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Woody Allen’s Frustrating Memoir

Apropos of Nothing is funny, colorful, angry -- but very uneven
San Sebastian Is The Location for The New Woody Allen's Film

Last week I finished reading Apropos of Nothing, Woody Allen’s new memoir. I hadn’t intended on buying it, but when Allen was cancelled by his cowardly publisher, under pressure from #MeToo fanatics, I felt obligated to buy the book when it was inevitably published by someone else. This I did, as a matter of solidarity with a cancelled writer, even though I lost interest in Woody Allen’s movies around the time he took up with Soon-Yi, the adopted daughter of his former lover Mia Farrow.

Like a lot of people, I thought Allen’s getting involved with Soon-Yi was gross, and it made me unsympathetic to him. He also lost his moviemaking flair, or so it seemed to me. When he stood accused of molesting his seven-year-old daughter Dylan, I knew that it had not been proven, but I kind of assumed it was true.

I really regret that now, having read this book, and its thorough, detailed representation of the case. Yes, I know, this is Woody Allen’s book, and he’s going to tell it from his side. But I find it very hard to believe that he did what Mia Farrow accuses him of doing. I believe that Woody Allen’s reputation has been seriously wronged. Some of the reviews — Dwight Garner’s in the Times, Monica Hesse’s childish rant in the Washington Post — were embarrassments, as if the reviewers were more concerned with signaling how disgusting they believe Allen is, so no one accuses them of going soft on a monster.

That said, this book is really uneven, and ultimately, a big disappointment.

It starts out wonderfully, in Allen’s Brooklyn childhood. He was born in 1935, and broke into comedy as an older teenager in the 1950s. I had forgotten how old Allen is, and how his early comedy experiences were with the old-school comics of the Milton Berle heyday. Reviewers have criticized Allen for sexist language in Apropos, e.g., referring to some Village girl he dated in the beatnik era as a “delectable bohemian kumquat.” I found it much more tolerable coming from an 84-year-old Jewish comedian who got his start in showbiz writing for Sid Caesar’s variety show. It’s antique, in a charming, period-piece way … for a while. By the last third of the book, when he tosses out the va-va-va-voom-y remarks about contemporary actresses with abandon, it sounds lecherous. It’s one thing to hear an elderly comedian wax the memories of his youthful kumquats; it’s another to listen to grandpa gas on about how “sexually radioactive” Scarlett Johansson is.

He does this a lot in commenting on the young actresses with whom he has worked over the past fifteen years or so. I don’t see anything wrong with noting the sex appeal of particular actors, but it’s really tasteless for a man of Woody Allen’s age to talk in this way. Again, I give a certain leeway for an older figure who was formed by the standards of a different era, but at some point, you have grow up. He’s the kind of guy who uses “birds” to describe the women of Swinging London, and you aren’t quite sure if he’s being ironic. In this book, it becomes a tic that’s not so much offensive as embarrassing.

Nevertheless, I loved all the stories of New York of the 1940s and 1950s, especially Allen’s tales of breaking into the comedy scene. The stories are colorful and a lot of fun, and Allen writes in his singular way of speaking that is always amusing and companionable. He is frequently self-deprecating, though by the end of the book, he does it so reflexively that it comes across as insincere. After he discharges his account of the Mia Farrow abuse accusations, Allen’s book loses forward motion. It reads like he wrote Apropos to say what he had to say about the most wounding and (understandably) infuriating episode of his entire life, and having done so, he lost interest in the plot. The last third of the book feels like it was written in haste, by someone who had a deadline to meet.

The great disappointment, at least to me, of this memoir is how shockingly unreflective the director is about his own work. The reader who comes to Apropos hoping to read Allen’s thoughts about what went into his best and most culturally significant movies, Annie Hall and Manhattan, will be let down. Allen spent a lot of time and effort trying to make Ingmar Bergman-style movies that are generally regarded as inferior. Why was he attracted to those themes? What was it about Bergman’s work that appealed to him? You don’t find out. Aside from superficial, chatty details about the making and marketing of these movies, the reader gets nothing. It’s weird if you think about it — that a prolific artist, one of the most influential tastemakers of the 20th century, publishing a memoir at the end of his life and career, declines to disclose significant insights into his own art, and the themes that inspired and tormented him.

In the book, Allen protests from time to time that he really isn’t intellectually deep at all. Maybe he’s telling the truth, but as someone who has watched a number of his movies, and genuinely cherish some of them, I find this hard to believe. So why is it?

Reading Allen write about how he doesn’t drink, and stayed away from drugs, made me wonder if he is genuinely afraid of losing control. He’s famously neurotic, and talks chipperly about his phobias, which have been a rich source of comedy for him over the decades. I can’t help thinking, after having finished this frustrating book, that Woody Allen is someone who is afraid to be vulnerable where he feels least secure: on matters of culture and intellect. Maybe Apropos of Nothing is a carefully controlled performance. But what, at this point, does Woody Allen have to lose? It seems more likely that he really doesn’t think deeply about matters of the intellect — which is not to say that he’s not intelligent.

My point is, maybe readers like me expect too much of Woody Allen. Thinking about this book, and why it was so dissatisfying, brought to mind an interview I did in the late 1990s with the actor John Hurt, who was in New York to promote a minor film of his (Love and Death on Long Island). For reasons I’ve now forgotten, I had been quite taken by the philosophical questions raised by the movie. Hurt’s performance as an aging academic who becomes infatuated with a shallow young male movie star was amazing. Hurt’s depiction of the disintegration of a distinguished intellectual’s personality in the grip of erotic obsession was enormously moving in its finely textured emotions. I prepared extensively for the interview. Hurt, I was sure, was a man who profoundly understood this character, and the intellectual themes — fear of death, the destructiveness of obsession, the hypnotic power of image, etc. — in the work.

Well, I made a fool of myself in that interview. Poor John Hurt struggled to answer my questions, and finally said, “I think you understand my character better than I do.” He was being kind. In fact, I had been an egghead about it. As a young film writer, I did not yet understand that actors and artists may not approach their work with a clear understanding of what they are doing. But they know what they are doing intuitively. John Hurt couldn’t articulate why his character did what he did, but he didn’t have to: he demonstrated onscreen how deeply he understood the character. I left the interview embarrassed by my rookie mistakes, and feeling bad that I seemed to have put the great actor in a bad position by posing questions that belonged in a film studies class, not in an interview. The thing is, I wouldn’t have put those questions to a regular movie star. Hurt’s performance was so bewitching that I assumed he could not have done it on intuition alone.

My point is that maybe Woody Allen is that kind of filmmaker. Maybe the idea that he’s a New York intellectual was just what we all wanted to believe. He tells us right here in his memoir that he’s not that deep. Maybe it’s true — or maybe he has spent his life too afraid to inquire into these questions beyond the Philosophy 101 level. When I was more into Woody Allen’s work, I used to wonder why he kept asking the same damn question about the meaning of life, and coming up with the same answer. Why didn’t he grow in his understanding? Now, having read his book, I think I know the answer, or at least I know that the answer is one of two things: he’s either shallow, or afraid. I don’t think Woody Allen is shallow.

One more thing: as sordid as the Soon-Yi affair was when it began, it sounds like she and Allen have had a loving marriage, and raised two adopted kids. Good for them.

UPDATE: Tanya Gold has a scathing review up this morning on UnHerd. Like me, she read the book out of solidarity with a cancelled writer. Like me, she was disappointed by it. Unlike me, she thought deeply about why, and I have to say that I think she pretty much gets what’s wrong with this book, and with Woody Allen. I found that the first third or so — with his stories about breaking into showbiz — compensated somewhat for the emptiness of the rest of the book (minus the Mia Farrow story) — but Gold, I concede, sees more deeply into the weakness of the book. Excerpt:

His work, then, was a brilliant deception on himself and others that, in the end, failed; when his audience realised they had practised the same deception on themselves, they ceased to believe anything he said. They stopped laughing.

Perhaps this is right, and he is a greater artist for being known — and loathed — than he was when misunderstood. I certainly find the films more moving now. He has exposed comedy for what it is; you could call that generous, even revolutionary, but it was probably unconscious. The work remains a luminous study in post-war Jewish self-hatred, and it will endure, but he has not morally survived it. He could not. Perhaps he should have listened to his mother. He should have been a dentist.

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