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August 24, 2001/Elul 5, 5761, Vol. 53, No.46
Allen's new comedy-mystery visits 1940RICHARD T. JAMESON"Forgive me if I tend to romanticize the past," says the off-screen narrator of Woody Allen's "Radio Days," who happens to be Woody Allen himself, casting back over the people, incidents and places of his own childhood.Although not among Allen's hits, "Radio Days" is a seemingly lovely film that points toward a salient aspect of Allen's art: For all his signatory identification as the chronicler of contemporary Manhattan, the repository of beauty, tenderness, and abiding value for this deeply disenchanted writer-director is the past. Not so much the historical past, or even the facts of his own biography, but the movies and music and media minutiae of the era in which he grew up, and the era in which he just missed growing up. A dream of beauty - via Cole Porter and Fred Astaire and Groucho Marx and the soundstages of RKO and Warner Bros. - that had already slipped away in the act of being imagined. In his newest film, "The Curse of the Jade Scorpion," with its emphatic announcement of 1940 as time frame, Allen embraces the opportunity to make the kind of movie nobody makes anymore but everyone would still love to see: a preposterous comedy-mystery full of outrˇ clues, plot twists, and cultural assumptions that would never pass muster in a literal-minded postmodern project, yet casts a just-pretend spell as talismans of a bygone world and style. The dreamlike black-and-white of the Sam Spade-Philip Marlowe night world is replaced by effulgent amber-gold, so that the nighttime fa¨ade of a cafˇ shines like a portal out of the Arabian Nights, and a tracking shot down a brown-toned office corridor lined with pebble-glass doors becomes a movie fan's sigh. In this instance, Woody Allen plus Period Movie yields the fond charm of a favorite wallet found at the back of a drawer. As Leonard Zelig said of another cherished pastime: "I love baseball. It doesn't have to mean anything. It's just very beautiful to watch." As a writer-director, Allen has made some half-dozen "period pieces," though only three-"Radio Days," the gangster-era "Bullets Over Broadway" and the lapidary Depression fantasy "The Purple Rose of Cairo" - even glancingly approach the straightforward Hollywood model for that genre. "Sweet and Lowdown" and "Zelig" are utterly persuasive, meticulously "researched" mockumentary biographies of celebrities who never existed. Add to the list two voyages into the imaginative past: the Napoleonic-era world of the classic Russian novelists, deconstructed and deranged in "Love and Death," and the art-house universe of German Expressionist cinema (1914-31) in "Shadows and Fog." And beyond these, we have the Allen nebbish of "Play It Again, Sam" realizing his dream of playing the Bogart part in the climax of "Casablanca," and the despairing (always despairing) Allen-figure of "Hannah and Her Sisters" finding in the lyrical Marxian madness of "Duck Soup" a reason to go on living. Mere nostalgia is rarely the issue. "The Purple Rose of Cairo," with its tone-perfect recreation of a black-and-white, RKO-modern romantic comedy colliding with the Depression in limpid Technicolor, is an endlessly suggestive meditation on compulsive moviegoing as both consolation for and flight from reality. "Zelig" consists largely of people striking poses for newsreel cameras rather than doing anything so prosaic as just living - an accumulation of nonevent that becomes eerily poetic. But stepping into another reality, another time, can be bounteously liberating. The free-form recollection of "Radio Days" freed both director and viewer to forgo conventional narrative and soar in an exultation of color, music, atmosphere, cockeyed detail and reverie. "The Curse of the Jade Scorpion" opens tonight (Friday, Aug. 24) in local theaters. Richard T. Jameson is a free-lance movie critic who has written for www.rottentomatoes.com. |
