D: Woody Allen
S: Woody Allen, Goldie Hawn, Alan Alda, Julia Roberts
Woody Allen films have always been a matter of love them or hate them. Though
he has occasionally managed to hit the right note to find popular success,
his films still very much appeal to a particular and loyal core of fans
and devotees. I have long been one of them. And yet, despite the technical
skill with which Everyone Says I Love You has been put together,
despite the presence of all the familiar Allen ingredients, including on
target one-liners and a plethora of cinematic in-jokes, I found myself unable
to enjoy his treatise on the film musical.
The premise of the film is that it follows the fortunes of a family who
loves to sing. The actual plot is largely irrelevant, merely providing a
stage on which to showcase a series of musical numbers sung and danced by
professional actors with little to no singing or dancing experience. If
you really care, it's actually about the pending wedding of Drew Barrymore
and Edward Norton, the former the daughter of a typical Woody Allen upper-middle
class New York family headed by Hawn and Alda. A sub-plot involves Allen
as Hawn's ex-husband attempting to win Julia Roberts on the streets of Europe.
But what each element of plot essentially provides is a setting for the
action; usually romantic, always impeccably photographed and inevitably
devoid of any real character beyond the superficial attractions of a studio
backdrop from an MGM musical.
The problem is this: the film is so devoutly obsessed with its own intertextuality
that it becomes painfully transparent. While he has gone to a good deal
of trouble to cook up a script with romantic interludes and comic situations,
Allen's real interest here is in replicating the mechanics of the Hollywood
musical in his own particular cinematic world. The conceit of using non-singers
allows him to express the essential quality of a musical (characters sing
what they feel) without really providing its pleasures (a good singer is
a good singer, a bad singer is a bad singer, no matter what it symbolises).
Though it aspires to spontaneity, it is patently contrived, and if this
is a double bluff in-joke, it doesn't work. Only the climactic scene of
Hawn and Allen dancing by the Seine has the authentic elation (with knowing
asides and humour) of a musical moment, and the rest is all singing all
dancing emptiness.
It has plenty of evident exuberance and pleasure, but most of it doesn't
really communicate to the audience. It is a curiously alienating venture,
and one senses that Allen and his cast would have derived more satisfaction
from it than anyone else. Its postmodernism is its ultimate undoing, proving
that smug self-awareness can only create a timeliness destined to date itself
quickly rather than achieve a transcendence which marks a true cinematic
masterpiece.
Yet the skill and affection with which it has been put together are worthy
of note, and Allen is too experienced a director to miss the target completely.
It draws good performances from all concerned and it looks marvellous. There
is some fun to be had with the gags, including Tim Roth's extended cameo
as a freed convict bringing the latent prejudices of the liberal family
to the fore. There's nothing so much wrong with the film as wrong with the
enterprise in the first place. Though self-conscious musicals have long
existed, and have a pedigree including The Band Wagon and Singin'
in the Rain, few of them were as cerebral as this one, or as eager to
include social and political issues in such a blatant manner. It aspires
to innocence and subtlety, but does not achieve either. It merely presents
them as concepts, like the musical numbers themselves. The result is a peculiarly
cold film about human warmth which is incapable of inspiring the feelings
it seems genuinely to possess at some level.
It may be a matter of taste, of course, and some will probably find themselves
spellbound. But, for me at least, it is too studied a venture to be truly
involving, too postmodern to be enjoyable, and just never quite achieves
what it sets out to do. Sorry, Woody.
Review by Harvey O'Brien copyright
1997.