Posted: 05/15/2002

Hollywood Ending

(2002)

by Parama Chaudhury

To tell you the truth, I dread going to a new Woody Allen movie. I live in New York, so reminders of Allen’s classics surround me. Every time I walk past Washington Square, I can see Diane Keaton and Allen deep in conversation in Annie Hall. Manhattan is never far from my mind every time I see the Brooklyn Bridge at dusk. There’s no doubt that this is one director who’s always in a New York state of mind, but is that enough to keep us in love with him? After the last couple of movies: not really. So I went to see Hollywood Ending with a sinking heart. Sure enough, there were about four other people in the theater. And this in New York!

The surprising thing is that I actually enjoyed the film; maybe less than Small-Time Crooks, but I enjoyed it nevertheless. In between the clichés and predictable one-liners, there are glints of that wholehearted serio-comic romantic film that made Allen a master in his own right. An exquisite jazz score along with Bing Crosby singing Going Hollywood, and the discovery of Tea Leoni as someone who can finally rival Ms. Keaton as Allen’s romantic lead makes this film worth watching. Allen too throws in a sharp, witty and fresh performance There are shades of his neurotic, jealous husband character in all those Husbands and Wives-type films, but they are expertly mixed in with the wisecracks as well as the ravings of the frustrated artist in him. Debra Messing as Val’s live-in bimbo and aspiring actress, and George Hamilton as the producer (or the studio boss’s lackey, whichever you prefer), are a both little over-the-top, but within the ensemble, they are fine. In fact, Messing performs best in each of her scenes with the sophisticated character played by Leoni.

Allen plays Val, an out-of-work, has-been director who is hired by his ex-wife Ellie’s fiancée and movie studio bigwig to direct a remake of a 1930s noir, which Ellie believes is the masterpiece Val has been born to make. Val lives up to everyone’s fears that he won’t be able to handle such a big project, and develops psychosomatic blindness. His agent convinces Val to keep his blindness a secret and assures him that it won’t be a problem because “have you seen some of the movies, lately?” This is the central conceit of the movie, and it might have worked well enough if Allen had been content to live out this analogy, and not underline it repeatedly with a side plot about how he has been blind about his relationship with his son.

How does Val’s movie turn out? Well, the ending is only a bit of a fairy tale, a Hollywood ending, but the last scenes are in themselves symptomatic of what is so frustrating about this film. It has that wonderful romantic touch that Allen honed to perfection in his earlier films, but at the same time, his swipe at the French film critics is so predictable, so broad, that you cannot help but cringe. The early jokes about Canada, the in-crowd jokes (“I get half a million plus one-tenth of a percentage point after quadruple break-even!”), and some of the California gags are stale, way too many, paced badly and too forced in delivery. Allen’s standard neuroses—he thought at various points in his life that he had hoof-and-mouth disease, shingles and even elm blight—and his movie-making jokes work best. A foreign director is, of course, absolutely required, even if he doesn’t speak anything but Mandarin; and fashion designer Isaac Mizrahi delivers a smart little turn as the set designer who wants to build Harlem and Times Square.

Now back to the real reason why this film might just go down as a landmark Woody Allen film: Tea Leoni. Was she this beautiful before? Why didn’t I notice when she was doing that silly little sitcom in the mid-90s? And why hasn’t Allen used her before? Leoni is smart, charming and eminently believable as someone who is up to here with Val’s eccentricities but somewhere, deep in her heart, never stopped loving him (note to Woody: why does Ellie, along with everyone else have to declare loudly whatever she’s feeling, like in those Hollywood movies?). In Central Park, at Balthazar’s, by her swimming pool in that place where Satan lives, Hollywood, Leoni is radiant and it is her performance that holds the romantic element in this film together. Allen plays off of her sympathetic acting, and together they make a perfect couple. Leoni is not as loopy as Keaton’s characters could be sometimes, and that makes her the one you’re rooting for throughout the film. Even though her role in the comedy itself is limited, you find yourself wanting the romantic movie in this awkwardly funny film to assert itself, if only because it means seeing more of Leoni’s Ellie.

Hollywood Ending is definitely not the start of a comeback trail for the Woodman, much as I would like to believe it. The slip-ups of the past few years, the bad habits that have been creeping up on him, are present in this movie in all their glory: the repetitiveness, the fact that a good little idea is beaten to death, and the uninspired cinematography (even though they had a foreign guy do it!). What is heartening to see is that Allen still has some of the magic left. He may never make another Radio Days or Take the Money and Run, but with even a sprinkling of that fairy dust remaining on his fingers, we can hope to see hints of the enchanting past in his future movies.

Parama Chaudhury is a graduate student, an ex-writing instructor and a budding freelance writer, based in New York City.

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