THE COMEDIAN'S DILEMMA: WOODY ALLEN'S "SERIOUS" COMEDY
1991; Salisbury University; Volume: 19; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
0090-4260
Autores Tópico(s)Media, Gender, and Advertising
ResumoEven though it is in many ways his worst film, Interiors may yet prove to be Woody Alien's most revealing. As his first film, it is ample evidence that Alien's forte is indeed comic film; more importantly, it demonstrates convincingly that insofar as Alien is an artist of ideas, those ideas are rather conventional. As cold and sterile as Eve's decorations, from which film takes its title, Interiors nevertheless provides an opportunity to examine Alien's ideas laid bare, as it were, and to evaluate more Alien's larger, and very real, achievements as comic filmmaker. Beginning with Annie Hall, and perhaps even earlier, reviewers and critics have helped to create an image of Woody Alien as serious funnyman, kind of comic guru/philosopher/sociologist/psychologist/literary critic. Richard Schickel's comments on Manhattan are typical: ... masterpiece that is thai blending of style and substance, humor and humanity that his friends and followers were convinced he would one day make. It is also rare summarizing statement ... in which an artist casts selective eye over fantastical life of his time and shapes his observations into an unsparing, compassionate, always witty and radically moral narrative. Tightly constructed, focused intellectually, it is prismatic portrait of time and place that may be studied decades hence to see what kind of people we were. (63) It is hard not to see such praise as overkill, notwithstanding Manhattan's genuine merits. And Alien himself, of course, has seemed to encourage such grandiose interpretation, especially in Interiors, film which immediately preceded Manhattan. Although Interiors received more negative reviews than any other Alien film, many critics took Alien seriously. Maurice Yacowar, writing one year after release of Interiors, still maintained that film was a harmonizing of form and content. Every nuance is expressive. In Interiors Alien achieves ... symbolic transcendence of 'the darkness and dread of human condition,' as Becker puts it, only this time he worked without of (196). Yacowar's comment about the of is particularly telling. The implication of both Yacowar and Schickel's commentary is that comedy is at best tangential to art of Woody Alien. Indeed, it would seem that once Alien was able to achieve that perfect blend of style and substance (or masterful harmonizing of form and content), he could dispense with comedy altogether. Why is it, one is led to ask, that in order to appreciate Woody Alien it is necessary to pretend that he isn't comedian? Or that comic film can't be clearly focused intellectually? Is comedy only safety net in Alien's best films? Alien has always acknowledged his debt to what Diane Jacobs calls the comic film tradition. When asked about influences, he has cited film comics from Chaplin and Keaton to Marx Brothers and Jacques Tati. Alien's films certainly show variety of comic influences: Marx Brothers-inspired early films, Keatonesque Sleeper, social comedy of Annie Hall and Manhattan, Chaplinesque Broadway Danny Rose. One of his best later films, The Purple Rose of Cairo, is fascinating combination of Chaplin's comic pathos and Keaton's energetic self-reflexivity. But Alien has been equally free in his praise for filmmakers such as Bergman and Fellini, and critical opinion seems to accord more weight to these particular enthusiasms. And it was certainly to these directors that Alien turned in making Interiors. That critics received Interiors as badly as they did must have come as something of shock to Alien, so universal had been acclaim for Annie Hall as an intellectualized comedy. How better to follow it up than with film which eliminates comedy altogether, leaving only intellectual message? Given nature of message in this case, one can hardly blame reviewers for their reservations. …
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