A Novel Spoof

Rating: 10/10 (30 July 2008)

Love and Death is a novel idea, because of all the spoofs---Airplane!, The Naked Gun, Blazing Saddles, Young Frankenstein, these horrible new ones like Meet the Spartans and Superhero Movie---Love and Death parodies things none of those other filmmakers would think to. The main thread of the plot is framed like a Russian novel with direct hints at Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, complete with imposed philosophical debates, and freely sprinkled across the film are direct send-ups of Ingmar Bergman films, namely Persona and Smiles of a Summer Night.
Love and Death is a special, unique film, a testament to the inventiveness of a certain comic mind, when Woody began exercising not only more ambitious experimentation with the comic possibilities of cinema, but also more cinematic ways of telling an actual story, polishing the banana-peel attitude of Sleeper on the journey to Annie Hall, and, like What's Opera, Doc?, an feat of artistic deflating that bolsters the value of art. Woody Allen meets Dostoyevsky, and the two contrast misanthropic viewpoints: The world is a "big restaurant," God is an underachiever at best, "subjectivity is objective," etc. Allen joins unwillingly and a black drill sergeant hollers at him. Allen's darling Diane Keaton in the meantime engages lovers as the old husband retires to his bedroom carrying a herring.
The plot is Tolstoy via Bob Hope, with enough room for Mozart and Prokofiev, Eisenstein's stone lions, pistols at dawn with Harold Gould, reflections on the word "jejune." The splendor of Ghislain Cloquet's cinematography is part of the gag. Same with Prokofiev, who is intrinsic to the evocation of Czarist Russia, and yet it gives the film a very lively sound. Splendor can hardly appease the heart of a grouch, however, so Allen gets the noose ready, changing his mind at the last minute to start poetry and, later, revolutionary assassination. Other flashes of sublimity include Napoleon insisting on more cream for the pastry that is to carry his name, and the divine presence that assures safety but flakes out at the last minute.
Perhaps the first of Woody's films where God and the meaning of life are linked to the question of whether or not life is worth living. He says to Keaton, "What if there is no God? What if we're just a bunch of absurd people running around with no rhyme or reason?" To which she says, "But if there's no God, then life has no meaning. Why go on living, why not just kill yourself?" And then of course Woody, "Well, let's not get hysterical; I could be wrong. I'd hate to blow my brains out and then read in the papers they found something up there." Keaton audaciously makes the presumption that if God doesn't exist, then life has no meaning and one might as well commit suicide. Woody asserts that if God doesn't exist, then humans are absurd, and he seems to bow to Keaton's implication, to the extent that he implies that if God does exist, then one shouldn't commit suicide. He'd hate to pull the trigger only to learn that God actually does exist.
Such illustrates the film's approach, which is to contrast grave matters with a lively comical disorder. At times that's merely a case of setting up a threatening scenario and assaulting it with a punch line, but Allen repeatedly finds a way to make his point visually. That's not to say Woody isn't still chiefly a verbal comic, because he is, and one of the movie's running gags is a perpetual argument about the philosophical and moral choices continually offered the characters.
Allen's idea is a straightforward one. Picture the basic Woody character, and put him in Napoleonic Russia. Raise him to be a "militant coward," draft him and send him off to fight the French, and then marry him to Diane Keaton who feels sorry for him because (she hopes) he will be shot dead in a duel. He's the ideal foil for the Keaton character, who always wants every situation both ways, with alternatives. There are dozens of small moments when their looks have to be just so, and they virtually always are. There are tinges of humorous import that could have gotten lost if all we had were the words, and there are entire scenes that play off facial expressions.