In a recent essay in The New York Times A. O. Scott asks the question, “Is Woody Allen a Great Filmmaker?” Scott is a critic for whom we at Mid Century Cinema have enormous appreciation—his reviews are thoughtful and well written; his longer-form thought pieces and video essays are almost invariably valuable and insightful. We read his recent book with great interest.
With the exception of expressing a presumption of guilt that we find reckless, Scott has also admirably tried to steer what he considers to be a middle course on the Woody Allen controversy, bravely writing several essays that have exposed him to the wrath of partisans. With this latest effort, he aspires to set aside the controversies and revisit the films, which, as he noted elsewhere, were formatively important to him, and he “can hardly unwatch” them, even if he wanted to.
In this piece, a response to Scott, we will also focus on the movies. (Our position on the off-screen controversies is here.) Although “we will also” is not quite right. Scott is to be applauded for going out on a limb with an attempt at a dispassionate assessment of Allen’s films, and to invite the argument about the greatness (or lack thereof) of the filmmaker. Our answer is plain, as we have argued here and here, the short version of which is, yes—Allen belongs in the pantheon of great filmmakers because he has (as we elaborate in those other essays), produced a large and distinguished body of work identifiable with his personal imprint, no less than ten of which can reward close and sustained study, attention, and serious discussion. Only a rarefied few can make that claim.
Our disagreement with Scott, however, is not with where he comes down on the question of Allen’s greatness—as he suggests, the argument’s the thing, and we love having a good argument about the movies. Rather, it is that despite his admirable intentions, to our eyes Scott is arguing in bad faith—he is still reviewing the man, not the films. Some of the language choices in the essay tip this hand, such as “I’ve spent much of the past few weeks re-watching movies that I used to count among my favorites,” and his acknowledgement that he cannot watch many of those movies today “without queasiness or qualm.” This leads to an approach that reeks of double standards, which stack the deck impossibly and unfairly against Allen in Scott’s reassessment.
Consider the treatment of three Allen masterpieces: Another Woman, Manhattan, and Crimes and Misdemeanors. With regard to the first, Scott dutifully notes Allen’s well-deserved reputation for writing rich female characters (often during eras when fine parts for women were all-too-scarce), eliciting performances that have been justly showered with awards. Scott now downgrades those roles, reassessing them as more circumscribed; and even when unmitigated praise cannot be avoided it is grudging and backhanded, as with the observation that Gena Rowland’s character in Another Woman “is perhaps Mr. Allen’s most sustained and successful effort at imagining women who function independently from a man like him.” This revisionism cries out for some contextualizing referent, such as how Allen’s oeuvre might fare on this score in comparison to other great filmmakers. (To take one easy example, consider how the films of John Huston would fare when confronted with the same standard.)
And then of course there is Manhattan, one of the great films of the 1970s, with a brilliant screenplay (even more obviously impressive when read), Gordon Willis’ stunning, indelible Black and White imagery, and outstanding performances—it is a film with something to say and one that effortlessly captures a moment in social-cultural history. But it is now of course ground zero for anti-Allen absolutism – certainly one of those films that makes Scott “uneasy” – commonly vilified for its purportedly objectionable content or as an example of a certain type of retrograde male fantasy, because one of its central relationships is between a forty-two year old man and a seventeen year old girl. We don’t read it that way (nor would we reduce the film to that summary). As observed by Mary (Diane Keaton), Isaac (Allen) pursued his relationship with the young Tracy (Mariel Hemmingway) out of insecurity, his confidence shattered after being abandoned and humiliated by his wife (who the movie presents quite sympathetically, it should be noted). Subsequently Allen breaks it off with Tracy to pursue a relationship with Mary, a woman who is more his equal, and then she ultimately casts him aside in favor if his best friend, again leaving him in ruins. This sends him rushing back to Tracy—who is now unavailable, heading off to London, where she will surely embark of a rich new life without him. Like Alvy Singer in Annie Hall, Isaac is a dysfunctional character, alone at the end, and defined by his stasis; in both films, the younger women with whom he was involved mature and plainly outgrow him. Is the relationship between Isaac and Tracy romanticized and unrealistic? Yes it is. We would observe that such things sometimes happen in the movies.
To be made queasy by Manhattan, then, is to do exactly what Scott says he is trying to push beyond with his essay—he is not assessing the film, he is condemning the filmmaker. This may sound like a bold assertion, but consider our claim in the context of Scott’s recent rave review for Phantom Thread. (Before going any further I should mention that I think Paul Thomas Anderson, writer-director of Phantom Thread, is one of the greatest filmmakers working today.) That movie tells the story of an older, powerful man and the very young waitress he falls in love with, molds in a controlling way to conform to his exacting needs, and routinely treats shabbily. Among many scenes that might give some pause is the dress-fitting sequence, during which the camera lingers (leers?) on the nubile, nearly-naked form of the young beauty who has caught the old man’s eye. Aside from the problematic central May-December romance, the film’s portrayals of women more generally are none-too-pleasant (some might even be tempted to say misogynist), such as the frankly ugly vulgarian who dares to wear one of the master’s dresses in an inadequately dignified manner, and the controlling spinster, who has apparently devoted her entire life solely and selflessly to the advancement of her brother’s work.
I argue this: had Phantom Thread been a Woody Allen film, Scott (among many others) would have penned an openly contemptuous review of the movie, and offered it as still more proof of Allen’s unhealthy fixation on the need to dominate and be loved by fetching young women (who are also, if not cloying, profoundly dangerous to the great man). But as the film is by Anderson, and not Allen, it is instead extolled as “a perverse psychological fable of unchecked ego and unhinged desire.” And then there is this laudable passage from Scott’s review: “This is a profoundly, intensely, extravagantly personal film. I don’t mean autobiographical. I know little and care less about the details of Mr. Anderson’s personal life.” This is the clarion call for assessing a film as one sees it (which is not to disregard its subtexts or social-cultural context), as opposed to a source of evidence to introduce for an already-unsealed indictment of the filmmaker—the good will and fair play that Scott now withholds from his reading of Allen’s movies.
This bias is most pronounced in the radically revisionist take on Crimes and Misdemeanors. Here Scott is looking at the film through such deeply scandal-tinted lenses that he offers an uncommonly weak and short-sighted misreading of the picture. “What do you make of the homicidal misogyny of Crimes and Misdemeanors,” Scott asks, “in which Martin Landau murders his inconvenient mistress, played by Anjelica Huston? . . . Does the philosophical despair that surrounds it offer an explanation or an excuse for amorality? Whose?”
Actually, Crimes and Misdemeanors is a rich, complex, and deeply searching film (we recommend the long discussion here)—and, most important, it is a film with a profound moral center, exploring the nature of evil and the ease with which it can triumph, considering as it unfolds the dilemmas raised by Tolstoy’s philosophical writings, the suicide of Primo Levi, and the implications of the holocaust. As for that murder, the movie does not celebrate that Landau’s character escapes justice—just the opposite. It takes an act of willful motivation to look past Crimes and Misdemeanor’s essential moral grounding (the very point of the picture) and define it instead by the horrifying and condemned-by-the-movie immoral actions of its central character. Consider by way of contrast Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs: a shockingly misogynist, inherently immoral, and manipulative and offensive film, in which a female character is held responsible for (and initially enjoys) her own rape, and which obscenely stacks the deck to encourage the audience to cheer acts of gratuitous vigilante justice. In assessing Straw Dogs, would one turn a blind eye to all that, and instead label it a “moral” film, because its lead character is a well-intentioned pacifist, and it ends, as the old Hollywood censorship code would have insisted, with justice nominally restored?
Like the work of all great filmmakers, the movies of Woody Allen will be assessed and reassessed, and interpreted and reinterpreted over time, as they should be. And, inescapably, people bring themselves to the movies that they watch, and movies, wonderfully and magically, lend themselves to a variety of possible interpretations, even by the same person over time. (We watch My Dinner with Andre with astonishment about every seven years, and see a different film at each screening). But if you go in looking for evidence you expect to find, you will very likely find it. That is not criticism.
Martin Landau and Woody Allen in Crimes and Misdemeanors