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Comparing Steve Martin with Albert Brooks with Woody Allen is really comparing apples and oranges and bananas. Martin is obviously using the “one for them, one for me” strategy—only the most indiscriminant of his fans are expected to pay to see Cheaper By the Dozen or The Pink Panther, so there is really no reason to even bother reviewing them. Albert Brooks is not really a comedian, he’s an actor whose best roles happen to have been in comedies (the distinction is the same as between, say, Groucho Marx and John Barrymore). Broadcast News, for instance, is about serious people in an absurd situation, the humor built around complex characters, not comic personae. With “Looking for Comedy,” Brooks tried to take on current events and ended up over his head; a regrettable failure perhaps, but a noble effort, and not at all indicative of a career in decline.
Now, for the hundredth time, about Woody…
I happened to find Match Point one of the most discomforting movies of 2005, and, for that very reason, one of the best. From the awkward juxtaposition of Italian opera and Buckingham Palace guards to the final scene with the murderer’s happy extended family and newborn baby, a truly nauseating existential dread grows on the viewer. Any hint of comedy, even an appearance by Allen in a serious role, would have broken the Doestoyevskian spell.
Ms. Zacharek, who obviously prefers Allen’s early, funny pictures, complains, without bothering to give evidence, of Match Point’s “dunderheaded moralism.” But in reality the film is less about any specific moral code than it is an examination of the amorality of it’s narrator, and how flawed but basically decent people, both in the film and in the audience, can become ensnared by his self-exculpatory rationalizations. I don’t know what Allen’s opinion of Doestoyevsky is—his main character can’t read Crime and Punishment without a crib, and even then, all he seems to get out of it is the inspiration for a murder scheme, after which his victims come back to try to haunt his conscience, but are almost comically unsuccessful. We do know what Nabokov thought Doestoyevsky to be—an overpraised, illiterate, reactionary fanatic. Nabokov’s response to Crime and Punishment was Lolita (a title that always seems to come to mind when Allen is the topic of conversation), the amorality of the unreliable narrator of which is strikingly similar to Match Point’s.
Allen’s movies tend to polarize critics in strange ways—instead of champions and detractors, he attracts critics who try to divide his work into masterpieces and failures. While I would agree that Manhattan is extremely good and Anything Else is mostly flat, for the most part I tend toward the opinion that Allen’s good films are not as great, nor are his poorer films nearly so bad, as everybody tries to tell me. His dialogue will always strike me as a little too mannered and stagebound for the cinema, his actors projecting to the audience instead of conversing with each other. But if his wit occasionally sours, and if his work is never quite realistic enough to be true art, he never fails to be inventive and provocative—and that even goes for the “indefensible” Melinda and Melinda.
