Hooray for Hollywood

>> Woody Allen stages a comeback with Hollywood Ending

by MATTHEW HAYS

Woody Allen must be the strangest entity ever to come out of the American cinema. Embraced by the mainstream for a long while, romancing several beautiful stars, wildly prolific, admired by much of the film community (everyone from Stanley Kubrick to John Waters have cited Allen as an influence and an envy). In a post-Soon Yi world, however, people either love or hate this man—usually pretty passionately.
For those of us who do enjoy his persona, however, the last couple of Woody entries have been substandard and disappointing. Both Small Time Crooks and The Curse of the Jade Scorpion felt entirely routine, shadows of the auteur’s colourful past. Though I’d read the promising premise for Hollywood Ending, I wasn’t holding my breath. It looked like another slide down the slippery slope of mediocrity for the Woodman.

But Hollywood Ending works, on its own absurd comic terms, in true Allenesque style. Woody plays a two-time Oscar-winning filmmaker, struggling to find work after a series of box-office disappointments. (In the hilarious opening scene, he’s stuck in a snowstorm in Canada, where he’s forced to the level of doing commercials. Upon his return, he asks his girlfriend, “Have you been to Toronto? Now I know why they don’t have any crime up there.”) Hope comes in the form of Téa Leoni, an ex-wife (yes, he’s self-cast opposite a woman almost half his age again) who feels sorry for him and thinks he’s the perfect person to direct a big-budget film set in Manhattan. She manages to convince her current beau (Treat Williams, fine as a sleazy Hollywood mogul) to give Allen the gig.

The best twist comes when Allen, under the crushing pressure the film shoot presents, suffers a bout of psychosomatic blindness. His analyst can cure him, Allen is told, but it will take weeks, time the struggling filmmaker doesn’t have. So he spends the rest of the movie, in collusion with his agent, trying desperately to fake his way through the shoot with no vision. The comic possibilities are clear, and Allen mines them adeptly. I’m not going to ruin any of it here.

There are certainly scenes in Hollywood Ending that don’t quite work. Some of Woody’s shtick can feel belaboured, Yaweh knows. But there are a few sequences involving his attempts to cover up his temporary disability that are simply priceless, evoking some of his best slapstick work from Play it Again, Sam and Sleeper. Not surprisingly, Hollywood Ending will have its European premiere at Cannes, and the newly press-friendly Woody will attend (like his appearance at the Oscars, it’ll be his first time). It’s a safe bet for the sexagenarian; his French and Italian fan base didn’t flinch at the Soon-Yi-Mia scandal and, with the punchline about European responses to his oeuvre in this film, Hollywood Ending will undoubtedly win standing ovations when it screens there later this month. :

Hollywood Ending opens Friday, May 3