Hannah and Her Sisters

Although I am and always have been a big Woody Allen fan, it is not because I like or would want to be part of the world that his films depict, but rather the opposite. I take a strong dislike to many of his characters, and invariably think that, if they are depictions of his real-life friends and family, well, better him than me. I should enjoy the culturedness of the core inhabitants of WoodyWorld, but since for a lot of them culture seems merely to be a high-class consumable, I sometimes wince rather than smile at the cultural references. Having grown up within the orbit of New York City (but having always been ambivalent about the place, too), I can confirm that there are plenty of real-life specimens that correspond to Allen’s characters - he’s not just making these people up – and that, unfortunately, they are often every bit as tediously egocentric and Manhattan-centric as they appear to be in the films.

I re-watched Hannah and Her Sisters remembering that it hadn’t been one of my favorite Allen efforts back in the Eighties, even though it is often judged to be among his top achievements. It seems to endorse the smugness and conventional-mindedness of its characters in a way that Allen at his best (Manhattan, Stardust Memories, Crimes and Misdemeanors) avoids. I will admit that there is something potentially delicious in the conceit that there are only three women available for relationships in the entire world and that they are all members of the same family – however, since I find the sisters themselves unappealing, that doesn’t take me very far. In fact, I don’t think that there is a single character in the movie that is even borderline tolerable, and thus I find the machinations of the happy ending disappointing (because I want them all to die) as well as quite unbelievable.

One scene that is particularly bothersome is the date between Allen and Dianne Wiest, in which they shuttle from a punk-rock performance (her choice) to Bobby Short playing at a jazz club (his). The attempted satire at the expense of the punkers is ugly, ungenerous, and dripping with unearned superiority. One doesn’t expect Woody Allen to like punk rock, but one does expect him to realize that much of the art he does like was absolutely revolutionary and discomfort-provoking in its day. His reactionary stance not only fails to understand the new, but puts the wrong frame around the old and the retro, too, and so winds up being unproductive no matter how you look at it. A punk fan’s contempt for Bobby Short would be just as tiresome; surely one of the glories of Allen’s beloved Manhattan is that it can contain the energies of a thousand styles, as well as open-minded people who can enjoy many of them.

When Woody is operating at his more thoughtful, self-critique is built in, and such issues become interesting instead of annoying to think about. But self-critique – indeed, any critical stance with respect to his characters’ crises within the cocoon of privilege - is noticeably lacking from Hannah and Her Sisters, which makes me wonder why this film has been among his most acclaimed (as well as his biggest earner before Midnight in Paris).