"You have the temerity to say that I'm talking to you out of jejunosity?"

Rating: 8/10 (24 August 2007)

A persistent complaint about Woody Allen movies (by people who proudly admit that they never watch Woody Allen's movies) is that all of his movies are the same. You know -- if you've seen one, you've seen them all. That is not a fair assessment. Of course, he repeats themes and ideas and muses over philosophical non sequiturs over and over again -- sometimes, ad nauseum. And he certainly isn't above repeating a joke, good or bad. Yet, in his four decades as a filmmaker he has shown a remarkable amount of variety in his style and subject matter, without really straying too far from his home turf. From musicals to murder mysteries, from farces to overtly depressing melodramas, he manages to be fairly unpredictable.
Yet, while watching LOVE AND DEATH, it struck me that it is practically a remake of his previous film, SLEEPER. It would seem that the only things they would have in common are that they feature his favored muse, Diane Keaton, and that they are the last two of his so-called "early, funny movies." After that, you have SLEEPER, which takes place in the far future in America and LOVE AND DEATH which takes place in Russia, in the far past. Yet, they are both period pieces, mocking specific types of literary/cinematic genres (sci-fi and historical epic) and as such are time warp comedies, wherein most of the humor comes from injecting Woody's 20th century, New York, Jewish/atheist, left-wing, intellectual pessimism into an alien time and place. And looking past the settings, the plots are identical: Woody's prototypical nebbish/coward falls in love with Keaton's vapid, but provocative kook, while they both get sucked up in revolutionary politics and plots to assassinate tyrannical leaders.
The political assassination angle is intriguing. He treats it in a farcical fashion in both SLEEPER and LOVE AND DEATH, just as it was used as a running gag throughout BANANAS. He'd bring it up again, most famously perhaps, in ANNIE HALL, when he confesses that his character's obsession with the JFK killing was a mere pretense to avoid having sex with his wife. Though Allen has never been a particularly political comedian, this minor obsession with political violence does seem to have a point, whether it was intended as such by Woody or not. Even though he seems to suggest (albeit in jest and with much reluctance and equivocation) that assassination is the wrong, yet possibly the most efficient means of political change; his greater message is the futility of such acts. Reactionary violence, and indeed war itself, is mocked as being pointless and trivial -- which, I suppose, is also his pessimistic outlook on life, art and, well, just about everything else.
The one thing he consistently claims to take seriously is death. Yet, even as he places it right up front in the title of LOVE AND DEATH, his vision of it here is that of the purely cliché Grim Reaper -- hood and cycle and all. Indeed, for an artist supposedly obsessed with death, it really isn't part of his repertoire. Woody's own death is a punchline in LOVE AND DEATH, SCOOP and even CASINO ROYALE. In A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S SEX COMEDY, it is a whimsical plot twist and in EVERYONE SAYS I LOVE YOU it is an excuse for a musical number. The murders at the heart of his later films, like CRIMES AND MISDEMEANORS, MANHATTAN MURDER MYSTERY, BULLETS OVER BR0ADWAY and MATCH POINT, pointedly place the violence off screen. And the suicide in INTERIORS -- like everything else in the film -- is property borrowed from Bergman. Rather than being obsessed with death, Allen seems more inclined to distance himself from it altogether. Certainly one of his limitations as a director is his inability or unwillingness to deal with unpleasant things like death or violence, except in an aloof, second-hand way. His clumsy handling of the battle scenes in LOVE AND DEATH attest to this -- though arguably such scenes are funnier because they are so poorly staged.
Despite a title that promises big themes, LOVE AND DEATH is the last of his gag-driven comedies, less interested in plot and character than in churning out comedy bits. It is interesting that even though LOVE AND DEATH is one of Woody's most esoteric films, it is also one of his most accessible ones. Never one to dumb-down his material for mass consumption, he seems to purposely build so much of the humor and action in the film around familiarity with Russian literature and history -- hardly topics of common knowledge (much less interest) to the vast number of filmgoers, even the more sophisticated ones that Allen attracts. Yet, the film is packed with sight gags, anachronisms and universal observations, so that little of the material goes over the viewer's head. Grandiose themes of epic novels and philosophical theories are cut down to size by a burlesque approach that hearkens back visually to the silent era, as well as the low-brow sarcasm of the films of Bob Hope. One doesn't have to understand the philosophy or recognize the literary references to realize that what is being ridiculed isn't just the the source material itself, but the pomposity of it all -- even the pretentiousness of Woody choosing such a high-brow subject in the first place. If you don't get the source of the joke, the way it is reduced to skillful double talk and pseudo-intellectual patter is funny in its own right. For both better and worse, Woody's growth as a filmmaker would soon make him less willing to be so cavalier with such material. But, for all of its obscure literary references, LOVE AND DEATH is one Woody's silliest films -- and one of the reasons we miss his "early, funny movies" so much.