Darkest Woody

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

INTERIORS

Directed and Written by Woody Allen

The movie begins with stark images--still lifes snapped around a disused beach house, then female hands and pensive, pained faces. That style, an emblem of high seriousness, persists throughout a film one will remember mainly for its look: actors grouped in self-consciously arresting ways, costumes and sets done up in grays and beiges, the lighting (by voguish Cinematographer Gordon Willis) low-keyed and "textural."

Eventually characters are introduced and dialogue begins--but most of it seems couched in terms of the higher banality: psychobabble, discussions of creativity, even home decoration when money is no problem. Despite advance word that this was to be this deservedly respected writer-director's first entirely serious film, a faint hope stirs. Perhaps he is merely setting up the biggest Woody Allen joke of them all, since this kind of talk, and film making, is one of his best satirical subjects. Alas, the snapper never comes.

Instead one wades deeper into ever shallowing waters. The beach house belongs to a fragile and frigid family: Dad (E.G. Marshall) is preoccupied with his lawyering; Mom (Geraldine Page) is round the bend for causes never fully explained, but presumably having to do with everybody's failure to talk and touch with any real warmth. Their three daughters are a successful poet (Diane Keaton) married to a novelist who boozes because her reviews are better than his; an actress (Kristin Griffith) who can only get parts on TV; and a young woman (Marybeth Hurt) with the spirit of an artist, but no gift for any particular art. Late in life father has divorced mother, who grows more visibly dotty as the knowledge sinks in that he will never return; indeed, he has taken up with a sensible widow (Maureen Stapleton) whom the kids hate despite (really because of) her warmth.

There are many unedifying quarrels among them all, and gradually we learn that one daughter is miserable because Daddy didn't love her, another because Mommy failed her, while the third was left out by both. If the movie has any merit, it is in its middle passage, where we see how, as adults, the three young women still seek compensation for the parental debts left over from childhood. But good performances by these actresses can not really compensate for the desperate sobriety of the film, which robs it of energy and passion, so that it seems to congeal. One sign that Allen may have recognized this difficulty is his attempt at a big finish: a walk-into-the-sea suicide that is a belated attempt to engage us emotionally in a story so sterile that we have long since withdrawn from it.

One is sympathetic to Allen's problem. As great comedian to his age, he must have felt that the faintest suggestion of humor would have stirred audiences to a risibility from which he could not recover their attention. But, of course, the absence of wit does not necessarily betoken seriousness; it merely betokens the absence of wit. All Allen really had to avoid was farce. We could have accepted, as a logical outgrowth of his work to date, the rue and irony of a full-scale comedy of middle-class manners, a sympathetically satirical study of the lies by which many of us attempt to sustain life and sanity.

His style is Bergmanesque, but his material is Mankiewiczian, and the discontinuity is fatal. Doubtless this was a necessary movie for Allen, but it is both unnecessary and a minor embarrassment for his well-wishers.

-- Richard Schickel

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.