Woody Allen’s The
Curse of the Jade Scorpion made many people laugh during the screening I
attended, mostly from the ferocity of the insults exchanged between Mr. Allen’s
C.W. Briggs, an insurance investigator circa 1940, and Helen Hunt’s Betty Ann
Fitzgerald, the firm’s bossy efficiency expert. As it happens, I didn’t even
smile once, but I made a mental note that The
Curse marked a huge improvement over Mr. Allen’s previous parody of old
movies, Small Time Crooks (2000).
Mr. Allen has chosen to
exploit some of the eccentricities of a 1940 movie-and of life in general in
1940-that might make today’s young people titter: the Veronica Lake hairdo over
one eye, the overstuffed sweaters with outsized bras, the men sporting fedoras
even indoors, and the alleged craze for hypnotism acts on-screen and off.
Just out of curiosity, I
decided to look up the better movies of 1940. At the top of my list were three
comedies: Ernst Lubitsch’s The Shop Around the Corner , Charles Chaplin’s The Great Dictator and Howard Hawks’ His Girl Friday . Also that year, Preston
Sturges made his directorial debut with the hilarious The Great McGinty and followed that with the poignantly comic high
jinks of Christmas in July . On the
more serious side were Frank Borzage’s anti-Nazi The Mortal Storm , Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca and Foreign
Correspondent , John Ford’s The Grapes
of Wrath and The Long Voyage Home
and William Wyler’s The Letter .
And I haven’t even begun
to dip into the fun pictures and the sleepers. Still, I don’t remember a single
movie in 1940 with hypnotism as a subject, and 1940 was a bit early for Ms.
Lake as a femme fatale. She didn’t hit her stride until 1942 with Preston
Sturges’ Sullivan’s Travels , René
Clair’s I Married a Witch , Frank
Tuttle’s This Gun for Hire and Stuart
Heisler’s The Glass Key . (Hollywood people really believed in the work ethic back
then.) Mr. Allen was not quite 5 years old, and I was not quite 12, but I never had the slightest idea that 1940 was such a banner
year for movies. Of course, nowadays, with videocassettes, Mr. Allen and the
rest of us can go back even beyond our childhoods for movie “memories.”
But what Mr. Allen
provides in Curse is a deformed image
of the 40’s, with only the popular music of the period restored in all its
glory, with an emphasis on the jazz greats-and it is, for the most part, not
even movie music. Yet this has been Mr. Allen’s strong point all through the
years. This is to say that his ears are more perceptive than his eyes.
A more grievous omission from The Curse vis-à-vis the Hollywood comedies of 1940 and the years
before and after is the army of character actors who generated most of the
laughter despite the occasional virtuoso turns of a Cary Grant, a Charlie
Chaplin, a W.C. Fields or the Marx Brothers. I laugh today just remembering
Akim Tamiroff in The Great McGinty ,
Franklin Pangborn in Christmas in July ,
Felix Bressart in The Shop Around the
Corner , and William Demarest in Sullivan’s
Travels -and let us not forget the marvelous comic foils Ralph Bellamy
supplied to Cary Grant in His Girl Friday
and Margaret Dumont to Groucho Marx in just about everything.
This raises the question
of when Mr. Allen has ever written a funny line for anyone except himself and,
on a few occasions, Diane Keaton. In The
Curse , Dan Aykroyd and Wallace Shawn are accomplished farceurs who can read a funny line with the best of them, but Mr.
Aykroyd’s Chris Magruder is a humorless adulterer, and Mr. Shawn’s George Bond
is a cheery, but not particularly witty, nice guy. Charlize Theron’s society
dame Laura Kensington has a few snappy comebacks, but her part literally goes
nowhere, while Elizabeth Berkley’s office babe Jill barely registers on the
radar screen.
The villainous magician
Voltan of David Ogden Stiers is little more than a mellifluous voice enacting
his criminal activities with two suggestive, comically multisyllabic place-name
passwords. Mr. Allen’s glazed expression under hypnosis is good for a few
chuckles, but Ms. Hunt is a bit too tense, both under hypnosis and out of it.
Perhaps she’s aware of
the suspension of disbelief required to imagine a screen romance between a
65-year-old nebbish type and a thirtysomething looker, particularly in the
Darwinian atmosphere of movies in 1940. Mr. Allen was never a matinee idol,
even in his younger days, and yet for many years he was reportedly considered a
sex symbol, at least in Manhattan and its environs, where wit, talent-both directorial and musical-and a
sense of humor could compensate for his nerdy appearance. But this was in the
glory days of Annie Hall (1977) and Manhattan (1979), when his canvas was completely
contemporary and there was a feeling-right or wrong-that the characters he
played were very close to his off-screen persona.
Lately, however, Mr.
Allen has assumed a tongue-in-cheek attitude toward the old movie genres and
yet has tried to remain a lead player in fictions that traditionally demanded
much younger participants. For example, Woody, in the Keaton-Farrow periods,
was never made to feel that he was physically inadequate. As a certified
analysand and hypochondriac, he made enough jokes about his cowardly nature to
deflect any embarrassment that was not self-imposed. By contrast, in Curse Ms. Hunt’s character itemizes Mr.
Allen’s physical deficiencies with inventive analogies to the most odious
creatures in nature. The audience may laugh out of lazy sadism, but Mr. Allen
discovers ultimately that he can’t put Humpty-Dumpty together again, and the kiss-kiss
ending falls flat.
Still, there is
something heroic about a comic artist who strains to make people laugh at
essentially the same persona with the same shtick for 35 years and 26 films,
while resisting the lure of Hollywood and the low-cost temptations of Toronto
and Montreal to remain the cosmopolitan Manhattanite par excellence-New York
Knicks and all. Indeed, to find the way to keep making movies year after year
without conspicuous compromises and concessions is a feat few filmmakers have
achieved in any country at any time. With all that is wrong and inadequate with
The Curse of the Jade Scorpion , it
demands our respect and admiration for having been made at all. Woody remains
our civic treasure, as he always has been.
Romance in Reverse
Brad Anderson’s Happy Accidents , from his own
screenplay, unfolds as a cleverly resourceful mixture of romantic comedy and
sci-fi time travel, and until the end we are not sure which genre will prevail,
and on which genre’s terms. Mr. Anderson has already made his mark in offbeat
independent filmmaking with The Darien
Gap (1995), Next Stop Wonderland
(1998) and Session 9 , which is also
currently playing.
Happy Accidents begins with intimations of backward movement in time and space before
introducing the two romantic leads, Marisa Tomei’s Ruby Weaver and Vincent
D’Onofrio’s Sam Deed. Cut to the midst of a breakup argument full of convulsive
close-ups that hammer home the faces of Ruby and Sam in extremis before we know their names or the stage of their
relationship.
Mr. Anderson then pulls
back to show Ruby with her circle of woman friends, each with well-preserved
memories of disasters with various men from Mars. Ruby regales her friends with
an account of her first strange meeting with Sam, and this strategy of indirect
storytelling is developed with many variations of overlapping sounds and
images. But it is always Ruby who is talking about the mysterious Sam, and
never, until the very end, Sam talking about Ruby.
The many jokes about the
dating game at first make Happy Accidents
look and sound like a clone of HBO’s Sex
and the City . But gradually, Sam’s apparently deranged fantasy of being a
time traveler from Dubuque, Iowa, in the year 2470, when global warming has
brought the Atlantic
Ocean to the shores of
the Mississippi, takes over. Ruby’s psychotherapist (Holland
Taylor) warns her about the dangerous pathological symptoms Sam is exhibiting
and urges her to leave him. But Ruby has fallen in love, and the issue
eventually becomes one of life and death for both Ruby and Sam.
Mr. Anderson succeeds in
making his potentially far-fetched narrative plausible by the connections he
establishes between Ruby’s ultra-sophisticated and self-innovative friends and Sam’s seeming improvisations on his fanciful identity. The
adventurous performances of Ms. Tomei, Mr. D’Onofrio, Ms. Taylor and the rest
of the cast are persuasive enough to fill in the pieces of Mr. Anderson’s
puzzle. Happy Accidents is just the
latest example of independent filmmaking filling in the vacuum left by the
mainstream bean counters in supplying intelligent adult entertainment.
Good Godard
Jean-Luc Godard’s Band of Outsiders (1964) is being
revived locally, and I recommend it to anyone who hasn’t seen it before. The
film, in which Anna Karina, Sami Frey and Claude Brasseur engage in a
half-hearted caper plot that ends with tragic grotesqueness, celebrates the
Nouvelle Vague’s joint love affair with Paris and Hollywood melodramas, particularly from the
black-and-white period. Mr. Godard himself was once considered an axiom of the
cinema by his most fervent admirers, because he took it upon himself to
proclaim where the cinema was going. The most magical moment in the film
involves his three leads in a stirring formation dance that was very au courant at the time. Such relaxed
filmmaking combined with artistic rigor is no longer feasible. But from advance
reports, Mr. Goddard is still in the hunt with his latest film. I can’t wait to
see it.
