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Time - Man of the Year
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1993-04-08
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REVIEWS CINEMA, Page 64Sleepwalking Into a Mess
By RICHARD CORLISS
TITLE: HUSBANDS AND WIVES
WRITER AND DIRECTOR: Woody Allen
THE BOTTOM LINE: What is this thing called love? A man who
knows has made a film better than real life -- his, anyway.
You expect to read a cool appraisal of Woody Allen's new
film. The tawdry gossip attending Husbands and Wives -- the
question of whether it contains clues to Allen's dumping Mia
Farrow in favor of her 21-year-old adopted daughter, Soon-Yi
Previn Farrow -- this is irrelevant, surely, to the noble trade
of movie criticism. You want us to ponder weightier issues, like
the piquant mise-en-scene in the oeuvre of a major auteur.
Perhaps the entire review should be in French.
Well, forget it. Dish comes first. Besides, there's no way
that any reasonably tuned-in moviegoer can dismiss the
subversive import of the dialogue between Allen, as an author
who teaches a college writing course, and Farrow, as his wife,
a magazine editor. She asks, "Are you ever attracted to other
women?" He replies that his students "don't want an old man."
He, who thinks his marriage might be saved by having children,
admits, "I'm begging to have a baby that I don't even want." And
when he falls for a wily coed (Juliette Lewis), he frets, "I
feel myself becoming infatuated with a 20-year-old . . . I'm
sleepwalking into a mess." At these moments the masks of fiction
drop and seem to reveal two naked, anguished souls: the "real"
Woody and Mia of late notoriety.
The thing to realize now is that Allen wrote this movie
long before he says he was involved with Soon-Yi. The thing
that moviegoers will realize decades hence is that Husbands and
Wives is a damn fine film. Here again he is X-raying the gnarled
psyches of Manhattan's glamourati: Gabe and Judy and their best
friends Jack (Sydney Pollack) and Sally (Judy Davis). Each is
in some stage of a mid-love crisis; each married partner is
given the chance to follow a flirtation to climax or
catastrophe. Typically, Allen deals himself the highest cards.
Gabe alone can resist temptation and take himself "out of the
race. I don't want to hurt anybody or be hurt."
The only ones sure to be hurt are those viewers who can't
get used to the nosy, nausea-invoking camera style in the
movie's fake documentary format. Take some Dramamine, folks.
Then savor the desperate wit and the sharp acting -- especially
that of Davis, who executes high comedy with the world's tensest
mouth, and Farrow, doggedly searching for an Adam in a new Eden.
So this is also a movie. But it is not only a movie. It
has become the accidental equivalent of a trashy best seller
that expects you to know who's who even if it can't name names.
TriStar Pictures knows this; it is opening the film a week early
and at 800 theaters instead of the handful typical for an Allen
release. The media tattlers who have already revealed the
movie's reel-vs.-real twists know it. Soon so will the 'plex
patrons; they will make this Allen's first hit since the 1986
Hannah and Her Sisters. Everyone seems to know it but Woody
Allen.
What has most vexed Allen's fans lately is the moral
ignorance of an artist touted to find both passion and ambiguity
in the characters he creates. Allen seems unaware even of the
ironies, pathetic and comic, that would abound if he were to
marry Soon-Yi and win custody of his kids: Soon-Yi would become
the stepmother of her own siblings, and Mia would become Woody's
mother-in-law. For most people, movies are simple and life is
complex. For Allen, on recent evidence, it's the other way
around.
What a pity that Allen the sagacious filmmaker doesn't
have the ear of Allen the screwed-up philanderer. Because, if
you had a friend in his predicament -- someone blind to the
moral morass he had sleepwalked into -- Husbands and Wives is
the movie you'd want him to see. It would open his eyes.