Woody Allen on His New Film To Rome With Love and Some Very Old Themes

PHOTO BY JENNIE WARREN
Ellen Page, left, Penelope Cruz and their To Rome With Love director, Woody Allen

1980. Woody Allen has just had the biggest hit of his career with Manhattan — a love letter to the titular city, a romantic celebration of its timeless urban landscape set in a nostalgic-fantastic present, culminating in the gut-punch realization that what's past is irretrievably past. Manhattan's $39 million take made it Allen's biggest to that date. It also qualified as a comeback of sorts, restoring Allen's reputation in the minds of the moviegoing public (and the movie-financing private) after the Bergman-esque Interiors squandered whatever goodwill the writer-director-actor had stockpiled when Annie Hall won Best Picture in 1978.

Ellen Page, left, Penelope Cruz and their To Rome With Love director, Woody Allen
PHOTO BY JENNIE WARREN
Ellen Page, left, Penelope Cruz and their To Rome With Love director, Woody Allen
Penelope Cruz, left, Woody Allen and Ellen Page
PHOTO BY JENNIE WARREN
Penelope Cruz, left, Woody Allen and Ellen Page

His stock on the rise, Allen's next film is Stardust Memories, a dreamlike rumination on love, mortality, celebrity and art, starring Allen as a director crippled by his fear of death, whose faith in the power of his work to ensure immortality is weakened by his anxieties and insecurity. In one sequence, Allen's character imagines his own wake, in which his analyst explains the recently deceased suffered from "a depression common to many artists in middle age," which he's dubbed "Ozymandias Melancholia."

2012. Woody Allen has just had the biggest hit of his (late) career with Midnight in Paris, a love letter to the titular city, a romantic celebration of its timeless urban landscape set in a nostalgic-fantastic present, culminating in the gut-punch realization that what's past is irretrievably past. Midnight in Paris' $57 million gross makes it, numerically, Allen's biggest hit to date (adjusting for inflation, Manhattan would have made roughly $118.5 million today), making Paris an unqualified comeback — catnip for his base, his first film in 25 years to earn the dubious imprimatur of an Oscar nomination for Best Picture and a magnet for a new generation of fans.

His stock once again on the rise, Allen's next film is To Rome With Love (in theaters Friday), a dreamlike rumination on love, mortality, celebrity and art starring Allen as a director (of operas) crippled by his fear of death, whose faith in the power of his work to ensure immortality is weakened by his suspicion that nothing he's left behind will stand the test of time. In one sequence, an aging architect (played by Alec Baldwin) admits that he's suffering from a malaise he calls "Ozymandias Melancholia." His wife scoffs — she's never heard of it.

"It's just a phrase that I coined years ago, and I thought it was a good phrase, and so I wanted to use it again," Allen tells me, his slight, 76-year-old body sunk into a plush couch in a suite at the Beverly Wilshire on the morning after To Rome With Love premiered as the opening-night selection of the Los Angeles Film Festival. Next to him sit Rome co-stars Penelope Cruz and Ellen Page.

"It's a perfectly valid description of a particular phenomenon. It's that sad and depressed feeling you get when you realize that no matter how great and majestic and important something is at the time, in time it's going to pass. Just like the [Shelley] poem — eventually, time kills everything. It's just that rotting statue of Ozymandias, a once-great statue, and now a broken-down piece of marble in the desert. So you get a depressed feeling because it gives you a sense of the futility of life, that all that you're working for, and all the things that seem so meaningful, are nothing."

Another bit from Stardust Memories comes to mind. Allen's character tells a woman that when a man's basic needs are taken care of, "then your problems become how can I fall in love — or why can't I fall in love, more accurately — and why do I age and die, and what meaning can my life possibly have?"

And she says, "You know, for a guy who makes a lot of funny movies, you're kind of a depressive."

It's a popular misconception that Allen despises California. Reporting on Allen's trip west in a post headlined "L.A. Hater Woody Allen Sucks It Up to Attend Los Angeles Film Fest," Laist.com was typical of media outlets fixated on the "irony" of the event luring the man who, in 1977's Annie Hall, famously said of L.A., "I don't want to move to a city where the only cultural advantage is being able to make a right turn on a red light."

"I'm not anti–Los Angeles," Allen says today. "I couldn't live here because I don't like a place where I have to drive everyplace, and I don't like sunshine. But I love coming out here for a couple of days. I have a lot of friends here, and the town has, over the years, really come on very strong. When I first came out here years ago, you couldn't get a decent meal in Los Angeles. Now it's full of great restaurants, great museums; the opera's wonderful."

Allen is famously a creature of habit — he still types every screenplay on an antique typewriter, literally cutting and pasting with scissors and a stapler. But over the past decade, he's made it clear that his geographic loyalties are not set in stone.

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Adam

And in other news, there's also Jerry Sandusky. But I guess you can't do an article on him, because it would be inconvenient at this time, seeing as, you, at the L.A.Weekly, like this sort of thing. You give an 'objective' review, and then, you make sure another one of your reviewers reveals their true gushing feelings for ol Woody. Dude is so arrogant, he won't even change his first name. And how about that man sized frame of Penelope Cruz. I heard, somewhere that, when you have a problem with somebody, you get personal.

Doug Tarnopol
Doug Tarnopol

Whoops -- should have used actual quotation marks instead those "sideways carrot things". Here it is in full again; apologies for having to double post. Didn't see any way to undo my first one. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- To call this review trite is a compliment. I'll waste only this much ATP on it: "'That Allen is still making films about men grappling with the illogic of love, well into his 70s, particularly in light of his own life experience, gives the work the weight of tragedy. He's been using his art to ask these questions for 40 years, and he still hasn't figured it out. "About the important things in life, you learn nothing," Allen acknowledges. "I know this, I'm older now. It's really true."'" It should be front-page news that this 31-year-old film critic has ironed out that whole love thing in her spare time. She would be the first human being in history to have done so. She really ought to come back into the cave and let the rest of us benighted fools in on the secret. I have to add this: virtually all artists, great and small, end up repeating themselves, both because most people, even most geniuses, don't have more than one or maybe two great ideas and, more importantly, because the human condition sort of limits the possibilities. What "new thing" can be said at this point? Not much, if anything, though new ways of saying old things is good enough -- just as saying "I love you" to a loved one repeatedly, in perhaps somewhat different ways, is not exactly, like, you know, needlessly repeating oneself. If she understood a thing about Woody Allen's real themes, she'd realize that he thinks we're all checkmated at birth, and the best we can do is console each other along the way. In various ways, including by "tell[ing] funnier jokes." Whether or not she agrees with that is her affair, but a critic should first understand and then critique. I know, and everyone should be nice to everyone else, too. Finally, the whole undertone of this piece -- that Allen's work is just all about crass monetary considerations -- is really tacky. As well as totally groundless. It's typical of the kind of oh-so-(faux) clever-critic reversal you'd expect of someone with a taste for postmodern-ish glasses frames: Allen, the one person you would have thought least concerned about such things, the one person who, like his stuff or not, is obviously authentic and serious, turns out to be...wait for it...a total hypocrite! He's just like Hollywood hacks -- perhaps even *worse*! And speaking of trying to create a persona based on glasses frames...hmmmm.... Sure, TRWL might suck. It happens. I don't know Woody Allen personally. He may be an intolerable person. I like most of his films; others not so much; at least a handful are among the best American films, period. I "like" him in the way you "like" anyone who can make you laugh, make you think, and so on. But I don't pretend that he's my friend, that image on the screen. Again, I don't know him, and don't much care one way or the other about his personal life. I know, that's taboo in our current "culture." I'm weird like that. But what most annoys me is the ridiculous critic-sneer that comes through so loud and clear. She should be so lucky as to have a tenth of the insight into the ultimately tragic human condition as Woody Allen does. Oh, and that insight *is* utterly derivative -- they were onto it in Gilgamesh, after all. So, we should concentrate on something else, right? Like, what, exactly? It's almost enough to make you think the ultimately unfair trope that all critics are failed, frustrated artists is true. (It isn't -- at least not for all critics.)

Doug Tarnopol
Doug Tarnopol

To call this review trite is a compliment. I'll waste only this much ATP on it: > It should be front-page news that this 31-year-old film critic has ironed out that whole love thing in her spare time. She would be the first human being in history to have done so. She really ought to come back into the cave and let the rest of us benighted fools in on the secret. I have to add this: virtually all artists, great and small, end up repeating themselves, both because most people, even most geniuses, don't have more than one or maybe two great ideas and, more importantly, because the human condition sort of limits the possibilities. What "new thing" can be said at this point? Not much, if anything, though new ways of saying old things is good enough -- just as saying "I love you" to a loved one repeatedly, in perhaps somewhat different ways, is not exactly, like, you know, needlessly repeating oneself. If she understood a thing about Woody Allen's real themes, she'd realize that he thinks we're all checkmated at birth, and the best we can do is console each other along the way. In various ways, including by "tell[ing] funnier jokes." Whether or not she agrees with that is her affair, but a critic should first understand and then critique. I know, and everyone should be nice to everyone else, too. Finally, the whole undertone of this piece -- that Allen's work is just all about crass monetary considerations -- is really tacky. As well as totally groundless. It's typical of the kind of oh-so-(faux) clever-critic reversal you'd expect of someone with a taste for postmodern-ish glasses frames: Allen, the one person you would have thought least concerned about such things, the one person who, like his stuff or not, is obviously authentic and serious, turns out to be...wait for it...a total hypocrite! He's just like Hollywood hacks -- perhaps even *worse*! And speaking of trying to create a persona based on glasses frames...hmmmm.... Sure, TRWL might suck. It happens. I don't know Woody Allen personally. He may be an intolerable person. I like most of his films; others not so much; at least a handful are among the best American films, period. I "like" him in the way you "like" anyone who can make you laugh, make you think, and so on. But I don't pretend that he's my friend, that image on the screen. Again, I don't know him, and don't much care one way or the other about his personal life. I know, that's taboo in our current "culture." I'm weird like that. But what most annoys me is the ridiculous critic-sneer that comes through so loud and clear. She should be so lucky as to have a tenth of the insight into the ultimately tragic human condition as Woody Allen does. Oh, and that insight *is* utterly derivative -- they were onto it in Gilgamesh, after all. So, we should concentrate on something else, right? Like, what, exactly? It's almost enough to make you think the ultimately unfair trope that all critics are failed, frustrated artists is true. (It isn't -- at least not for all critics.)

 

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