Funny, if silly, send-up of War and Peace and Russian novelists in general

Rating: 6/10 (1 April 2006)

Woody Allen and Diane Keaton ham it up in a wicked spoof of Russian novelists' tendencies to wander off into philosophizing and forget about sex altogether. The setting is the time of the Napoleonic wars, and the sets and costumes are often opulent, sometimes reminiscent of Doctor Zhivago. Woody seems to feel that a combination of Chaplinesque physical comedy and his own brew of one-liners is the perfect antidote to the introspective, world-weary dialogs of some of the heroes of Russian fiction. Allen keeps the pace very fast-- so fast that anyone familiar with Russian novels hardly has time to savor any of his gags before the next one comes tumbling in. As usual, Woody plays his ubiquitous cowardly persona, while Keaton plays the object of what passes for affection on his part. Their dialogs are a hilarious lampoon of serious philosophy, mouthing lines about the nature of being in a perfect verbal burlesque. Allen seems to think that the way to Keaton's libido is through her intellect; for her, libido and Allen are mutually exclusive phenomena throughout most of this romp. Keaton's character runs through a whole catalog of Russian heroines, skewering each of them with her unsentimental matter-of-factness. In such a nihilistic farce, Love and Death seem to be quite interchangeable, and it's hard to say which comes out ahead.