Not So Strange
You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger
Directed by Woody Allen
Runtime: 98 min.
There’s
not a spiritual bone in his body. How could he write books!” an
exasperated woman says of her loutish son-in-law in Woody Allen’s You
Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger. The same could be said of Allen, who has
yet to show any sign of spiritual sensitivity, only that peculiar New
York narcissism that takes pride in claiming its neuroses. Now, in his
30th-odd film, Allen presents another quasi-comic look at contemporary
turpitude. It’s the story of a London family’s disintegration: As Sally
(Naomi Watts) copes with her parents’ (Gemma Jones and Anthony Hopkins)
recent divorce, her own marriage collapses. Allen compounds trouble by
paralleling the parents’ middle-aged sexual insecurities with Sally and
her American husband Roy’s (Josh Brolin) career anxieties, which lead to
more infidelity, distrust and betrayal.
This interpersonal
disaster is not an ingenious farce mechanism; it’s what the British call
a “cockup.” Allen has transplanted his secularist cynicism, yet, once
again, fails to capture a sense of place (the great Vilmos Zsigmond
photographs England as if he were no longer the great Vilmos Zsigmond).
Allen’s simply spread his virus. Some people laugh at it—nervously or
out of habit—mistaking Allen’s comic reputation for a genial intent. But
for others, Allen’s misplaced, soured sense of humor has become an
unfunny, unending routine.
Happily, the perfect contrast to this
faux-European phase of Allen’s interminable career is Criterion’s new
box set Presenting Sacha Guitry—an almost official re-introduction of a
once beloved filmmaking personality—showcasing four classics recently
out of distribution. Writer-director-actor Guitry turned out a number of
distinctly personal comic entertainments throughout the mid-20th
century (he died in 1958) that not only teased the idea of European
sophistication but also exemplified it.
In Guitry’s world,
characters are motivated by an itch which not only complicates their
immediate lives but may also determine history—as in his epic The Pearls
of the Crown (1939), which burlesques English, French and Italian
history, even a bit of Africa’s legacy. Through ingeniously connected
episodic fables, Guitry illustrates how the Queen of England’s crown got
some of its jewels. In essence, Guitry satirized the imperialist
ideology that he—and his bon vivant audience—unapologetically enjoyed.
Even his minor masterpiece Quadrille (1938),
featuring the flirtatious interplay of a Parisian newspaper editor
(Guitry), his actress paramour (Gaby Morlay), their mutual friend
(Jacqueline Delubac) and an American movie star (Georges Grey), provides
some of the same social observation that informed Jean Renoir’s
profound The Rules of the Game the following year. Guitry glossed
profundity; his talent was insouciance itself—the cinematic
immortalization of his era’s theatrical postures, diction and morality:
updating Moliere’s moral ferment and turning it to contemporary fizz.
Quadrille
is a condensed roundelay like You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, but
Guitry’s excellence evokes the swanky world of Hollywood screwball
comedies like My Man Godfrey and Twentieth Century—froth that
was also culturally, spiritually authentic. Much of its pleasure
derives from Guitry’s bulky, strutting persona, his infectious egotism
and élan. Guitry was French showbiz’s equivalent to Orson Welles and
Noel Coward in the mid-century. Later, only Mel Brooks similarly
multitasked (his History of the World, Part I was a vaudevillian version
of Pearls of the Crown), yet
Brooks never matched Guitry’s grand example of a formally-audacious
sophisticate. Rewatching Guitry’s boulevard comedies confirms that Woody
Allen’s films aren’t just spiritually deficient—they lack true
sophistication.
The real point of Allen’s title You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger is
to jab at faith as a form of superstition: Sally’s mother visits a
fortune teller and clings to the suspicious, paid-for advice. Her
pathetic search for guidance is a postdivorce response to insecurity and
fear, just like her husband’s dalliance with prostitute/actress
Charmaine (Lucy Punch). Each character switches partners and allegiance
(aspiring novelist Roy even plagiarizes his best friend), but it all
happens in Allen’s degraded appreciation of social climbing. Compare the
clownish wrap-up Allen gives his Brit twits with Quadrille’s fugue-like
dialogues, in which the characters amusingly articulate their world
views, leading to a zesty finale that tilts into musical comedy—a tonal
shift and spiritual distillation that was cinema’s damnedest denouement
until Godard’s 1965 Band of Outsiders.
Without
a spiritual bone, so to speak, Allen’s films have no emotional spine.
His depiction/validation of inhumane behavior doesn’t get beyond his
fascination with cruelty: Naomi Watts signs off with an ugly castigation
against her silly mother that leaves everyone desolate. When Allen
rewards the story’s most clownish characters with happiness, it’s an
unfelt gimmick that plays the audience cheap. This is the opposite of Quadrille’s dance,
the opposite of sophistication. Allen’s preoccupied with how people
abuse and deceive each other (as his most recent films have been
obsessed with murder).
You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger
continues the selfishness and lack of faith that in Manhattan once
seemed to observe moral decay, and Hannah and Her Sisters became
a symptom of. There’s been no real progress since—not with such drab,
inert filmmaking. Allen’s made a career out of obtuseness. His narrator
says, “Life is sound and fury and means nothing”— misquoted Shakespeare
and serious misunderstanding.