The Woody Allen Project

Lately I am compulsively organizing most of my reading / viewing / listening into projects, reviewing what I've done up to now and where I want to go next. I have a complete log of my book-reading going all the way back to high school; my similar logs for film watching and music listening are, alas, either buried in a storage locker a thousand miles away (I really must take care of that stuff one of these days) or lost to history (I've had a number of catastrophes over the years which I won't dwell on, including the loss of painstakingly assembled personal libraries to economic circumstance). But much of what I've done before I want to do again anyway, from a matured perspective.

The projects spin off into sub-projects, and unless a project is very tight (but I can always expand its definition), none is ever really "done."

An example of one of these projects, just getting started: Woody Allen. It is axiomatic that Woody has been in decline for 20 years, with the occasional uptick. But is it true? I mean to find out.

There are many Allen pictures I've liked or loved over the years; you could call me a fan. Among the Allen high points for me are Love and Death, Manhattan, Stardust Memories, Zelig, Broadway Danny Rose, Crimes and Misdemeanors, Husbands and Wives. But I realized recently that those latter two were the only films of his I had seen since Radio Days (also quite good) in 1987; I had missed 19 features (now 20, Allen works fast), the Allen segment in New York Stories, and a TV movie (Don't Drink the Water), not to mention several freestanding Allen performances in works directed by others. The worsening critical climate for Woody undoubtedly had a lot to do with my missing so much. I'm certainly influenceable, and Allen didn't seem essential on the cultural radar anymore.

But then he got really good notices for Match Point in 2005, and when I finally saw it on DVD, I too was impressed: it is a superior modern noir (in the plot sense, not the lighting sense). I especially liked the fact that Jonathan Rhys Meyers's character gets away with everything: that seemed realistic as well as cynical.

Now I've watched Deconstructing Harry from 1997, and you know what? -- it's really good too! I have a lot more late Allen to look at, but I'm starting to get a suspicious feeling that it's not that the quality of his work flat-lined so much as that the critics just got tired of him. He is repetitive, no question; Deconstructing Harry, for example, reprises themes that are quite familiar from Stardust Memories. But artists get to be repetitive and work a vein if they want to; Ivy Compton-Burnett is strictly repetitive, but also one of the greatest English language novelists of the 20th century. Allen's obsessions are his working material, and he likes to revisit them as often as possible. There is nothing wrong with that.