Not the Point, Not the Game

Rating: Null/10 (24 July 2007)

God bless Woody.
He drives me nuts.
He told us his psychiatric diagnosis 25 years ago. He "Zelig," someone who bends to the strongest influence he encounters. He's often able to become master of whatever tradition he falls into, though we always seem to judge him on some past project we like. We think we know the man: well, we know a few things. He wears Manhattan. He has a stuttering mask of indecision. He loves not women but how they slide between what is and what they wish for us and them.
But as an artist, we know nothing. Everything is a new experience, a new adventure and even the framework for exploration or experimentation shifts so there is no way to describe what we have. Anyone who purports to misses the point. The man as an artist must be taken as the quantum blur surrounding the poles of what we have encountered.
When he makes a film, it rarely matters as a film. Oh, some do. I would value "Sweet and Lowdown" and "Annie Hall" even if we had nothing else, and I would pay dearly to see the three hour mystery cut of "Annie Hall." But even those adventures pale when considering the vast, deep wander through cinematic ideas he's taken us.
So when I sit through this mess, and wonder why, why could someone do something so mindless, so lacking in richness... I wonder what, is he dead already? This has no elaboration, no noir agency, no complicating perspective, no folding, passion. It isn't even what it shows, an ad hoc inventiveness to pleasure, contrived at the last minute. It does have some introspection on the unlikely existence of itself  accident.
But it isn't accident. Its yet another street he's wandered down, another Tourette's utterance. It has no value in itself as a movie for me. It doesn't have to. Its another, different page in a life that has become a larger movie for me. And is there any better thing to say about a life as an artist?
The lovely thing is that the films are essentially all most of us have about the man, and each can be used as a window into the others.
One thing about each film is that it is a lover that he abandons, probably already on to the next one.
Ted's Evaluation -- 2 of 3: Has some interesting elements.