Sarris on Woody Allen

In the wake of my umpteenth viewing of Stardust Memories, I read Andrew Sarris' reviewof Woody Allen's latest in The New York Observer. (It's the second one, after Chambrol.) I was struck by this paragraph:

The suspicion persists among many critics that when one of Mr. Allen’s films fails, it is because he isn’t really trying: He doesn’t spend enough time rewriting, he doesn’t do enough retakes, etc. One can be tempted to believe that Woody is the prisoner of his own reputation. After all, why does a genius have to do retakes or rewrite his own spontaneous wit? One can also suspect that talent diminishes with age, but where does that leave us aging critics? Perhaps the ability to make people laugh fits into a special category. As Chaplin got older, he was widely thought to have lost his comic gifts. With beloved aging performers, the question becomes more and more complex. Did people really laugh with exuberant surprise when Jimmy Durante performed the same shtick for the thousandth time the same way he’d performed it 999 times before? Or was something more complex at work, something like nostalgia or shared survival? The problem is that Woody never asked us to love him: His humor was more sharply edged than that, and now the edge is gone. Or is it? I ask because I do not know.

I don't know, either. I do know that there is something really complicated--and more than a little sad--going on between Woody and his audience. For years, I delighted in Woody Allen's work, and was more than willing to forgive him his flaws and indulgences. Now, he inspires in me a real feeling of loss.

I would disagree with Sarris that Woody never asked us to love us--his early material (the schlemiel persona, the references) is an enjoyable, but very calculated, attempt to give the people who he respected the kind of comedy he thought they'd respond to. Then, having done what he set out to do, Woody began to look around. He didn't like what he saw, either in himself ("I'm dishonest, this persona isn't real, I'm manipulating them...") or us ("...and they lap it up."). When a self-hating performer becomes successful, the audience becomes a target of his/her self-hatred. "If I'm worthless, and they love me, they must be idiots."

With every laugh I think Woody despises us all a little more, throwing out one-liners like fish to a trained seal. Maybe he hates us for continuing to laugh while in a world Allen finds absurd, vile, repugnant. That we see the suffering of the world and want more jokes is, perhaps, an indictable offense--but a famous comedian isn't the person to scold us for it. After all, that was Woody's reaction to the world, too. He may have since discovered that "comedy as palliative" doesn't work, but audiences would naturally feel angry, even cheated, to hear him say that.

A comedian engages in a simple transaction with the audience; an artist's transaction is more complicated, and for better and worse, Woody Allen's become much more of an artist than a comedian. But what he's been attempting for the last 25 years feels very unhappy and thwarted to me. I feel bad when I watch his movies. Whether they are entertaining or not, I feel like I'm watching a desperate, unsuccessful attempt to escape.

Anyway...