Hal and Jasmine, there’s a tacit contempt exchanged between the wealthier couple for the earthier tourists.  Though siblings, we’re reminded of the differences between Jasmine and Ginger, who aren’t biologically related but were both adopted.  Ginger ran away from home while their parents favorited Jasmine because, according to Ginger, she has “better genes.”  Jasmine may deny it, but she can’t resist implicating Ginger and her men she attracts as second-class citizens.

Allen and cinematographer Javier Aguirresarobe capture San Francisco in a way that accents ethnic idiosyncrasies (building murals, the multicultural grocery store) in addition to something working class.  The film’s most troubling–and overlooked–chapter, regarding Jasmine’s part-time job as a receptionist in a dentist’s office while she tries to understand computers (so that she can take online classes for interior decorating), addresses an unspoken racial dimension.  Jasmine retreats the advances of Dr. Flicker (Michael Stuhlbarg), who is undoubtedly creepy, but his Semitic attributes (Stuhlbarg’s appearance in a dentist’s office can’t help but spring the very Jewish A Serious Man and “The Goy’s Teeth” to mind) juxtapose against the WASPy “substantial” men Jasmine gravitates toward, like Hal or the up-and-coming politician Dwight Westlake (Peter Sarsgaard), with whom she sparks a flirtation at a party.  All three men are successful, but considering how Jasmine voices bitterness toward the government it’s curious how she has no problem in adjusting, chameleon-like, to the prospect of being a wealthy politician’s wife while refusing to even acknowledge Flicker–the one man who would make demands on her (he chides her for doing homework on the job).  Allen invites us to ponder the dark observation spilled by Ginger earlier: she had better genes (Flicker himself mentions how she has good teeth), and the dark eugenicist mindset that’s explicit in fascism is implicit throughout the almost exclusively white world of Jasmine and Hal’s luxurious parties.

Those “genes” work behind Jasmine’s gears, and miserable as she is throughout her San Francisco ordeal, her luck is astounding when we consider how easily she bags Westlake through some recklessly drastic self-reinvention, rewriting herself as a widowed interior decorator, whose surgeon husband had a fatal heart attack.  And of course he buys it–Jasmine has the poise, diction, and genes (tall, blonde haired, blue eyed, aesthetically sharp) to sell it, even if it’s totally absurd.

The dark haired and ganglier Ginger has different problems.  She struggles with Augie, to whom she’s now divorced, and new beau Chili (Cannavale), both despised by Jasmine as “medial” brutes. Augie’s bitter because Hal and Jasmine ruined his one big chance to be an honest businessman after luck granted him a $200,000 lottery win.  He was convinced by Hal, for whom such money is a drop in a bucket, to invest in offshore real estate, and the money was lost with Hal’s subsequent imprisonment. Augie’s now laying pipe in Alaska; “Go West” isn’t about individual achievement. For Augie it’s linked to necessary servitude to big capital (oil) interests.  Chili, “another version of Augie” for Jasmine, isn’t afraid to interrogate her about Hal’s guilt (“Did you not suspect anything or did you just not care?”), but he’s susceptible to being childishly overwrought when Ginger meets sex-crazed sound system installer Al Munsinger (Louis CK), a “gentleman” who pays sweet compliments before getting dirty in cheap motels.

It’s not about genes.  Things aren’t fixed. Adaptation is aided by inheritance, opportunity–and finally fate (to quote Husbands and Wives, “God doesn’t play dice with the universe, he plays hide-and-go-seek”).  The Manhattan women we see with garish wedding bands can afford to luxuriate in baths, go to yoga, and spend hours with a personal trainer. A child born from money, like Hal’s son Danny (Alden Ehrenrich), can transition from an Ivy League golden boy to an unkempt and addiction-rattled seller of used musical equipment in a matter of years. Under Jasmine’s influence and Al’s “charms” (his craft does, after all, change the atmosphere of an environment), Ginger lies to Chili and irresponsibly leaves her children under the care of booze-drenched Jasmine, telling them her life story, at Chuck-E-Cheese. People change all too easily.

Allen shows this in an early and unexpectedly moving scene between Augie and Ginger, fresh from their lotto win and vacationing in New York, returning to their hotel room after Jasmine’s birthday party. Ginger is disturbed because she believes Hal’s cheating on Jasmine with a family friend, Raylene (Kathy Tong). She struggles to express the suspicion to an inebriated, though affectionate and sympathetic, Augie.  Augie remembers Raylene by name, which means that she also caught his attention (when we see her talking with Hal at the party, her nipples threaten to burst through her dress). Ginger jokes with Augie that she has nothing to worry about, because a woman like Raylene would never sleep with him anyway.  Allen’s banter between the two is very poignant, because the scene conveys how if things were a little different (say, Augie wasn’t the kind of person to tell Polish jokes), he could be as unfaithful as Hal, and the imperfections these two modest characters wear openly make them closer to each other than Jasmine and Hal ever could be.  We also know how misfortune will tear them apart.  Later on, audiences may scoff at the sexual politics between Ginger and Chili as being crude and regressive (“the man always gets the last slice of pizza!”), but Jasmine, with either of her lovers, is bereft of that organic degree of intimacy.  In Allen, love is always seeking if rarely successful, and even when it’s honest and true it treads on fragile thread.

We’re told that Jasmine’s real name is Jeanette, but that she changed it for something classier, demonstrating how the wealthier characters tap dance and shape shift their way through life. Hal can fix some financial glitches by switching a few words around in the paperwork. Even if she’s disdainful of the government, Jasmine isn’t lying when she tells Ginger that she has the pedigree for a life in politics. An empty vessel who babbles about her life to uninterested strangers, Jasmine once majored in Anthropology, the study of human origins, ironic considering how she severs her own roots and lacks an origin. She now wants to go back to school and be an interior decorator, reflecting her tendency to camouflage psychologically, deceiving herself along with others when she’s in the throes of fantasy. She recalls another one of Allen’s great characters, the far more sympathetic human chameleon Leonard Zelig from Zelig, whose insecurities lead him to transform into the guise of surrounding people.  As with Jasmine, he also undergoes “Edison’s medicine” of electric shock therapy in attempts to set his mind right. But in the meantime, he has several wives in accordance with multiple personalities. Both Jasmine and Zelig are strained by the uncertainties of freedom and become aligned with respective evils–the absurd greed of Wall Street, and the Nazi Party.

Zelig is saved, though, by the one person who would listen to him, Dr. Eudora Fletcher (Farrow), a voice from the past who calls him back from Hitler’s circle, the epitome of evil conformity.  Fleeing Germany with Fletcher, Zelig heroically lands a faulty plane by flying upside down. “It goes to show that you can accomplish anything if you’re a hopeless psychotic,” he tells a crowd.  Psychosis almost saves Jasmine too, in her compulsive lies to her prospective trophy husband, Westlake. As with Zelig, her Manifest Destiny is also interrupted by a voice from the past, Augie, who by perplexing chance runs into Jasmine and Westlake in front of the jewelry store where her new ring will be purchased.  He lays his bitterness on thickly and the carefree Jasmine dismisses him, “Can’t you put this behind you?”  Confronted with reality, Jasmine’s defenses regress her from high class sophisto to an unreasoning adolescent.  The blueprint for her new golden pavilion begins to crumble.

Luxury affords Allen’s heroes to live life disconnected and rootless, unbound to relationships and responsibilities, morals and ethics. When we hear Jasmine say, “Can’t you put this behind you?” and later see how Hal eventually falls in love with one of his mistresses and then, without much discussion, has plans for moving on to his third wife, you could speculate that Woody Allen is sublimating some feelings about Mia Farrow and his own infamous affair, his excuse for which simply was, “The heart wants what it wants.” His son with Farrow has, much like Danny to Hal and Jasmine, become hopelessly estranged from him, which certainly affects his creativity (it’s a strain that undoubtedly influenced a troubled father-son relationship in the more buoyantly comic Hollywood Ending).

His condemnation of Jasmine, the architect of her own demise (like Chili, heartbreak and neediness leads her to do something quite destructive with a telephone), might be an attack on what he sees as Mia Farrow’s over-reaction; or, rather, perhaps it is his own self-censure, however subconscious.  Neither the guilty or the innocent can put the past behind them, and it’s the human condition to deny, rationalize, and run. Andrew Dice Clay, a comedian whose star has drifted far from the heights of 25 years ago, almost breaches a fourth wall when he tells Jasmine, “Some people, they don’t put things behind so easily.” It’s a moment beautifully played by Clay (whose work as a Lefty Rosenthal-type in Michael Mann’s Crime Story proved long ago that he had solid acting chops), embracing his derided Ford Fairlane persona by tossing a barely-smoked cigarette on the ground after speaking his piece, the specter of What Could Have Been having the final word before sadly walking away.

Blue Jasmine is an immaculate and fascinating portrait of a scattered identity being painfully exposed, going from First Class airs to rambling nonsensically as armpit sweat builds up on an expensive blouse. It’s a funnier film than it’s been given credit for, and also a richer one, but its bitterness–and sympathy–toward human folly is the lacerating testament of a great misanthrope and human observer. Jasmine has hidden from herself in the ritual of the remembering the lyrics of “Blue Moon,” the song playing when Hal swept her off her feet. But young Danny’s lowly station in life emphasizes how the instruments behind music are used, refurbished, and resold cheaply, just as the slimy Al Munsinger can change a room with a little iPod. Did the Hal she construct from her imagination during that incipient musical moment ever exist?  Did Danny, a holdover from his previous marriage that she’s nearly taken as her own adopted son?  Did anything from that warm and luxurious life, quickly taken away from her, actually belong to her, when she wasn’t even there? The anthropology of Jasmine/Jeanette is a foolhardy expedition, another delusional Manifest Destiny, and now she wanders aimless and mad while the words to “Blue Moon” are forgotten, just a mash of jumbled words.

Raiders of the Lost Golden Age: Super 8 vs. Midnight in Paris

Let me be your spoil sport. The good times of summer, for me, are almost always accompanied by a melancholy taste of nostalgia for the moments while they're passing by: Living becomes an immediate memory, and so, summer is almost instantly sad. Maybe this is a symptom of my biographical youth, my own blossoming years of awareness being, at Valley Fair for example, fed the synthetic sounds of New Wave music, which is euphoric and sad in equal measure, struggling to hold onto its own high (which kind of makes it easy to understand why so many of the artists were on heroin). Strangely, Valley Fair remains an odd time vortex, where I can go back each summer – and still most of the music seems to be underground and across-the-pond pop music from 1984. It's like a doorway to my own hidden golden age, before things stopped making sense, or rather they started making sense. The slippery slope began with innocence lost, from domestic peril, to homework, dating, college, insurance, student loans, rent, and finding work. Before you know it, you're old, and too old to accomplish the things you had set out to do when the Golden Age withered away and you vowed to make a New Jerusalem of sorts. Then your prostate and eyes give you problems, there's gastroenteritis, your hair falls out, your gut expands, and you're 66 and have no savings. Scrambling for time, you beg the ref for a do-over.

The summers of my youth are so synonymous with the movies of my youth, which has become a sort of collective youth for the world of moviedom. In the late 1970s, Hollywood sort of determined that it was stubbornly not going to grow up and remain wrapped in its nostalgia. Before I was around, it was born with Jaws, Star Wars, and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. My earliest memories in a movie theater take me to images of Darth Vader (a re-release of the original Star Wars, I believe), who would become my personal hero, and horror on seeing a suffering E.T. drained of color. I fell asleep often during these early movies, but I was also alerted and terrified by them. Eyewitnesses testify that I had my eyes covered – when I wasn't sleeping – during most of E.T., and even I can remember locking hands on my ears during the Rancor sequence in Return of the Jedi. Around this time, I started "coming to," meaning I was able to begin experiencing moments linearly and process them to my memory hard drive. The images of Spielberg and Lucas, not to mention their buddy Jim Henson, fertilized the mythological soil of my youth, to say nothing of my bedroom. Toys, t-shirts, pajamas, Halloween costumes…and I was hardly alone. Steven Spielberg and George Lucas colored the land of innocence before it was lost, and so it's a place that in maturity many of us are eagerly looking back to acquire, a Lost Grail. I still remember the pinnacle moment, outside the Southtown Theater in Bloomington, prior to a screening of Return of the Jedi (perhaps my third). Handing balloons out in front of Wendy's were Darth Vader and Yoda. I talked to Darth, asking him about his dismembered hand, and also complained about how his action-figure had a cape that kept on ripping. I don't remember his replies. I do remember not taking a balloon.

That was, as they say, "long, long ago." We grew out of our action figures and space age operas. We graduated high school and had dreams. We were set for losing our virginity and going to college. But it never really died, did it? How could it. Most fortuitous for Lucas and Spielberg, and how they miraculously channeled the collective unconscious with archetypes of hope following a period of great social malaise craving optimism, they had not only a triumphalist Ronald Reagan ideology to follow them, but these new things, videotapes. So you could watch these movies again and again at home. You could own them and put them right up there on your bookshelf. Spielberg in particular played it very well with his E.T. Unavailable for years following its record-breaking theatrical release, its videocassette commercial release in the late 1980s was met with fanfare that I can only remember as being puzzlingly bizarre…particularly considering it was that movie, of all the era's blockbusters, that was perhaps the easiest for me to grow out of (though it was also, as an adult, the best one to grow back into). The Force was with Luke Skywalker, always, as Obi-Wan said, and our early movie memories were always with us. On tape. Or laserdisc, if you were kind of rich.

The respected late critic Robin Wood talks about the era of "sequels and repetition": "The success of Raiders of the Lost Ark, E.T., and the Star Wars movies is dependent not only on the fact that so many people go to see them but also that so many see them again and again." Wood argues that the movies feed into our childhood desire for repetition, the same way a toddler, for instance, wants you to play a game with him again and again, doing the same thing…and if he grows tired of it, maybe throw in some slight variations – like a sequel! "The satisfaction of Star Wars is repeated until a sequel is required: same formula, with variations. But instead of a leap, only an infant footstep is necessary, and never one that might demand an adjustment on the level of ideology." Wood, a gay Marxist-Feminist academic, is conscious of the high-brow toil here. "To raise serious objections to them is to run the risk of looking a fool (they're 'just entertainment,' after all) or, worse, a spoilsport (they're 'such fun')…They work because their workings correspond to the workings of our own social construction. I claim no exemption from this: I enjoy being reconstructed as a child, surrendering to the reactivation of a set of values and structures my adult self has long since repudiated, I am not immune to the blandishments of reassurance." The problem, Wood pointed out, was that because these fantasies were being produced on such a prestigious platform, the public – and critics – had a hard time appreciating large spectacles that challenged them with cognitive dissonance, listing examples such as Heaven's Gate (which Wood, to his credit, believed was perhaps the best film released by a Hollywood studio decades following its release), Blade Runner, and The King of Comedy. And it is worth mulling over, isn't it? What are the all-time box office champions since the Spielberg-Lucas era, but wish-fulfillment fantasies? Star Wars, E.T., the Indiana Jones films, Jurassic Park, Titanic, Avatar… In 1972, The Godfather became the all-time box office champion, and it has as gloomy an ending that anyone could conceive; the same could be said of its usurper from the next year, The Exorcist, where Satan is cast out but with too many ambiguities for our comfort.

Wood wrote his critique on Spielberg and Lucas era cinema decades ago, claiming not to blame the filmmakers as much as he blames the critics. But what sticks out today is this: "The success of the films is only comprehensible when one assumes a widespread desire for regression to infantilism, a populace who wants to be constructed as mock children…The films are obviously very skillful in their handling of narrative, their resourceful, ceaseless interweaving of actions and enigmas, their knowing deployment of the most familiar narrative patterns."

Flash forward. Was it so coincidental that around the time a lot of us kids got to graduating high school and being readied for adulthood, George Lucas re-released the original Star Wars trilogy in theaters? The appetite of Geekdom had been primed and ready for the new trilogy beginning in 1999, regardless of how bad The Phantom Menace was (Lucas' return is, perhaps, one of the worst movies I've ever seen; it points to how Godfather III may have been a disappointment, but was also a good movie; The Phantom Menace was simply dire). Peter Jackson further fed into it with The Lord of the Rings. Throughout that decade, the post-modern cultural reflexivity of Kevin Smith and South Park tickled many of us with nostalgic mirth, both often being very intelligent and prescient. I admit this is a subject that has perhaps exhausted itself. But the Geek Generation, stirred into consciousness by the Star Wars paradigm – which also was in its own way compliant with the death of the New Hollywood of the 1970s – was now back with a vengeance. The illusion of special effects became a part of everyday life, with virtual images gliding along our phones and laptops at every moment, avatars pinpointing our unconscious Force-driven personas. The things we adored as children were reinvented for us as adults: our Star Wars indulgences, extraterrestrials, comic book heroes, videogames, weekly television characters, cartoons (The Smurfs are around the corner), and finally, toys (Transformers, an immensely profitable trilogy now). Jesus Christ. Board games are next.

Maybe my own experience of J.J. Abrams' new film, Super 8, was tainted by how it was the first motion picture I viewed after luxuriating with Terrence Malick's own descent into youth, The Tree of Life, for about a week (not including two weeks following my first screening, where the images persisted in invading my mind). But now it is not the hidden attic or underwater bedrooms that existed before your awareness, or the enigma of a plesiosaur pondering its wound, pointing direction to the Self, but the mass market toys you bought and TV shows you watched. In Abrams' film, the television becomes a marker for Truth, after all, as the adolescent characters express their certainty of a disaster-movie moment (a hilariously hyperbolic train derailment) only after they see the wreckage on the news.

Before thinking about Super 8, maybe I'm reading Abrams all wrong. He is very clever, but perhaps he's also a master ironist and is making sly commentary on the form that embraces him as its new master (M. Night Shyamalan was once dubbed by Newsweek "The New Spielberg," but that hasn't turned out so well…) Super 8 expresses a deep love for movies in its Spielbergian nostalgia, and it will certainly prove a steady crowd pleaser and perhaps become the sleeper hit of the summer. Its successes are more in line with Richard Donner's film of Spielberg's production The Goonies than to the maestro's own E.T.
Super 8 is a work that, taken on its own terms, is fairly humble and structured to do nothing other than please (though, for my money The Goonies is still better). But it's that air of nostalgia, even so, that will unnecessarily elevate it for a lot of people, who is simulating their pasts will believe that they've seen, I'm predicting, the best film of 2011…which is kind of what Abrams wants. He's made a Goonies or Gremlins-caliber Spielberg production, but it's so lushly dressed up as Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T. The Extra Terrestrial, particularly in how well it hones Vilmos Zsigmond's and Allan Davieu's cinematography respectively, that the artifice, with a perfectly structured plot that works like a screenwriting teacher's dream (again, mark the contrast with The Tree of Life, a screenwriting teacher's nightmare), will sing audiences in search of lost time to rapture.

All credit to Abrams, who is a masterful engineer and has learned well from his mentor in how to trigger effects within the public. If the enthrallment of Geekdom has met with subpar critical success in movies (where it still secures a lot of money), on television it has proved endurable. Abrams is maybe emblematic of the problem cinema faces when set alongside contemporary television. Abrams' own shows, such as Alias and Lost, have a devoted following linked to their quality, which its fans would say is equal to that of respectable moviemaking. Television is not a weekly escape or ritual in Abrams' TV universe. It ranks alongside shows such as The Sopranos, House, Mad Men, etc. It is something a viewer immerses in. Most people with Netflix accounts do not use it to watch old movies, but rather to be kept up to date with television shows…which keep on coming. Lost is roughly a 200-hour movie. And quality television is primarily plot driven, week after week, with a host of new writers and directors recycling familiar characters. Even if they are well developed, the element that primarily drives the viewer's interest, as in a soap opera or serial, is what happens. In this process, the viewer primarily coasts over the surface of water on a joyride – but rarely gets submerged in the ocean. The experience is rich in content only. And that's fine, for Abrams: it is handled frugally, efficiently, properly. And it generates revenue.

Abrams has been successful in applying his plot-driven material for movies, as a producer of gimmick-based curiosities like Cloverfield, and as a director, interestingly of other peoples' material: Mission: Impossible III, the wildly successful reboot of Star Trek (considered by some to be the best film of 2009), and now Super 8. And yet his childish enthusiasm might be a hindrance. Star Trek was well-done, even getting the long-forgotten camera glares in the photography of outer space, which had been missing for as long as Douglas Trumbell's been an old codger. But for me, the reflexive winking stifles the material from being anything more than a geek fan's wet dream. The soul is there, but it's still like one of Steven Spielberg's mechas from AI: Artificial Intelligence. It is close, but not quite Orga.

Super 8 is Abrams' own original screenplay, but it wants us to know that it is the lost Spielberg film that never happened, set in 1979-1980, as the decade turned over and one paradigm of cinema gave way to another, Raging Bull and Heaven's Gate being a coda while Raiders of the Lost Ark, Rocky II, and The Empire Strikes Back bespoke the traits of the new. It is a personal story, about a young filmmaker finding his voice among friends in suburban Ohio, emulating his heroes and the movies than inspired him (in this case, a zombie film). Abrams apparently grew up in the industry with his father, and apparently was also instrumental in shaping John Carpenter's cutting of Escape from New York during a test screening, with the successful elder filmmaker taking the adolescent's advice for shaping a scene. His finished zombie film got Spielberg's attention and he went to work for the maestro/mogul. Super 8 is a love-letter to Spielberg and to Abrams' youth (for many of us, the two – Spielberg and our youth – are synonymous), who is credited here as a producer and, for the first time in many years, has allowed his Amblin Entertainment logo (with Elliot and E.T. on their mythic bike-ride) to open the film. There's then something loving here, something about memories and linking the sentiment of memory to film (we see the word "Memories" at a film developing shop frequented by the boys).

We also see the master engineer understanding his craft, as when the director/writer of the zombie film, the obese character Charles (Riley Griffiths), mentions a new scene: he needs his zombie-hunting detective to have a scene with a wife, where she begs him to stay home and not go. Why? Because it will make the audience care for them. It's about "story," Charles says. "You feel for them so you don't want them to die." The characters are given soul and we are given involvement and a reason to be interested. The Abrams alter-ego, the makeup artist Joe Lamb (Joel Courtney) is given reason for us to care about him, because he is grieving the death of his mother, who died in a tragic – and grisly – factory accident. His own dad, a police deputy (Kyle Chandler), is forced to become an active father and fill in the mother's gap, but wants to keep Joe away from his zombie-movie friends and enlist him in baseball camp. The kicker is that the actress Charles wants to cast as his detective-protagonist's wife is Alice Dainard (Elle Fanning), the daughter of the drunk indirectly responsible for the death of Joe's mom. There's thus friction between the two dads, while at the same time Alice is the girl of Joe's – and Charles' – dreams.

In other words, with the set-up, Abrams has given us a lot of plot devices connected to characters and how they feel for each other – which function to engage us dramatically. His movie can go full steam-ahead as long as he has the obligatory scenes that verbalize these emotions (such as fat-kid Charles voicing his resentful attraction of Alice to his best buddy…which really comes out of nowhere). And yet, I'm not sure that Abrams with his narrative smorgasbord gives us anything to chew on and richly ingest. It's all plot. It's television. It's simulation with the good and clever writing and one-liners of one of his shows. Indeed, this has much to recommend about Super 8. Like Spielberg's early films, the kids here talk as much like suburban pals growing up as can be put into a PG-13 movie (we even have an older character, the photo lab pothead in lust with Charles' sister – the hot one, mind you – drop the 'f' bomb). Spielberg's family films, even E.T., were not sanitized as too many are today (Elliot would never call someone a 'dickweed' in 2011; hell, the federal agents lost their guns in favor to walkie-talkies in 2002).

But I'm stuck on Charles, the director, talking to Joe about what makes us care about a character, and not wanting anyone to die. This, for me, hints to one of Super 8's weaknesses (if I'm not going to give it an ironic reading). For though we care about the kids, all of whom are well-grounded and do great work here, and maybe a couple of the adults like Joe's grieving pop, along with the comic relief of Charles' big and wealthy family, most everyone else lacks any depth here. The villains, government spooks trying to cover up the existence of an alien monster, are flavorless in their antagonism. One may allege a similar complaint about E.T., but those government scientists were not necessarily villains, and one of them (Peter Coyote) even has a certain kinship for Elliot ("I was just like you when I was your age."), and so they fit into the architecture of Spielberg's love song for loss in adolescence. We could say a major problem with big special effects movies is the hollow treatment afforded most secondary characters. They are docile bodies, disposed of conveniently, like the Enterprise crewmembers wearing red (I think it's red). Meanwhile, explosions and hurtling metal thrash everything everywhere in sharp shooting shapes – while the human body usually remains untouched. Abrams gives an example of this during many of his elaborate CGI disaster-movie set-ups, where the action is so hyperbolic that it must be experienced humorously (and so makes me wonder if there's more to Abrams' film than meets the eye). He begins his film with Joe's friends contemplating over the dead mother's coffin, their thoughts pertaining to the reality of her body. She was apparently flattened. Is there anything in there? If there is, what does it look like? The unseen, mangled remains are linked to the surviving son's mourning. For real people that we care about, bodies are real.

But what about people that we don't care about? The alien monster of Super 8 collects bodies and technological contraptions in constructing a spaceship to leave Earth – and its nourishment. We don't really care about anyone taken by the monster (aside from Alice, who becomes the object of desire that Joe and company have to heroically save). There is no emotional investment. I want to believe – and maybe this intuition is correct and so is redemptive of Abrams' otherwise middling effort – that Abrams is making a pointed commentary on how we interpret and care for characters. This reading is given some credence by how we may think about the monster, who is no E.T., either as a narrative/cinematic invention or as a cuddly projection of the hero's longing. The creature, pure fleshy plasticity in its CGI glory, seems to be an embodiment of cinematic visual wizardry. It is the technology of special effects cinema run amok, tainted and maladjusted, made hateful by how its handlers (the government spooks…or the faceless studio heads) have mishandled it. Only one character, a well-meaning scientist, understands the creature. Its thoughts and emotions have been linked to him since it grabbed him during laboratory research: "The moment we made contact, we understood each other….This creature is more sophisticated than any of us….We've turned him into an enemy."

One of the gifts of Spielbergian fantasy was how he manipulated us: in his special effects landscape of awe and sentiment, we felt exactly what he wanted us to feel, the grandest example being the connection between Elliot and E.T., where the alien watches a John Ford romance on the television, while at school Elliot re-enacts the passionate movie kiss that E.T. is looking at: Spielberg is E.T., touching us from a distance. Other examples would be the similar astonishments of the alien spacecraft at Devil's Tower in Close Encounters, or the Well of Souls in Raiders of the Lost Ark, which are ingenuous moments born by the director's team of visual effects consultants. But, as the ill-fated sheriff says to a gas station employee listening to his Walkman, technology is "a slippery slope." This is what has happened to movies in the Spielberg era, where CGI, though effectively handled now and then, has stolen away the real-space magic of stop-motion spectacle (Terrence Malick's hiring of the retired Douglas Trumbell for the special effects sequences in The Tree of Life testify to the older format's superiority; Malick's meagerly budgeted $32 million epic is far more beautiful than its $300 million brethren). Spielberg, producer of Michael Bay's Transformers trilogy, is certainly complicit in this sin, as a lot of Geekdom is. Can it be possible that Abrams is also issuing a critique of his idol, just as he is giving a glowing letter of adoration?

This is unresolved for me, but its question at least holds me off on declaring Super 8 a sometimes frivolously enjoyable failure. The CGI Special Effects Monster that was first met and nourished with the best intentions now simply eats people, disposing of pointless bodies without a context. In his sway, weapons fire on their own and there is no integrity to real spaces. Could Super 8's nostalgia for a Golden Age of special effects moviemaking be a longing for a time before Loud Noises were simply an Invasion of Spectacle? A replacement for the Real? Before life was experienced as a movie, a post-modern thought? The train wreck is called like "something out of a disaster movie" by one character, even though they actually lived it. The mourning for the loving mother goes back to a moment of human connection, and Joe remembers his mom while looking at home movies: "When she looked at me it was like I existed." There may be poetry yet in Super 8, in its dialectic of film and real life. Cinema can communicate this human warmth.

Unlike Spielberg's great works, however, though Abrams engages us, he still lacks the master's magic – that warmth. For me, a random meditation on E.T. makes me misty-eyed, it's so powerful. The disconnections in families dealing with lost time is real sentiment, and whether I love it (like Spielberg's best film, AI, where Stanley Kubrick's framework tempers Spielberg's infantilism to nuanced perfection) or dislike it (as in Hook), the filmmaker's emotional engineering for a wide spectrum of audience members is almost without peer (though I should note, AI – which absolutely overwhelms me – left a lot of people cold). Abrams has so embraced and alluded to his master that I even saw nods in Super 8 to Spielberg's best historical drama, 2005's controversial Munich, as the boys climb a restrictive fence, framed in exactly the same way Janusz Kaminski films Palestinian terrorists sneaking into the Israelis' hotel. Abrams goes for the gold with his own "iconoclastic" Spielbergian image, with the alien's spacecraft pulling up Joe's locket (with an image of his mother) with its gravitational force. He lets it go, like Elliot lets go of E.T. But though I felt more here than I did anywhere else (the scenes between Joe and Fanning's Alice simply made me roll my eyes; she is, like many young females in this paradigm of film, a very young agent of the hero's desire, and little else…though again, maybe this is irony, seeing as that's the purpose of her role in Charles' film….), it was not close to being in Spielberg's league. Even the goodbye to Gizmo in Gremlins had a lot more punch to it.

Is Super 8 only a simulation, like the boys' amusing zombie film? Is it nostalgia porn? Why cannot Abrams make a film for his own era? Or is this his Far From Heaven, recalling Todd Haynes' wonderful homage to Douglas Sirk from 2002? But Haynes' picture matched Sirk's 1950s repressed America in quality and emotional potency while also being strangely relevant to its own time, in the same way that David Lynch's Blue Velvet transcendentally surpassed its 1950s teen-movie inspirations. I'm predicting that Super 8 will be a major player in this year's Academy Awards race, though, meaning that its very attitude of nostalgia for a Golden Age – even if that Golden Age killed off what many see as the real Golden Age of movies – will win it more merit than it's worth.

Indulge my spoil-sporting snobbery when I propose that Super 8's bid to be the surprise sleeper hit of the summer has been usurped by the most unlikely of opposing forces, the 75-year-old Woody Allen, whose Midnight in Paris is the season's true achievement as summer escapism. Allen, like Abrams, is also longing for a lost "Golden Age," in this case the 1920s of Paris, imagined by the frustrated writer Gil (Owen Wilson), vacationing in the City of Lights with his spoiled – but tolerable because she's so attractive – girlfriend, Inez (Rachel McAdams). Inez and her conservative parents (Kurt Fuller, Mimi Kennedy) are materialists who want to exist with all the convenience they can afford in the present moment; the historical richness of Paris means nothing to them, and they scoff at Gil's dreams to be a part of that history, being an artist in Paris and finishing his novel. They'd rather he'd just live in California and punch out screenplays…for what are essentially Spielbergian productions. Inez' interest is hijacked by a pretentious academic and former classmate (Michael Sheen), while Gil discovers a strange time portal. At a specific location at midnight, the 1920s trot by in an old car, and drunken passengers invite Gil to come along with them to parties where the guests are all dressed…oddly. Gil discovers that the man singing Cole Porter songs at the piano is…Cole Porter. And that the bipolar married couple introducing him to the other guests is…F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. He meets tough-talking Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Picasso, T.S. Eliot, and others. He finds himself in a sort of paradise that puts his present day in perspective: Inez is a hollow, sexually attractive person with irritating parents; she has absolutely no interest in his own interior life. Here is a place where his soul can dance in endless fascination.

But in the Golden Age, Gil discovers a receptive and beautiful socialite Adriana (Marion Cotillard), mistress and inspiration to Picasso and Hemingway, and fast-falling for Gil, who finds himself in a major dilemma of Time. Hilariously, he voices his predicament to…Dali, Man Ray, and Bunuel – the surrealists, who fail to see anything too outlandish about Gil's situation (though it would make for Bunuel a great film, for Man Ray a great photograph, and for Dali, a great rhinoceros). He even finds the present and past in perfect correlation, coming across Adriana's diaries at an antique shop, where she speaks glowingly of him and how she dreams that he will present her a gift of earings and make love to her. So…when he goes back into the past, he fulfills the details of her dreaming. He is also, meanwhile, able to be the Present in dialogue with the Past, trying to reassure Zelda that Scott really does love her – even though it's bad for him.

The problem- and Allen's ultimate theme – is that Adriana is also enamored with a lost Golden Age, the Belle Epoque Paris of the 1890's, where the decadent artists came together at the Moulin Rouge, and laid the groundwork for the modernism of Gil's Golden Age of the '20s. The time loops of nostalgia go back centuries (as an ill-fated detective, hired by Inez's suspicious father, discovers), and the Golden Age emerges as an illusory concept; the Belle Epoque artists, like Gaughin, comment on how their own generation is empty and has no imagination: they long to be a part of the Renaissance. People are the same, driven by the same jealousies, desires, and stupid things. The mask of Art, what is truly important in creating something that heeds a meaningless existence, simply changes. A beautiful aspect of Midnight in Paris, much like Allen's other great magical realist piece (and my favorite of his films) The Purple Rose of Cairo, is that there is no logic to the narrative. This is not "a dream" or an "invented story" within the larger framework of the narrative. These things are really happening to Gil, and Owen Wilson with his gee-gosh naivete, though critics have said that he is simply playing Woody Allen, is doing his best Owen Wilson yet. Midnight in Paris is the most genuine kind of wish-fulfillment fantasy, while simultaneously, laced with Allen's misanthropy (here very benign, as this movie is very mirthful and perhaps Allen's most likable movie in decades), is also frank about the delusions we construct for ourselves.

Allen is mindful of the schism between high art and fluffy escapism, and he winks at us while making a fluffy escapist film about high art. The opening montage of shots, detailing the rich historical sites around Paris, is a deliberate cliche, as is Gil's attitude about the old Paris vs. the present day. But as Gertrude Stein (a wonderfully droll Kathy Bates) notes, the job of the artist is to find an antidote for the despair in life's meaninglessness - while also, to take a word from Hemingway (Corey Stoll), it should be "honest." Gil's novel is about a "nostalgia shop" called Out of the Past, which sells antiques from long ago that dually retain a sense of magic with time, while also "camp." Yes, Paris is photographed as a cliche (camp), but it's a city - more than most others - where History and its richness is present on every corner. It stands opposed to the year 2011, of corporatism (the reason why Inez's right-wing father is working in Paris), shallow materialism, and a time where, as Gil puts it, "people measure out their lives with coke-spoons." Inez' parents talk about enjoying a "wonderful but forgetful" comedic movie, which "lacked any wit or believability, but we laughed in spite of ourselves." That's fine, I think Allen believes, but that something so forgetful is processed so easily, while Paris with its rich history is rejected just as easily by the same people, gets to the heart of his artistic yearning. Tiresome and pendantic fellows (like Michael Sheen's academic) are able to spew a lot about history, but they're not in dialogue with it; they lack a sympathetic relationship to it, and so exist just as selfishly in the present moment, estranged from a perspective. Gil's a dupe (a very lovable one), but he's like the Last Man, always talking with the Past and asking for its advice. For him, the figures of the Past are not relics to be treated as museum objects, but are living, and in spite of their own flaws, they can teach us. To Inez, they're just "dead people," but Gil answers for Allen, "You can fool me, but you can't fool Hemingway." There's something to that, transcending nostalgia camp, which I think bears some reasonable wonder, and is essential for whenever we go inside an old book or film, or wonder about a masterpiece painting. Art means nothing, indeed, unless we are creative readers/viewers, in sympathetic engagement and bridging the discussion with incidents or feelings from our own lives.

Midnight in Paris is, like Super 8, its own kind of frivolous good time, eschewing the deep emotions of The Purple Rose of Cairo (while having just as much wonderful humor – though Cairo is the only Allen film that brings a tear to my eye), and not even attempting to sail to the heights of Hannah and Her Sisters and Crimes and Misdemeanors, or the deliberate frustrations of his recent wonderful offerings, like Match Point and Vicki Cristina Barcelona. It is Woody Allen escapism, and it works in its breezy 88 minutes as the best of its kind in a dense summer market, nakedly addressing the theme of escape. The Geeks who love Super 8, and the critics who acclaim it for its "perfect" (too perfect for my liking) engineering in story, will probably not grow out of their love for infantile regressions. Allen too is more in love with the past than he is with the present, but he understands the trappings of such a disposition. Super 8 offers possible ironies which lead me to ponder, but Midnight in Paris sent me out of the theater with the same kind of affirming adulation that, well, I used to feel as a child after a Spielbergian fantasy.

Hide and Seek: Woody Allen's Crapshoot Universe

Moving beyond the bunk and hooey, the repeated story arcs and contrivances, the jealousies, neuroses, characters and constant realizations of meaningless despair in Woody Allen's body of work containing 40 films in 40 years, there is also a poignant repetition of cinematic adoration, an appreciation for the imagistic worlds artists and entertainers give us in order to help us make any kind of peace with the absurdity of existence. Comedy alone can perhaps only stave Tragedy off for so long, though the elements in both feed off one another to make sense of a world that is existentially and morally inexplicable. Art alone is, for Allen, a kind of ritual, a meditation where he expresses his despair. He creates so as to bargain with Nothingness. His audience can then choose to participate in active viewing, not so much laughing at the films as participating in the exhortations of Allen's expression. Maybe then we get a deeper sense of what it means to be alive, just as the film may also be a kind of elliptical escape from the suffering of life. Allen loves the seriousness of Art, but he also loves the Elsewhereville of the Movies – just as he loved the Elsewhereville of Radio as a child – and Allen manages not to judge such an escape while also remaining serious in his presentation of celluloid enriched longings towards the screen. When we see, for example, Cecilia (Mia Farrow), an abused wife and neglected romantic, at the conclusion of The Purple Rose of Cairo, staring at the screen as her life may well be ruined, the lyrics of Irving Berlin's "Dancing Cheek to Cheek" being sung by Fred Astaire, the sense is not negative. The feeling is bittersweet and conveys the relationship between Viewer and Movie, reflecting the need for any type of buffer to make life endurable, while also acknowledging its pain.

The scene of temporary escape is repeated in Allen several times. For example, his alter ego, Mickey Sachs, in Hannah and Her Sisters (1986), whose sudden suicidal grasp of absurdity is eased by walking into a movie theater and watching the Marx brothers monkeying around. Or in Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989), where Allen's character, filmmaker Cliff Stern, goes with his niece to the movies for escape and enlightenment, just as it becomes increasingly clear that the more cynical and greedier forces in his own industry – personified in a television producer played by Alan Alda – will always win out over the sincere questions posed by meaningful artists and thinkers. In the same film, Judah Rosenthal (Martin Landau) has somehow managed to ease his anxiety and guilt over having his too-eager-to-talk mistress (Angelica Huston) killed, by summing the drama of his entire dilemma into a movie scenario pitch, except where the tropes of familiar morality, where the unjust are punished and the just blessed, are revealed to be only consistent in the content of Hollywood, which takes its own tropes from literature, and beyond that, the Torah. The irony here is that Judah's story has just been the story of the whole film Crimes and Misdemeanors, and he's telling it to Cliff, who doesn't believe that you can make a movie with such amoral conclusions – when of course, Woody Allen the film director who is also the actor playing Cliff, indeed just has. In Allen, the movies in all of their variations give a kind of solace even for the guiltiest among us, as there is a sense of identification and thus a sign that we are not alone. The movies themselves are like individuals, something to converse with and debate, and even if the debate can never be won, the participation in the debate is an affirmation of Art.

For Allen then, the movies are not about simple escapism, but are as personal and private an experience as a religious ritual. And as a person may engage in a mental dialogue regarding the articles of faith, so too does Allen demand that we participate in the film. This is an element which makes Allen often aggravating to watch; instead of comedies levying the toil of life, or cathartic tragic dramas that come with a very direct point of view, Allen's pictures don't offer a consistent subjectivity or agency for identification on the audience's part. Vicki Cristina Barcelona (2008) follows two young women with two different worldviews, but Allen offers no clarity in terms of offering a suggestion for which perspective – stable, committed, conventional, or impulsive, pleasure-seeking, and adventurous – is the better choice. As audiences, even if a story is in a landscape where there is no God or a priori moral systems, we are used to filmmakers at least nudging us in a "correct" direction for identification, where the binaries of Good and Bad may, if blurry, still be drawn.

Not so in Woody Allen. Perspectives clash loudly, all ends achieving points and debits, and there is no resolution other than, to quote the title of a recent Allen film, "whatever works." But this is frustrating for us – "whatever works for you is fine" – because, Allen understands, human beings are inclined to believe that what works for them must then also work for others, from religion on down. Confusion, resentment, uncertainty, and animosity once again re-enter the scenario and nothing is resolved. The only character that can accept "Whatever Works" working has got to be the most pessimistic and curmudgeonly nihilist, like Boris (Larry David) in Whatever Works, and even he retreads back into suicidal impulses when the world once more loses focus within his own worldview of, well, whatever works working. In a sane universe, to each his own subjectivity. But Allen, a true Freudian, does not believe in our subjectivity having any free will; after all, as Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex * But Were Afraid to Ask (1971) reveals in all of its scenarios (aphrodisiacs; Gene Wilder's sheep love; What's Your Perversion?; the impulse of transvestism; a woman only being able to orgasm in public places; the runaway breast wreaking havoc on the countryside; and the plight of an insignificant sperm cell called up for duty), it's from our inability to control our unconscious and mysterious impulses, and our conscious ego's constant belief that it is in control (best manifested in, again, poor lovestruck Gene Wilder and his sheep) that creates the best humor.

In the meantime, we have films. And because Boris talks to us in Whatever Works, even addressing some of us in the theater as "mouth breathers," and despite his suicidal tendencies and nihilism, we're safe and the film is quite jovial, counting oddly among Allen's most mirthful. Again, the movie and the viewer are supposed to be intimately communicating. This goes back as far as Allen's Broadway play, later made in the 1973 film Play it Again, Sam, directed by Herbert Ross though still written by and starring Allen. Here, the protagonist Allan Felix tries to cope with his feelings of inadequacy and depression by having conversations with the marquee celluloid personality of Humphrey Bogart, star of his favorite film, Casablanca. The movies come as a relief and comfort but are something much more. They also demand attention, and like Bogey, they're speaking right to us, just as we, when we leave the theater, speak through the film by subconsciously embodying and imitating the archetypes we've been watching. Life and Art mimic each other until the two are indistinguishable.

It's then appropriate that many of Allen's protagonists, if they're not moviegoers, critics, or radio listeners, are then creative individuals acting within the industry, like writers, directors, producers, and performers, particularly actresses, who often amount to being the female heroine (or otherwise the femme fatale) in the Allen universe. In The Purple Rose of Cairo the actors are distinct from the characters they play in the movie. These celluloid figures seem to have a life of their own; they're stuck when one character, daring archeologist Tom Baxter (Jeff Daniels), walks out of the movie screen in order to fall in love with Mia Farrow's meager and entranced Cecilia, who watches the film repeatedly. Meanwhile, as the movie playing is on indefinite hold, leaving the black and white characters to ceaselessly bicker while they wait for their estranged costar to return, in Hollywood the actor playing the character, Gil Shepherd (also Daniels), finds that his career is in jeopardy; after all, it was the way that he played Tom Baxter that enabled the fictional character's ability to quit the story and make the decision to mingle with Reality.

Another classic instance occurs in Annie Hall. While waiting in a movie theater line for The Sorrow and the Pity, Alvy Singer (Allen) displays annoyance upon having another moviegoer, a Columbia media professor, loudly and with great intellectual knowitall gravitas demean some of the recent work of Allen's own heroes, such as Fellini. His accusations of "self-indulgence" sound like the general attitude of the New York critical intelligentsia regarding Fellini, and it's the word "indulgence" that mainly throws Singer over the edge. After all, Allen, sympathetic to Fellini, is also often accused of being indulgent. Finally, as the academic begins to quote Marshall McLuhan, Singer stops the scene, addresses the camera, and physically pulls Marshall McLuhan into the frame to confront this professorial troll. The true-life intellectual chastises the fictional (but representative) one: "I heard you back there...How you ever got a job teaching is beyond me." With that, Singer/Allen looks back at the camera and says, "If only real life was like this," again conveying the difference between Art and Life, yet noting the wishful thinking that deliberately confuses the two in order to make sense out of a silly existence. It's also the movie director's ultimate revenge on the critic and academic, as Allen is here addressing, just as he will in Stardust Memories, the dismissive critics who believe that they're smarter than the artist, while often missing the ultimate points – something that happened famously to Fellini, has happened to Allen, Allen's contemporary Kubrick, and continues to happen to Scorsese, Mann, Soderbergh, Stone, Lynch, and Malick.

The most troubling instance in Allen's body of work is also one of his best, and it again exemplifies the problem of Art and Life coordinating and influencing each other. Husbands and Wives may have been the best film of 1992, and is probably Allen's last unequivocally great film (that is to say "masterpiece," following Annie Hall, Manhattan, Zelig, The Purple Rose of Cairo, Hannah and Her Sisters, and Crimes and Misdemeanors; I would say he has a good number of "great" and "very good films" in succession, such as Bullets Over Broadway, Mighty Aphrodite, Anything Else, Match Point, Cassandra's Dream, and Vicki Cristina Barcelona, to say nothing of the pleasures afforded by his lighter offerings, like Manhattan Murder Mystery, Everyone Says I Love You, some of the episodes in Deconstructing Harry, Sean Penn and Samantha Morton in Sweet and Lowdown, the comic half of Melinda and Melinda, Whatever Works, and, upon reevaluation, the other much-maligned Dreamworks comedies from the early part of the century, which though panned upon release, are each filled with a multitude of comic virtues and accomplish often what they set out to do: Small Time Crooks, The Curse of the Jade Scorpion, and particularly Hollywood Ending). A multitude of tabloid stories preceded Husbands and Wives' release in September 1992, linking the film's content of unstable marriages with husbands seeking much younger lovers to the exposed true-life sexual relationship of Allen with Mia Farrow's adopted daughter, Soon-Yi Previn. This gives the movie an undeniable air of frenzied anxiety, placing the audience in a state of uncomfortable voyeurism. The style of the film, Allen's most idiosyncratic with Carlos DiPalma's hand-held cinematography and jump-cut editing, along with the principle characters giving interviews as if they were in a documentary, compliments this shivering brush with the All-Too-Real.

Like any Allen film that stars Allen, it was sold as a comedy, and the film begins with a joke. Gabe Roth (Allen) watches a TV show where a scientist quotes Einstein, "God doesn't play with dice." Allen turns the TV off and walks away uttering, "No he doesn't play with dice. He plays hide and seek." It's a very funny joke to set a rhythm for an Allen comedy, but then Allen turns everything around and does not go back. Gabe and his wife Judy (Farrow) have invited another married couple, Jack (Sydney Pollack) and Sally (Judy Davis), over for dinner. The Roths discover that their friends are separating. Judy is disturbed and even hurt by the announcement, as both Jack and Sally work to insist that it's a friendly break-up and for the best. "Don't turn this into a tragedy or a wake," Jack says more than once. This is a significant line, because this "comic" film doesn't want to become a tragedy either. But some films, like relationships, are unpredictable and never turn out the way you expect them to. Husbands and Wives becomes a tragicomic drama, something made more interesting by the fact that the actor playing Jack, Sydney Pollack, is an Oscar winning movie director (Tootsie, Out of Africa, Three Days of the Condor). Jack is unable to hold any sort of control over the consequential emotions of this "agreeable separation." After he says, "Please don't turn this into a wake," we might see the pictures of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald behind Judy in the Roths' apartment. We know that this then will not be an optimistic portrait of romance.

Sure enough, both Jack and Sally can't keep their happy faces on once they discover that they're both interested in other, more sexually appealing partners (played by Lysette Anthony and Liam Neeson). Meanwhile, the Roths have also been undergoing duress, as the very idea of divorce implanted by their friends has resulted in the security of their marriage to be questionable. Throughout the running time of the film, we see intelligent, successful, and progressive people who are unable to be single, unable to be satisfied (chronic dissatisfaction is another great Allen theme), and unable to resist exhibiting animosity towards the other sex. The sexes have views on each other that are equally shallow, and this is worth remembering when some of Allen's feminist critics accuse him of misogyny. Though we may notice the women are often weak and never in control of their impulses, it's because Allen refuses to write them as passive images of desire or hapless victims, like so many other filmmakers; and, by the way, have you been paying attention to the men?

Allen's viewpoint of relationships is like his view of the universe: nothing is constant and dependable, and though Love is reason enough to experience life, its unreliability and temporality, in addition to the suffering it brings, calls attention to how sorrowful and absurd Life is. This theme was first examined to great comic effect in 1975's Love and Death, the best, in my opinion, of Allen's early comedies, when Sonja (Diane Keaton) gives a hilarious philosophical monologue: "To love is to suffer. To avoid suffering one must not love, but then one suffers from not loving. Therefore, to love is to suffer, not to love is to suffer, to suffer is to suffer. To be happy is to love, to be happy then is to suffer but suffering makes one unhappy, therefore to be unhappy one must love or love to suffer or suffer from too much happiness. I hope you're getting this down." There is no logic to it, and we have no control of it, but to choose tangling with relationships, particularly in a secular existential age of freedom, means to willfully engage in a universe of constant competition and uncertainty, where one gets a lover, then has to worry about losing the lover, knowing that in Reality good and noble Romance doesn't trump all. In Husbands and Wives, we observe Jack at a party, seemingly fine in his new life with a much younger (and much dumber) woman, a former escort (a scenario repeated in You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger). A friend casually tells him that Sally is in a happy relationship with a new man. Suddenly, Jack completely loses his composure. He breaks into his former house while Sally's sleeping with studly Liam Neeson, and suddenly wants to work things out.

Allen has often been criticized for having a rather smug set of successful socialite characters, far removed from any typical moviegoing audience: we can relate to "starving artists," but not successful ones living in big Manhattan studio apartments. But Allen is treating his successful cocktail-drinking socialites ironically; he is showing the Elites of High Society, but at their worst and most embarrassing (to quote Stardust Memories, the Intelligentsia is like the Mafia, and they only kill their own kind). Many of the scenes in Husbands and Wives are difficult to watch, not only because they exhibit uncomfortable truths about love and commitment, but because the people tangled in the web of despair here are so seemingly respectable, brought down to their pathetic end. Gabe Roth's remark at the end brings us back into the uncomfortable relationship we viewers have with the screen: "Life doesn't imitate Art; it imitates bad TV."

The other sad aspect of Husbands and Wives has to do with the downslope of Allen's subsequent career, which is not to say that I think he has become a mediocre filmmaker. Quite the contrary, as the films I listed above make clear. However, the thing he lost after Husbands and Wives which was such an integral part to the masterful collection of films he made throughout the previous decade was Mia Farrow. Allen has continued to write interesting female characters since then (three women have won Oscars for playing those women since 1994), and in comparison to other writers, they are the most well-rendered women in movies, played by the likes of Dianne Wiest, Mira Sorvino, Judy Davis, Samantha Morton, Jennifer Tilly, Penelope Cruz, Patricia Clarkson, Naomi Watts, and Scarlett Johansen, among many others. But the Farrow character, an extension and I believe an improvement on the already magnificent Diane Keaton character from Allen's 1970s years, is noticeably missing. The Farrow character, from A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy, Zelig, Purple Rose, Broadway Danny Rose, Hannah and Her Sisters, Radio Days, September, Another Woman, and Alice, is the Allen character's equal and foil, the only sportive female who is more than a delusional and deceived girl, capacious and, when compared to the body of work of other actresses, incomparable. In a decade where the "defining great films" were limited to Raging Bull, Blue Velvet, Do the Right Thing, and a handful of Allen's own work, Allen and Farrow were a team worthy of Astaire and Rogers, or Burns and Gracie Allen – and yet I think that does not even come close to doing them justice. More so than De Niro and Scorsese, Brando and Kazan, the only comparable relationship between director and star to Allen and Farrow, I would be so bold to say, is John Ford and John Wayne – with the significant difference being that Farrow, in her parts, embodies far greater range than Wayne ever did. Allen's wrong against Farrow is something that hurts less as a heinous betrayal and hurts more as a fan of movies, because of the collaboration of which the audience, and both artists, were robbed (what has Farrow done of significance since Husbands and Wives? And what besides Rosemary's Baby had she done of much significance before A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy?) It's my belief that if Allen doesn't mourn the loss of a life partner or artistic collaborator, he must certainly miss his friend, whose conversations doubtless proved to be the inspiration for innumerable dialogues between combating viewpoints. We can see the capaciousness of Farrow's talent in the wonderful Radio Days (1987), where Farrow in a supporting role transforms from unsophisticated floozy to snotty socialite.

Though I like many post-Farrow Woody Allen films, what's missing from them is the strong heart that was Farrow. Her title role performance in Hannah and Her Sisters may be the most demonstrative example, as her cheating husband, Elliot (a brilliant Michael Caine), is a man exhibiting Allen's trademark mixed impulses, his voiceover narrations revealing how human emotions and erotic desires change on the most fragile whim. Elliot may cheat on Hannah, falling in love with her sister Lee (Barbara Hershey), but Farrow's presence as Hannah, and her utterly graceful completeness as a character -- a sense owed both to the writing and the performance -- convinces both us and him that this is a woman that Elliot could never deliberately hurt; he loves her much more than he knows. No such female character exists in post-1992 Allen, where women are often instead brilliantly marked by their self-deception and their unstable desirability (best demonstrated by Scarlet Johansen in Match Point, Scoop, and Vicki Cristina Barcelona).

But Allen's recent work nevertheless continues his marvelous meditation on making compromises with reality, the flight into the movies and Art, into different lifestyles or ultimately Religion. As quick as we are to judge Allen for his indulgences, I admire how, though he is one of the most acutely misanthropic observers of our own collective human mishaps, he is not a scathing or resentful one. Rather, Allen seems to have a kind of gentle pity, mixed with humorous detachment, for delusional human beings. You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, the most recent film, dabbles with middle-aged Helena's (Gemma Jones) sudden infatuation with New Ageism after her husband Alfie (Anthony Hopkins) has left her. Helena embraced the hocus pocus of religion as consolation from a suicidal depression that had set in. As she continues to get psychic readings, she falls in love with an equally bonkers New Age book dealer (Roger Ashton Griffiths) bent on communicating with his dead wife during séances. The rest of her secular, non-believing family, whom Allen is no doubt closer to in terms of philosophical perspectives, entropies within the confines of their own narcissism, the irony being that this secular bunch is also blind with delusion: ex-husband Alfie takes up with a promiscuous younger woman (Lucy Punch), only to discover that she's both cheating on him and pregnant, throwing him into uncertainty concerning the fate of his offspring; daughter Sally (Naomi Watts), eager to breed also, becomes infatuated with her sexy and wealthy boss (Antonio Bandaras), believing that his drunken confessions and amiable actions towards her indicates his own attraction, when in fact he's having a passionate affair with one of her art colleagues; and then the son-in-law Roy (Josh Brolin), a fumbling novelist who is able to nab the sexy Sri Lankan girl (Freida Pinto) across the street after he steals the brilliant manuscript of a friend (Ewan Bremner) he believes has been killed – though it turns out he's only in a coma, and what more, likely to recover.

Allen creates a quadrangle of delusion here, using the basic motifs and tropes that he has used countless times before, something that annoys many critics. But what's odd is not only Allen's sympathy, however detached in its misanthropy, for all of the characters, but ultimately how close he is to the aging Helena, who is the only character fortunate enough to find peace in her New Age ridiculousness. The other three characters seem to lack empathy for anyone else, and act accordingly in a Godless universe where there is no ultimate moral accountability. We know, as they do, that Helena is nuts – but Allen, though not praising her escape and often making fun of it, is also admitting that she has the upper hand. Helena is the happiest of all the characters. "Whatever works, as long as you hurt no one else," Boris says in Whatever Works, and that, ultimately, applies to the characters in You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, which simultaneously attests to the absurdity of existence while also winking at us with how oddly God does indeed seem to play hide and seek.

Woody Allen

What's New, Pussycat? (1965, screenplay only)

What's Up, Tiger Lily? (1966)

Take the Money and Run (1969)

Bananas (1970)

Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex * But Were Afraid to Ask (1971)

Play It Again, Sam (1972, screenplay only)

Sleeper (1973)

Love and Death (1975)

Annie Hall (1977)

Interiors (1978)

Manhattan (1979)

Stardust Memories (1980)

A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy (1982)

Zelig (1983)

Broadway Danny Rose (1984)

The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985)

Hannah and Her Sisters (1986)

Radio Days (1987)

September (1987)

Another Woman (1988)

Oedipus Wrecks (1989)

Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989)

Alice (1990)

Shadows and Fog (1991)

Husbands and Wives (1992)

Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993)

Bullets Over Broadway (1994)

Don't Drink the Water (1994)

Mighty Aphrodite (1995)

Everyone Says I Love You (1996)

Deconstructing Harry (1997)

Celebrity (1998)

Sweet and Lowdown (1999)

Small Time Crooks (2000)

The Curse of the Jade Scorpion (2001)

Hollywood Ending (2002)

Anything Else (2003)

Melinda and Melinda (2005)

Match Point (2005)

Scoop (2006)

Cassandra's Dream (2007)

Vicki Cristina Barcelona (2008)

Whatever Works (2009)

You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger (2010)

Midnight in Paris (2011)