Manhattan Murder Mystery: Escapist Comedy

One in a series of rather silly features from Woody Allen from the ’90s into the ’00s, Manhattan Murder Mystery acts as a sort of trivial extension of the earlier Annie Hall. This superficial fact doesn’t warrant its dismissal by critics as a forgettable chapter within Allen’s sizable canon. It has the flavor of a whodunit?, the tone of any of Allen’s best comedies, the aura of Allen’s New York, and the philosophical implications of Allen’s best comedies or tragedies. On this note, it is fascinating how traditional is Allen’s approach to theatrical art, typically falling on one side or the other of this classical distinction. See Melinda and Melinda for his explicit exploration of this dichotomy. Alan Alda’s presence in the case of Manhattan Murder Mystery recalls his character in Crimes and Misdemeanors, who explains with firm conviction, “Comedy equals tragedy plus time.” This tense relationship is something that fascinates Allen, and although his films often can be placed on one or other side of the barrier, he often refuses so simple a distinction. In the film now before us, which can pretty easily be categorized a comedy, the dark subject matter and allusions to perhaps that darkest of film genres (film noir) are indeed ultimately swallowed up in satire and comedic tribute.

And since it’s so difficult to avoid a parallel examination of Woody Allen the man alongside his films, it should be noted that the production of Manhattan Murder Mystery came immediately following Allen’s notorious personal scandal, leading to a divorce with Mia Farrow. If comedy is the (at least temporary) antidote to tragedy, Manhattan Murder Mystery may represent Allen’s cinematic escape from his own troubles. His replacement of Farrow with Diane Keaton not only hearkens back to Keaton’s roles in both Annie Hall and the similarly titled Manhattan, but also to her symbolic status as Allen’s formidable co-star during his earlier, less tragic years. In this way, one might even read into his invitation to Keaton to take over the part originally written for Farrow as Allen’s own personal Midnight In Paris. With a stormy present raining down on him, he can only reach back into the past to recover some piece of his romanticized past. And not  his past, only, but cinema’s past. Scenes shown within the film Double Indemnity along with a conclusion that simultaneously presented and re-presented Welles’ The Lady from Shanghai indicates Allen’s lifelong infatuation with the better, “golden” age of film. It may be true that their appearance in this film reflects Allen’s debt to them, his admission that he can’t equal them without parodying them, etc. However, beneath these surface possibilities is a more subjective truth evincing Allen’s insecurity over personal tragedy pushing him into the realm of comedy. (Images via)

Midnight in Paris: From One Flâneur To Another

Bored in the monochromatic present

What the ex-advisor said was true and remains true: you haven’t seen a film unless you’ve seen in (at least) twice. So, for as lighthearted in tone as Woody Allen’s latest is, one must revisit it to say much about it that’s worth hearing. That being said, here we are after only one viewing. Midnight in Paris is unashamedly nostalgic, with the theme written into not only the film’s main text but its subtext – Gil’s novel even revolves around the owner of a nostalgia shop. This fact, and Woody Allen’s regular identification with the male protagonists of his films, parallels his own status as the “novelist” behind the film. Like Gil, he too is a sentimentalist at heart (albeit a sharp, educated one) who makes films about what he loves.

Meeting the charming Fitzgeralds

The opening mélange of scenic images of Paris has already been likened to the introduction to Allen’s Manhattan, but without the funny and over-the-top romanticism for the city that Allen’s own voice overlays with those earlier images. Instead, here Allen employs the music of Cole Porter, perhaps as an acknowledgement of his own muteness concerning Paris, his linguistic breakdown with the inhabitants of the city. Indeed, in Gil’s midnight world, he is inundated with not only well-known historical and literary figures from the 1920s, but largely with American ones. Whomever he encounters, they all speak English – even broken English in the case of Salvador Dalí. This linguistic cooperation of the famous figures isn’t to imply that Gil’s experiences are fantasy – that would be missing the film’s point. Rather, Allen treats the narrative content of his film the way Wes Anderson treats his in The Darjeeling Limited. These filmmakers are self-acknowledged flâneurs, traversing a land that is not their own, featuring characters that likewise understand something of their cultural limits even while somewhat obliviously romanticizing places and times that are foreign to them. These films set themselves apart from others, such as the overhyped Slumdog Millionaire, which rather more imperialistically stampeded a foreign culture with the pretense of a Westerner who believed he could know it and say something about it.

Like Groundhog Day, but better

Allen, on the other hand, treats his subject matter for what it is. The opening montage keeps Paris at arm’s length, with almost entirely static shots that may as well be postcard images. The fact that it’s Paris, and not some small town in southern Provence, only serves to strengthen the argument that we are occupying, via cinema, the most hallowed ground of romanticized cities in the world. All the big sites are visited, with the viewer led along by Gil, an American born in Pasadena and working as a writer of sub-par Hollywood screenplays who hardly knows a lick of French. But he doesn’t need to. Indeed, one can read into the narrative beyond the film; the day Gil learns French is the day when Gil loses part of his nostalgia for the city. For in the same way that Adriana inadvertently teaches Gil not to sentimentalize the past (a temporal realm), Gil should eventually learn not to romanticize Paris (a spatial realm). This could be the only significant blind spot in Midnight in Paris. While fully conscious of its own nostalgic nature and the correspondence between its protagonist and its author, the consequences of its nostalgia are only partially acknowledged. It has been noted recently how often Woody Allen has been moving outside of his beloved New York to make films. He has recently made a number of movies in England, Spain, and now France. Has New York lost its charm? Has this most romantic of spaces (for Allen) changed, leaving Allen longing for a temporal period in the past? (Which only begs the real question: what “is” “New York”? Does it have an inherent essence? Can a city “change”?) This notion was already largely evident based on his previous depictions of New York, as seen most markedly in Manhattan. (For instance, his use of black and white pulls the viewer into a different temporal period than the contemporary one.) And if, as seems likely, Allen’s affinity for New York is being replaced, or at least temporarily set aside, for the likes of London, Barcelona, and Paris, why is his main critique of nostalgia in Midnight in Paris merely temporal and not also spatial? The film concludes with Gil and his new Parisian ami walking away at night, in the rain, into the belly of Paris. Gil has learned his lesson about re-envisioning the past as an inherently superior time than the present. Still, he settles into Paris with contempt for his home in southern California, and with all the naïve optimism of Adriana when she and Gil were ushered back to La Belle Époque.

Here or now; choose only one

The Purple Rose of Cairo: Subverting Cinema

Discontent in "reality"

It was awhile ago when we watched this one, which came via the lovely Netflix Instant feature streaming via Nintendo Wii. (Somewhere Jack Donaghy is drooling over the synergy.) So, the screenshots here will undoubtedly be inferior to the norm. Needing a little refresher, enlisted the assistance of Arnold W. Preussner, whose helpful article “Woody Allen’s The Purple Rose of Cairo and the Genres of Comedy” sufficiently brought the film back to mind and productively expanded on it. His thesis revolves around Allen’s use of (what Preussner identifies as) “three of the four primary types of comedy identified by Northrop Frye” in some essay Frye once wrote. The discussion of comedy becomes more interesting when Preussner gets into its concrete manifestations in and ramifications upon the film’s diegesis. The bottom line is that Woody Allen utilizes different and contradictory comedic modes that undermine viewer expectations while simultaneously engaging the viewer with Mia Farrow’s character Cecilia.

The blue pill

One mode is evident in Cecilia’s ability to extract the character of Tom (Jeff Daniels) from the screen in the theater into her own “real” world. This is “Arostophanic Old Comedy.” the second type is “Roman New Comedy,” seen when Gil (also played by Jeff Daniels), the actor who had played Tom in the film within, intercedes in order to confront Tom and persuade him to return to the screen. Finally, Preussner observes “Shakespearean ‘green world’ comedy” always on display on the screen within the film, filled with confused and quarreling thespians upset that one of their own has defied unwritten conventions by departing the celluloid. Preussner points out that the film presents a certain contradiction setting the viewer up for disappointment even while acknowledging the silliness of giving into the gag. The film is largely about a pathetic woman’s escapist existence, fleeing into the unreal world of Hollywood artificiality to negotiate her sad life as an inept waitress and unappreciated housewife. The viewer pities Cecilia, even while letting the different types of comedy overtake the rationality that such pity should reflect. So instead of taking a logical view of the film, the viewer sympathizing with Cecilia who also takes part in the film’s comedy is shocked by a relatively tragic ending. Instead of getting a traditional Hollywood conclusion, the film confirms its consistent critique if Cecilia’s pitiful embrace of artificial stories by avoiding such a shallow finale.

She needs the third pill

What the film calls into question, then, is the notion of viewer engagement. Films can’t succeed on a popular level without it, a fact that’s been true since the earliest days of film. Allen acknowledges this by planting the setting of Purple Rose in Depression-era New Jersey, a sad time and place if there ever was one. Cinema is escapist by its nature, and Cecilia gives into its temptations head-first. Allen relies on viewer engagement as much as Astaire and Rogers did (which he acknowledges at the film’s finale when Cecilia escapes back into the theater and Fred and Ginger are on screen). Still, Allen chooses to punish the protagonist for this essential truth about the movies. So while Allen subverts the nature of cinema, the nature of comedy, and the guilty pleasure that cinema arouses in its real participants (versus non-real figures on the screen), the narrative is wholly consistent with itself by not resorting to a melodramatic Hollywood ending.

The End.

Quickies, Vol. XXIX: Fantasies

Close Encounters of the Third Kind (dir. Steven Spielberg, 1977) – At this point, Spielberg hadn’t quite mastered his balance between grand scope and human interest; it’s overly big with not enough emphasis on the small. It’s good and well to offer a regular joe as your main protagonist, but don’t dwarf him too much. E.T., Indiana Jones, etc. do a better job with this. Still, lots of nice images of children, with the juvenile elements of humanity most likely to connect with the extra-terrestrial.

Ghostbusters 2 (dir. Ivan Reitman, 1985) – An old, guilty pleasure. Not as classic as the original, but still with its moments. It’s all Murray’s show as far as comedy goes, and all Aykroyd’s show as far as the occult stuff goes. There’s a lot of postcolonialism going on here, a la The Exorcist. All that is paranormal and weird seems to originate in the third world, reflecting all of our “Western” anxieties about the other/Other/mother. Whereas in the first film we have a symbol of Western capitalism terrorizing Manhattan – in a fundamental departure from the Godzilla rampage in Tokyo – this one flips to the “other” side: what we have most to fear is no longer ourselves, positioned here as we are halfway through the Reagan era, but the other, more netherworldy hemispheres.

Everything You’ve Always Wanted To Know About Sex…But Were Afraid To Ask (dir. Woody Allen, 1971) – Didn’t finish this one…didn’t make it halfway through, to be truthful. The idea of a series of vignettes about sex is worthwhile enough, and one would think that if anyone had something interesting and humorous to say about the subject, it would be Woody. It suffers from lengthy periods of either complete silence (intended as humorous awkwardness) or painful attempts at jokes. So many setups, so few coherent witticisms.

Femme Fatale (dir. Brian De Palma, 200?) – A pleasant surprise from the very techie, very senses-minded De Palma. He likes his cinema, too, as Blow-Out and this one clearly demonstrate. He’s playing with cinema’s tools, almost theorizing with them, and it comes off as exploratory and experimental rather than flashy and pretentious. By using such a classical form and narrative (noir) and toying with it and injecting it with modern thriller tropes, he whips up an interesting and bold mash-up that is, in its way, a very cool novelty. (Each of these films was screened via Netflix Instant, so screenshots suffer.)

Bananas

These old Woody Allen films are pretty delightful: intelligent slapstick overflowing with enough word plays and sight gags that the viewer might do well to hit “pause” while laughing so as not to miss another doozy. Woody seems to thrive on social commentary after being ripped out of his natural habitat, which somehow puts him in his element. In Sleeper, this happened when cryogenic preservation brought him into the distant future. Before Sleeper, here in Bananas, it happens after being sort-of kidnapped by revolutionary rebels in the socialistic/fascist nation of “San Marcos.” One of the best bits from Sleeper and one of the best from Bananas both poke wonderful fun at the phenomenon of sports, which seems to have been one of Woody’s big targets when he was a bit younger. (Now, consider how seriously he takes tennis as an existential illustration in Match Point.) Bananas begins with sportscasters, one of whom is the real Howard Cosell, offering sports commentary on the overthrow of San Marcos’ government through the assassination of its president. Cosell even attempts to interview the fallen leader and capture his dying words while gasping for breath on the steps of the country’s government seat. What may be largely a comedy routine still manages to carry biting ramifications on the nature of the news media, pretentiously neutral even in the most obvious of crises, sensationalizing the tragic and emptying the grave of all its gravity. (Sleeper‘s comment on sports takes place when a futuristic historian asks Woody’s character to make sense of a sports broadcast, guessing that the footage must have been used to punish society’s most grievous criminals. Woody replies, of course, with, “Yes. Yes, that’s exactly what that was.”

It’s more than just a commentary on sports and the media, though. Perhaps more than that, it seems to satirize the spectacle-ization of the “other,” the “third-world,” or just “them.” There’s always something funny about revolutions, as Woody Allen knows well. Can’t recall him ever specifically mocking the French Revolution, for example, but he may as well have. But what’s funny about the French Revolution is different from what’s funny about the Cuban or Argentinian revolutions. With the latter, North Americans (rather literally) look down upon still-developing nations wrestling with Marxist ideas and extreme poverty and unrest. “If only they knew what we know,” is the idea. By putting it in the context of a sports event, it becomes something for our entertainment, something trivial and ultimately insignificant. Perhaps most sadly, Bananas illustrates the effect of this outlook on the nations themselves. Needing a “legitimate” leader for their revolution, the people of San Marcos end up enlisting Allen’s character Fielding Mellish (excellent name), not unlike the Arabs enlisted T.E. Lawrence. Fielding’s own ineptitude doesn’t help the cause, broken and impotent man than he is, but at least he’s got more going for him than the revolutionaries. For them, “Something’s missing,” but they can’t figure out what. They live a life of constant discontent just like Fielding, but they’re defined by idiotic optimism rather than Fielding’s (Allen’s) intellectual fatalism.

Some of Woody’s more self-deprecating humor now feels anything but funny now, when considered in light of his own biography. His character’s sex addiction (or something like it) reminds one of the sad and pathetic problems the real Woody has had. It must be admitted, though, that the snake bite scene in Bananas is genuinely hilarious. Woody is always above revolutions like he’s above science and sports; these are dead ends at best and steps back in the evolutionary process at worst. He is willing to sign any petition if it offers the chance to get cozy with the lady revolutionary. He’s successful in the short run, but her “something’s missing” worldview applies to her relationship with Fielding; that is, until the final consummation of the film and their relationship. At that point Howard Cosell reappears to offer a play-by-play of their romp with following interviews.

Quickies, Vol. IX

Gilda (dir. Charles Vidor, 1946): The tagline read, “Was there ever a woman like Gilda?” Indeed. Upon a more recent viewing of this long-been favorite, it appears much less textbook Mulvey than previously alleged. Gilda’s sort of the pawn, the tennis ball; but she’s also got more power than the two men/players combined. Would make sense to consider her the substitute for the phallic (or is it?) sword-cane that Ballin wields before Gilda’s arrival and once she’s given him up for Johnny. So the instrument only makes appearances when Ballin is sine-Gilda. She has her breakdown(s), of course, but so do the men, losing their cool in a dual of male compensation. The previously commented-upon facets remain strong and interesting, but this film as a whole stands out for defying simple genre categorization and containing what are easily some of the sauciest and sassiest scenes from 1940s American film. The above clip constitutes perhaps the best female entrance ever in cinema.

Andrei Rublev (dir. Andrei Tarkovsky, 1966): Second viewing of this one, and words continue to fall flat next to such images and the ideas, feelings, and thoughts they represent and suggest. After all, the narrative concerns an icon painter whose doubts about what lies on the other side of the images paralyze him from creating said images. How a film, above all other forms of art, could do justice to such a theme seems impossible. Something about the animals in this film, too. Horses, cows, birds – majestic, transcendent, beautiful; bruised, injured, set aflame. 205 minutes, but not a superfluous moment.

Côte d’Azur or Crustacés et Coquillages (dir. Olivier Ducastel & Jacques Martineau, 2005): In many ways this is Feast of Love but in France and done by the French; certainly superior to the U.S. film by its relative lack of pretense. Summer vacation on the Riviera with a Parisian family who is anything but repressed in the broadly moral sense but each of them keeping and suspecting the others of keeping some illicit secrets, a number of them homosexual in nature. Has some very fun moments that seem to be inspired by Bollywood style song-and-dance routines showing up a couple times without warning. Despite the amoral element, a familial cohesion and ultimate optimism reigns that isn’t particularly true to “reality,” but in this little world the film has created, it works okay.

Rhapsody in August (dir. Akira Kurosawa, 1991): Would prefer to devote extensive length to this, but alas, time again forbids. Kurosawa is back in classic form here following a string of tragedies (especially Kagemusha and Ran) and then the exquisite Dreams. Rhapsody in August has moments of The Lower Depths and Red Beard that is as “Ozu” as Kurosawa ever gets, and some aesthetic insertions that recall both Dodes’ka-den and Dreams. The outcry that this film was “blaming” the U.S. for dropping the bomb is exceedingly naive and uninformed. Of course, we did drop the bomb, twice, on hundreds of thousands of civilians. But also, this film isn’t wrestling with anything very “American,” per se, but rather with (as is very customary in Kurosawa’s oeuvre) what it is to be Japanese at this particular time in history. Being the late-2oth century, that now means dealing with the post-industrial, postwar, Westernized Japan and the ramifications of having so may of one’s progeny living in the U.S. and mixing blood with Americans. The fact that it isn’t simply “the U.S.” here but Hawaii in particular pointedly alludes to Pearl Harbor, for all those who think Kurosawa was negating any Japanese culpability in the war. Kurosawa highlights the horrific and the heavenly, the ugly and the beautiful, with an amplified and otherworldly palette of textures and colors.

Sleeper (dir. Woody allen, 1973): Still funny, still biting, still smart.

Sleeper

Sleeper is a silly, smart, and enjoyable film. Its embrace of classic American silent comedy through ceaseless sight gags works remarkably well, with Woody Allen maximizing his minimalistic physical stature in imitation of a Keaton or Chaplin as few are capable of doing. Speeding up the film helps, along with ragtime music, to point the viewer back to comedy’s golden age. Put that together with Allen’s trademark punchline-driven dialogue, replete with constant mockery of the human condition in the 20th century, and you have the sort of humor that creates cultural and intellectual elitists out of its audience. A personal-favorite scene occurs when the analysts put Allen in front of various artifacts from ancient history (the 20th century) and ask him to describe them. While Allen is shown television footage of a sports commentator discussing a game that has ended, the doctor tells Allen, “We feel that when citizens in your society were guilty of a crime against the state, they were forced to watch this.” After a pause, Allen replies, “Yes, that’s exactly what that was.”

Sight gags while muted

The film’s futuristic architecture is suspiciously reminiscent of the kind popular during the 60’s and early 70’s, which had that progressive, lesser-is-better look that put functionality in the back seat. It seems likely that Allen was conscious of this, foreseeing the inevitable retroactivity that ironically takes place when art’s first priority is to outdo itself. Though Allen himself is doing this, at least he builds upon the genre without merely imitating it. His single-sentence comedy-soliloquies verbally encapsulate the spirit of Chaplin’s Tramp, in what turns out to be Allen turning Chaplin on his head while perfectly maintaining the latter’s self-pitying routine.

Silenced for reprogramming

Every time Allen is subjected to any form of technological artificiality, he is rendered silent, speechless. His initial wakeup from cryogenic sleep takes awhile, as he stumbles around a room without the control of his faculties. Later, while mimicking a servant robot at a party, he is given the task of passing around a drug orb, which makes him higher than anyone else. Later still, he hides out in the Orgasmatron, only to be discovered with the same look on his face: that of carefree bliss, and again verbally paralyzed. Allen’s complaint throughout the film is that he is being forced against his will to submit to all kinds of treatment, foremost of which is brain reprogramming. (“My brain? That’s my second-favorite organ!”) Clearly speech is Allen’s way of establishing personal identity. In a future run by a totalitarian regime (indeed, the dictator is a nose), subjectivity is removed through the effects of technology and its god, science. Allen’s view of science is low indeed, proclaiming it to be the death of the free, creative mind: “I don’t believe in science. It’s an intellectual dead-end.” Politics is no better, as he whines, “Political solutions don’t work; they’re all terrible!” It is not surprising that a character like Woody Allen, so renowned for his way with words, would see speech as the sine qua non of human freedom. Stating his disbelief in God, too, Keaton asks Allen what he does believe in: “Sex and death: two things that come once in a lifetime. But at least after death you’re not nauseous.”

The Orgasmatron

"Don't move or the nose gets it!"