The annual Woody Allen has become something of an article of faith for film fans who set their sights a fraction higher than the latest Jerry Bruckheimer triumph. Audiences know the chances are they will be entertained by a well-written, amusingly cast comedy that is probably not going to have a running time beyond most known limits of human endurance; qualities not to be sneered at in an age when 2 hours+ films all starring Penelope Cruz are squatting in valuable multiplex space not inhabited by Pearl Harbor.
Just as you can usually rely on a new Woody every year, equally clockwork-like is the approving acclimation from some critical quarter or other that his latest is "a return to form". There is something ludicrous in a film-maker, so productive as to be virtually a one-man industry, so frequently "returning to form". What such waffle-mongers mean, of course, is that they didn't like his last one because it was (a) one of his less obvious comedies, (b) one of his more obvious comedies, or (c) they don't know anything about Woody Allen films and this is what everyone else says.
So it came to pass that last year's Small Time Crooks (now available on video and DVD) was hailed as a "return to form" by those who clearly didn't care for his angry double whammy of Deconstructing Harry and Celebrity, or didn't connect with the delightful cameo Sweet and Lowdown. Indeed it's probably fair to say that this farcical comedy of class and manners was his best reviewed outing since Bullets over Broadway, as well as his most aggressively promoted since then (making it a minor box-office hit). And yet, and yet … I bow to no-one in my admiration of Allen, who need never fear for his place in Video Drone's otherwise Permanently Provisional (if that isn't inherently contradictory) Top Ten (either Manhattan or Hannah and Her Sisters, since you ask). I take it as read that he has been the closest thing American cinema has to a genuine auteur for twenty-five years. But on the basis of his output over the last ten years, culminating in Small Time Crooks, I am going over the top to ask: is Woody past it?
First of all, he seems locked in some movie time-warp where the working classes are all dumb-but-sweet and everyone else a superficial chancer. In Small Time Crooks Allen is Ray Winkler a dumb-but-sweet con artist not long out of prison married to Tracey Ullman's Frenchy, all tight leggings and big earrings. Together with Ray's dumb-but-sweet pals they plan to rob a bank under cover of setting up a cookie shop next door. Of course they botch the robbery but the cookie store is a huge success and the Winkler's find themselves rich. But where Ray is happy to continue hanging out with his pals, Frenchy seeks self-improvement via art dealer David (Hugh Grant) who is - yes - a superficial chancer. And English too, just in case there was any doubt about it. Cue a great deal of frankly patronising "humour" at the expense of these rich rubes, the sort of anti-pretension jibes that Allen has been getting in since Sleeper, but here mean-spirited.
Secondly, and almost heretically, Small Time Crooks - not by any means a lengthy film - has at least a couple of longish scenes of padding. In one, the dumb-but-sweet cons meet in a diner to do nothing but re-state the plot so far, and another, a truly excruciating bit of business involving Allen trying to get up a staircase at a party to rob a safe, suggests that Allen the comedian has lost that perfect timing he once had. Now this may not seem particularly hard evidence of Allen's decline but it is a mark of his usual skill and economy that these scenes stick out like rich Frenchy's couture.
So, not what I'd call a "return to form" then, but I don't think this is an isolated case. It may be Allen's misfortune that he has set his own standards so high, but that is how he must be judged and the majority of his post 1990 work just doesn't cut it. In the twelve years bookended by Annie Hall and Crimes and Misdemeanours he wrote and directed Manhattan, Stardust Memories, Zelig, Broadway Danny Rose, The Purple Rose of Cairo and Hannah and Her Sisters, arguably all masterpieces, and still had time for another five less-good movies. Since then, only Sweet and Lowdown, which has the finest use of music in any recent film I can recall, and the rather less delightful but formally barn-storming Deconstructing Harry can really stand comparison.
Despite all this, Video Drone will still be standing in line for Allen's next, even if it does sound like one of those ludicrous comedy-thrillers he seems increasingly to favour. And, yes, I'll be hoping for a ... bit of an improvement.
Video Drone would bet on Roman Polanski returning to the LA Police Department before returning "to form", but that doesn't stop him watering down his once tremendous CV with mediocre pictures, the latest of which is The Ninth Gate, just out on sell-through video and DVD. For a while this daft supernatural drama ("thriller" would be overdoing it) is engaging and Johnny Depp, who is in almost every frame of the movie, as slimeball book dealer Corso is always watchable. But as he hunts through anonymous European locations looking for copies of 'The Nine Gates of the Kingdom of Shadows' to compare against a possible forgery entrusted to him, leaving corpses in his wake, the agreeable silliness becomes increasingly tiresome and eventually incomprehensible - I am genuinely baffled by what was going on in the last five minutes.
This is one of the worst written pictures I've seen in a long time. People say things like "Flattery will get you nowhere, Mr Corso", and the supposed 'mystery' surrounding the murders of the bibliophiles makes Scooby Doo look like The Name of the Rose. Polanski can't seem to decide whether he's making a caper, a detective drama or a horror movie, and the result is a sort of satanic Inspector Morse episode. Things look up when it seems we might be in for a ritual orgy à la Eyes Wide Shut, and indeed a bit of Satanist on Satanist action might have redeemed things, but it was sadly not to be. I would be lying if I said The Ninth Gate isn't fun for an hour. But it runs for over two.
Video Drone
