“What about me? What about the next-door neighbor? … Is there no problem with me having to die?”
This is the melancholy question that the ghost of an elderly woman poses to her murderer in Woody Allen’s “Match Point,” which opened last winter to critical acclaim and Allen’s best box-office showing in decades.
It is an ace of a moment, an example of what might happen were Sophocles granted Venus Williams’ serve. Sure the killer, a tennis pro, tries a topspin return of her question, but it’s a moral whiff.
An apparition also materializes to goose the action in “Scoop.” Allen’s fleet murder-mystery comedy opened Friday and stars the writer-director, his “Match Point” lead Scarlett Johansson and Hugh Jackman.
And so a natural – supernatural? – question arises during a recent telephone conversation with Woody Allen, who is shooting his third consecutive feature in London.
Do you believe in ghosts?
“No, I don’t,” said the writer-director of movies as remarkable as “Annie Hall” and “Crimes and Misdemeanors” and as slight as “Alice.”
“That was strictly scientific. I have no patience with otherwordly phenomena, or crystals or astrology or ESP or any of that. I find all of that to be silly.”
Forgive the tautology, but there is something disarmingly Allen-esque about Allen’s reply.
It isn’t just the unmistakable rhythms of the writer-director- actor, whose voice and odd phrasing have been with us for five decades now. For instance, after picking up the receiver, Allen advised me to “Speak clearly because the phones in this house are not sufficiently articulate.”
It’s the thought that using an artistic device has a “scientific function. It’s fun to use it in fictional stories,” he said. “But in real life, I’m a diehard, practical, scientific, secular humanist.”
Since last year’s “Melinda and Melinda,” the secular humanist appears to have rediscovered his directorial agility. And it’s tempting to locate a creative renaissance in Allen’s recent output – even the intentional fluff of “Scoop.” After all, movie directors often do impressive work in their later years. Allen turned 70 in December.
So has age changed his filmmaking?
“I see it differently,” Allen says. “For many years, decades really, without trying to I’ve made a film every year. I’m shooting a film now in London. I’ll edit the film pretty quickly. I’ll be sitting around, and then after a couple of months I’ll make another film because it just happens that way.”
He seizes, he says, on the idea he likes at the time. His movies often have the recurring concerns and gestures found in the tales of prolific short story writers. He revisits. He revises. He retells from a new perspective.
“Some audiences like. Some they don’t. Some, I think are good, and the audience and the critics have not been fair. Sometimes the critics and the audiences have been overgenerous to me.
“The film I make now could be wonderful or it could be catastrophic. If this idea is indeed as dramatically interesting as I think it is, then it should be very entertaining to people. But if I guess wrong or I execute poorly, then it won’t be. He pauses. “But I’m the same immature person I was in my 20s.”
Allen just completed week two of the drama (with “the level of intensity of ‘Match Point”‘) he’s shooting in London. It’s slated for summer 2007.
Unlike “Scoop” he isn’t in it.
“It’s always more fun when I’m not in the picture,” he says, though some of his best movies provide evidence otherwise. “I don’t have to shave every day. I can relax. The burden of acting is on the other people.
“If I get good actors, which I was blessed with in this picture, they make my material sound very good. When you’re an American and you hear English people doing your material, it really sounds like a million dollars.”
Pondering ethical issues
Game. Set. “Match Point.”
A story of wealth, lust, ambition and, yes, murder, “Match Point” was entertaining for audiences and intricate in ways that please critics to no end.
The film harkened to the ethical dilemmas Allen explored in “Crimes and Misdemeanors” (1989). But floating above it was also the specter of a very different American classic relocated to British upper-class environs, 1951’s “A Place in the Sun.”
In “Match Point,” Allen captured Scarlett Johansson in a different light. Her Nola begins as the coolest customer. And the direction of the romantic chase seems fairly obvious: Smitten Wilton (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) will remain in hot pursuit until he destroys the upscale life he’s gained. But when Nola becomes pregnant, beauty is transformed into a troubled beast of need not unlike Shelley Winters’ character in George Stevens’ classic, based on Theodore Dreiser’s “An American Tragedy.”
Everyone who witnessed Allen and his star interact during “Match Point” told Allen he should do something with Johansson, who was 19 at the time.
“I was always joking with her and she was always funnier than I was. Every time I would tease her, she’d top me, always had great remarks delivered beautifully. So I thought to myself, ‘Yeah, this girl is really a comic talent.’ I’d love to show people how delightful she is.”
In “Scoop,” legendary Fleet Street scribe Joe Strombel (Ian McShane) is on a slow boat to Hades when he hears what would have been the tip of a lifetime. Ink-stained even in the bittersweet hereafter, he figures out a way to communicate the tip to an unlikely medium, Johansson’s American journalism student.
If Johansson’s Nola slid into hysteria, “Scoop’s” Sondra Pransky borrows backtalk and backbone from screwball gals.
Allen plays Sid Waterman, a.k.a. Splendini, an American magician fond of telling his volunteers fluffy, flattering, fawning phrases while ushering them into a large box. It is in that box that Strombel meets Pransky.
Allen admits he took a chance pushing Johansson toward levity. “Very often what’s fun off the screen, you try to put it on the screen and it’s pretty revolting,” he says. “It could have been one of those things where it’s funny to me and the crew and to Scarlett, but it’s pretty irritating to the rest of the world. But I didn’t think it came out so badly.
“Scarlett is indestructible no matter what you ask her to do. She’s just a big talent like Diane Keaton was. Or is.”
A trilogy is born
Looking back to “Melinda and Melinda,” one can now divine the makings of a wonderfully clever, if accidental, trilogy.
That comedy-tragedy recounted Melinda’s love story from two perspectives, that of tragedy and that of comedy.
With Johansson as the constant and British high-society as the backdrop, “Match Point” and “Scoop” attack murder and class from the grave and the goofball point of view.
A similar trajectory from serious to silly occurred in the transition that took Allen from the brilliantly assured “Crimes and Misdemeanors” (1989) to “Manhattan Murder Mystery,” (1993) which starred Allen and Keaton. Think of it as Alfred Hitchcock’s “Rear Window” retold as a comedy with two bumbling, married sleuths. At the time, “Manhattan Murder Mystery” drew mixed reviews.
But Allen feels strongly about pleasing himself. And this attitude has him sounding independent in ways many young indie directors should envy and learn from.
“When I did ‘What’s New Pussycat,’ it was a big, big hit,” he said of the 1965 comic romp. “I wrote it but didn’t direct it. And I was just humiliated by it. I thought it was awful, that they had mangled my script, killed it. Yet everyone was coming to see it. It gave me no pleasure whatsoever.
“Whereas I have done films in my lifetime where either the critics or the public didn’t really like the film, but I liked the film. And I got some pleasure out of that at least.”
Speaking of independence, perhaps no other director has been used more often as a modifier for young, idiosyncratic filmmakers. Remember when Spike Lee was introduced as the black Woody Allen?
So how does the genuine article feel about that?
“I remember having this conversation with Martin Scorsese once,” he says, then commits the sort of twists and turns we expect from his dialogue.
“I was saying – and not out of any false modesty or anything but just as an observation – that I’ve felt that I’ve influenced nobody.
“Marty has influenced a ton of people. Every young filmmaker coming up tries to make films like Marty, whether it was Spike Lee or even older filmmakers like Brian De Palma, whether they’re white or black, they’re all influenced by him. Which is a testimony to how wonderful he is, and I think that’s great.”
Then the clarinet player offers an analogy reminding us again how much he’s a keeper and tweaker of American arts from vaudeville gags to Catskill shtick to jazz’s blue notes.
“Bud Powell, the great pianist, influenced everyone who came after him,” said Allen. “Thelonious Monk, who was a perfectly fine pianist, influenced nobody.
“I feel I’m in that category. I’ve done a certain amount of decent work, but it’s never been of any influence.”
While he waits a beat, I ponder my love of Monk.
“And on that cheerful note …”
Film critic Lisa Kennedy can be reached at 303-820-1567 or lkennedy@denverpost.com.
A Woody Allen primer
Woody Allen has written, directed and often starred in more than 40 films since the release of “What’s Up, Tiger Lily?” in 1966. If you’re new to Allen’s work or want to reacquaint yourself, here are a handful of films worth checking out:
Play It Again, Sam (1972): Allen, with a little help from Rick from “Casablanca,” plays the classic nebbish who falls in love with his best friend’s wife (Diane Keaton).
Sleeper (1973): Allen plays a health food store owner who wakes up 200 years in the future to discover a world of rigid conformity. Disguised as an android, he ends up in the home of a greeting card writer (Keaton). The film famously features the clamshell house in Genesee.
Annie Hall (1977): This acerbic and often laugh-out-loud film skewers everyone from pretentious New York intellectuals to Rolling Stone writers, and won multiple Oscars to boot. A breakout role for Keaton, who spawned an entire fashion trend with her outfits.
Manhattan (1979): A paean to New York City, the film is shot in glorious black and white and revolves around the usual Allen issues of love, infidelity, artistic struggles and the like. His relationship with teenager Tracy (Mariel Hemingway) is a little creepy given his later, real-life marriage to Soon-Yi Previn.
Hannah and Her Sisters (1986): Allen’s biggest box office hit ($40.1 million) featured a stellar cast – Barbara Hershey, Michael Caine, Max Von Sydow, Mia Farrow, Dianne Wiest – and required a flow chart to keep track of who was having an affair with whom.
Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989): Comedy and drama provide the tension in many of Allen’s films – perhaps none more successfully than here. One plot strand involves a prominent doctor (Martin Landau) who has his mistress (Anjelica Huston) killed. The other focuses on a documentary filmmaker (Allen) who agrees to make a TV biography of his arrogant and shallow brother-in-law (Alan Alda) to make ends meet.
-Edward P. Smith
