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Woody Allen's latest comedy stretches plausibility
Woody Allen tries to direct a film with the help of Tea Leoni and George Hamilton
DreamWorks
So, Val Waxman can direct a $60 million epic without his sight. Can't he?
He might if he didn't have so much other baggage.
Once a major movie director, Val (Woody Allen), the central figure in Allen's "Hollywood Ending," can't even complete a two-day shoot of a deodorant commercial anymore.
Intensely neurotic and hypochondriacal, he bungles a critical pitch meeting for a period epic called "The City That Never Sleeps."
He catalogs his ailments. He describes his game plan for shooting the film in black and white with a handheld camera and a Cole Porter score. And when he gets a few minutes alone with his producer and biggest rooter, who also is his ex-wife Ellie (Tea Leoni), he berates her compulsively for abandoning him.
She pleads his cause to her lover, studio executive Hal (Treat Williams). Val is an auteur, after all — a perfectionist who has the streets of New York in his marrow. He's also a pain in the neck who insists on hiring an Asian cinematographer (Lu Yu) with whom he can communicate only through a translator (Barney Cheng).
That Val gets hired at all is the first of the leaps of faith built into "Hollywood Ending."
Loyal agent Al (Mark Rydell, the director of movies such as "On Golden Pond") negotiates an unremarkable salary ($500,000) and an amusingly worthless bonus (one-tenth of a point after quadruple break even).
But Val faces his biggest job in years by going psychosomatically blind.
Alternately funny and preposterous, his navigating of the set, much less his directing, are never even slightly plausible as depicted. Why doesn't he at least face in the direction of the person with whom he's speaking? Is there a hearing or balance problem, too?
It's a sketch idea that can't sustain an hour of big-screen time (representing about two months of shooting "The City That Never Sleeps") even as a metaphor that contains many individually humorous moments.
Faking sight (with a subtext of insight) is hardly what constitutes being mistaken for "a genius who thrives on chaos."
Along the way, though, writer-director Allen works in dozens of gags, including one involving an aspiring actress who says she'd do anything for a director.
"You should take a full page ad in the DGA (Directors Guild of America) Magazine," Val tells her. "You'll never stop working again."
George Hamilton's role as a studio flack amounts to so little that one wonders if it's all there.
But Debra Messing plays a brightly dim young actress named Lori, and Leoni registers effectively as the film's most sympathetic character. She has a cerebral loveliness akin to Emma Thompson's that has never been so apparent.
Viewers of American Movie Classics from years past will recognize former host Bob Dorian as a production functionary.
"Hollywood Ending" cultivates a metaphor about using sight to learn to see.
It delivers the most delicious (if affectionate) ribbing of pretentious French film critics you'll find anywhere.
They're already Allen's most enthusiastic audience, and they'll love the zinger when "Hollywood Ending" opens the Cannes Film Festival on May 15.
| 'Hollywood Ending' |
Director: Woody Allen
Stars: Woody Allen, Tea Leoni, Treat Williams
MPAA Rating: PG-13, for some drug references and sexual material
