Movies are my sports. I have the same interest in actors and film directors that some people have in sports. I don't have an encyclopedic knowledge of film, and my tastes aren't the same as those instilled in a film student. I like what I like and don't what I don't. I like to watch actors work. I have a real appreciation for the craft, and love to watch it play out before my eyes, embodied by the perfect cast. The perfect script is not necessarily a piece of literature; many movies are over-written, masturbatory dialogue contests between the scriptwriter and his mirror. That doesn't interest me. Great writing doesn't necessarily make a great script. It's as bad for the actors to sound like they're reciting important art as it is for them to sound like they're reading something written by a room full of monkeys. An interesting exception to this is the strange tone specific to the dialogue in most Stanley Kubrick films since 2001. His dialogue is like a strange, clipped, formal ballet that is completely unnatural, but which works perfectly in the context of his work. But I don't want to talk about Stanley Kubrick right now.
I want to talk about Woody Allen, and how he uses filmmaking as a storytelling device, and doesn't put filmmaking on a highbrow pedestal like most directors. His films are about people, and always have been. Even Manhattan, arguably his most artistic film, is about a person: a girl named Manhattan. He doesn't fall into the trap of taking his craft as a film director too seriously, which is a common pitfall. I can't think of anyone who has completely resisted this temptation, except perhaps Stanley Kubrick, who embraced it and brought it to a completely different level. But I don't want to talk about Stanley Kubrick.
I want to talk about late-period Woody Allen, which started with Match Point, and compare it to two other films by other great directors who have succumbed to the temptation of taking themselves too seriously: The Coen Brothers and Paul Thomas Anderson.
It's obvious they're great, so let's not waste much time on that. Hard Eight (my favorite Vegas movie) and Boogie Nights by Paul Thomas Anderson and No Country For Old Men by the Coen Brothers are three of my all-time favorite movies. I don't care about the one with the Dude in it, everybody is supposed to care about. The bowling one, what's the name? I like it, but I can take it or leave it. The Fabulous Bukowski, something like that. I have never seen the big deal. Those others though, are great. But I want to focus instead on the unwatchable self-indulgence in such works as A Serious Man by the Coens, and Inherent Vice by Paul Thomas Anderson.
The perfectly-titled A Serious Man is what happens when you take yourself too seriously as a filmmaker, and use the medium of film as a way of making somebody uncomfortable throughout, to show that you can do it, or that it can be done, like it's some kind of revelation. I can't stand it. I understand that I'm not supposed to stand it, and that the aggravation I'm feeling is intentionally put there by the filmmakers. Paul Thomas Anderson did something similar with Punch-Drunk Love, using Adam Sandler's annoying sisters, circumstances, and character lifestyle as a device to instill genuine discomfort in the moviegoer. I get it. It doesn't take a genius.
It's easy to see that A Serious Man is a good movie, in terms of the writing and acting and set design and all that. It's a perfect example of how and why that doesn't matter. The Coen Brothers are taking the medium of film too seriously, and instead of focusing on the characters (all of whom are reduced to well-written caricatures that insult both the characters and the audience), they are trying to make a moral point with the film, and how it is necessary to hold to one's own moral standards in the midst of a swirling chaos of unpleasant circumstance, or something. The minute the lead character fails his own moral test, there are consequences. Great, I learned something, and enjoyed nothing in the process. Unless I was able to put myself on a high horse and look down at the people I'm watching on-screen, all the Jewish caricatures that are completely self-conscious and impossible to empathize with. In which case I could have had a smug, self-important laugh at their expense. Great.
Inherent Vice is a self-important, self-indulgent piece of would-be art that should be unwatchable to all except the most smug and oblivious among us. I spoke to someone once about it, someone with an education in film, and he said that when he thought, "well it can only get better from here," that to his amazement it kept getting worse. I instantly agreed. I don't care if it's an attempt to put the unfilmable on film, and that it's a stroke of genius to put whatever-the-author's-important-name-is onscreen, and that it's a non-traditional story arc, deconstructed to the point of rubble, it's unbelievably and surprisingly boring. And infinite. It could be half the length, and would still feel like an epic drag, something that could only make sense under the influence of copious quantities of amphetamines. "Wow I get it, it's shaped like a fish," or some other subjective, hallucinatory revelation for the aloof and chosen few. Which, good for those people. Enjoy yourself, if you can. But man, what a drag. Inherent Vice is one of the best examples of a film, taking itself as a film, way too seriously, I have ever seen. I don't personally care if you want to challenge the limits of the medium; indeed, I wish more people attempted it. But at the end of the day, it's only a movie. Did movie theaters become museums when I wasn't looking? It doesn't have to be a postcard-length romantic comedy, or be overloaded with fake, CGI explosions to be accessible.
It only has to be real.
Woody Allen has excelled at this for decades, and has only become better over time. Rather than becoming more self-immersed and abstract, his characters have never been more believable. Which is interesting, since many of his protagonists have been played by the man himself, or are played-to-type (such as Owen Wilson in Midnight In Paris). Perhaps this is due to Woody Allen's not taking himself too seriously, which is readily apparent in a sample of quotes by him on Imdb:
"[about the audience] I never write down to them. I always assume that they're all as smart as I am . . . if not smarter."
"Basically I am a low-culture person. I prefer watching baseball with a beer and some meatballs."
"I do the movies just for myself like an institutionalized person who basket-weaves. Busy fingers are happy fingers. I don't care about the films. I don't care if they're flushed down the toilet after I die."
"Art for me has always been the Catholicism of the intellectuals. There is no afterlife for the Catholics really, and there's no afterlife for the arts. 'Your painting lived on after you' --well, that doesn't really do it. That's not what you want."
This attitude is what prevents him from producing overwrought, indulgent films whose own self-awareness prevents them from becoming art. It is the overwhelming effort and intent behind Inherent Vice and A Serious Man that make them unbearable. The effortless, unself-conscious attitude expressed by Woody Allen in these statements prevents him from falling into that trap.
Whether he's writing about a Ferris Wheel operator and his wife in Wonder Wheel, the dramatic fall from social position and grace played to pitch-perfection by Cate Blanchett in Blue Jasmine, or the archetypal drama in Match Point, Woody Allen understands that he is writing about something that happens to real people, whatever their level of education or social class.
This is what makes his movies great. He is not using film as a medium to explore itself, he's using it as a medium to tell stories.
And the first rule of writing is that stories happen to people, not things, and that plot is something that happens to characters, not something the characters serve. If you have a great plot, but no characters, you don’t have anything (well, you might have Inherent Vice, but you don’t have Boogie Nights). If you have great characters but no plot, you could easily make a career out of them (Seinfeld).
According to Imdb, Woody Allen "considers Match Point (2005) to be his best film."
I am disinclined to argue.
