Woody Allen: A documentary - review

He’s one of Hollywood’s most influential and prolific directors, who can usually get any actor he wants. Yet it’s his eccentricity and self-deprecation that make this documentary about him stand out
8 June 2012

There are many different views of Woody Allen but one thing is certain: he is a modest man. He is at pains to tell us, in this two-hour documentary sustained by copious clips, that he has never made a really good film and has often been disappointed even by his most successful work (eg Manhattan).

All he knows is that he can usually get the cast he wants for his many movies, despite the fact that they are not expensively made and thus don’t pay all that well. Also that he doesn’t abide, and never gets, any interference from the Hollywood suits, and can thus pursue his own course to heaven or purgatory unaided.

This is an enviable position for him to be in but, he says, he always thinks he’s going to make the next Citizen Kane until halfway through a film when he prostitutes himself in any way he can to stop the end result being a complete catastrophe. Sometimes it is, of course.

More often, his innate fluency as a film-maker wins out and it can certainly be said in his favour that he has made six or seven ground-breakers. Annie Hall, says Martin Scorsese, even changed the way people actually made movies. Zelig was almost as influential. A host of Allen’s alumni bear witness to the fact that he changed their lives, too, by giving them great parts. He has always known exactly what he wants from them, they report, but doesn’t bully them into doing precisely as he instructs.

Perhaps the funniest — whether it is funny ha-ha or peculiar — thing is the way he still writes his scripts on an old and practically defunct typewriter, later cutting out bits and pieces of his ideas, putting them in a box and fishing them out to examine later.

It’s even more instructive to see how his career developed through the clips appended to this film, which was originally made as a television feature and cut down from a three full hours. When we get to the last dozen years or so, you can see the screenplays becoming more flaccid and unconvincing until the little miracle of Midnight in Paris, Allen’s most successful film ever at the box-office, suddenly proved he could still be the director we love. It’s a fascinating progression that constantly surprises (who knew that he hated being a stand-up comedian and often had to be dragged onto the stage to do a job that made his name?). Films about film-makers are not always so entertaining, but this one about a man who never brags and views any praise with a rheumy eye is a pleasure.

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