Woody Allen In Exile
A look at the once-revered director's last four films and the breaking of a decades-long moviegoing habit.
Untitled Woody Allen Project was, for decades, part of a moviegoing routine. Woody Allen would write and direct a movie every year, it would appear on the schedule as “untitled” in the fall or early winter, and we would see it once it had a title and trickled out into limited release. For me, the routine started in 1989, with Crimes and Misdemeanors, and continued through the ups and downs of the ‘90s and ‘00s, even as the ups became less frequent and the downs suggested creative exhaustion, bordering on indifference. It had started to feel like the routine itself had overwhelmed whatever artistic impulse Allen might have had during the first half of his career, when every film—even (or sometimes especially) the “early, funny ones”—seemed energized and purposeful. Inertia had taken over and it was carrying fans along with it, through listless comedies like Celebrity and Anything Else, or forgettable baubles like The Curse of the Jade Scorpion, Scoop, and You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger.
For those still hanging on into the ‘10s, after 2011’s Midnight in Paris became an improbable box-office smash, the habit was easily broken by the resurfacing of charges that Allen had sexually abused his then-seven-year-old adoptive daughter, Dylan Farrow. These allegations had already been made in August 1992, eight months after Allen’s partner, Mia Farrow, had learned of his sexual relationship with another one of her adoptive daughters, Soon-Yi Previn, but they didn’t gain much traction in the system or in the culture at large. It wasn’t until the mid-‘10s, when a now-adult Dylan repeated the charges in various outlets and the #MeToo movement granted them a new legitimacy. She also had crucial support from her brother Ronan Farrow, Allen and Farrow’s biological son, who had done critical reporting on Harvey Weinstein and related scandals.
In retrospect, Allen’s three-picture deal with Amazon Studios was like watching the sun set on his career as a mainstream director: 2016’s Café Society had emerged to the indifferent reception typical of late-period Allen, but 2017’s Wonder Wheel came out just as Dylan filed a Los Angeles Times op-ed titled “Why has the #MeToo revolution spared Woody Allen?” and was dead in the water, despite a spot in the New York Film Festival earlier that fall. By the time A Rainy Day in New York came out the following year, Allen’s name was so toxic that much of the cast—including stars Timothée Chalamet, Selena Gomez, and Rebecca Hall, sparked by supporting player Griffin Newman—donated their salaries to RAINN (Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network) and Time’s Up, and Amazon shelved the film entirely, leading a breach-of-contract lawsuit and release from a tiny distributor. His subsequent projects, 2020’s Rifkin’s Festival and his new Coup de Chance, turned to European sources for financing and have drawn from a much shallower casting pool. Wonderful actors as they are, Wallace Shawn and Gina Gershon don’t quite have the modern cachet as romantic partners as, say, Chalamet and Gomez.
When Allen’s 50th feature, Coup de Chance, came out in limited release last weekend, I realized that I hadn’t seen his last four features—not so much out of moral outrage or the regret articulated by A.O. Scott in his January 2018 piece “My Woody Allen Problem,” but an erosion of interest that had started much earlier and that his rejection from the culture had conveniently legitimized. In retrospect, Allen’s vitality as a filmmaker had peaked with his last work with Farrow, 1992’s Husbands and Wives, a marital drama so bracingly unvarnished that it seemed like the beginning of a more candid, personal era in his career. His follow-ups belied that impression entirely: Manhattan Murder Mystery, Bullets Over Broadway, Mighty Aphrodite, and Everyone Says I Love You were all delightful in the way that made you anticipate those annual Untitled Woody Allen Projects, but emotional candor was not their defining quality. Some piece of Allen as an artist had died along with his partnership with Farrow, replaced by a form of compartmentalization, a terminal lightness that could seem either deft or disengaged, depending on how well he pulled it off.
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