SALON

Saturday, Jun 23, 2012 8:00 PM UTC

Who’s the best would-be Woody?

Jesse Eisenberg stars at the latest neurotic Woody Allen surrogate in "To Rome With Love." Let's see how he rates SLIDE SHOW

By

Topics: Movies, Woody Allen, Editor's Picks,

Who's the best would-be Woody?

View the slide show

Let’s start off by dispelling a widely held misconception. It’s simply not true that Woody Allen, in the years since he stopped playing the romantic leading man in his own movies, has only cast tall, good-looking, Anglo-Nordic gentile types in the “Woody Allen” roles. OK, it’s about 60 to 70 percent true, depending on how you count Will Ferrell, star of the supremely forgettable “Melinda and Melinda,” who is of Irish ancestry and not necessarily considered among the most smoldering men in show business.

Daringly, Allen has employed two actual Jewish actors — Larry David in “Whatever Works” and Jesse Eisenberg in the brand-new “To Rome With Love” — to play his self-involved, loquacious and neurotic (yet fatally irresistible to women) protagonists. And then there’s the intriguing case of Jason Biggs, the one-time star of “American Pie,” who headlined Allen’s 2003 flop “Anything Else” and has specialized in playing Jewish characters his entire career. (Apparently even Woody did not realize that Biggs is actually a Catholic with Italian roots.)

And while Allen is passionately committed to a jokey, old-school and largely stereotypical view of gender roles, he veered into accidental avant-garde feminist territory with the 2006 “Scoop,” featuring a bespectacled Scarlett Johansson investigating murders and canoodling with a villainous Hugh Jackman. One could argue, of course, that Johansson’s awkward journalism student is not a classic Woody surrogate and that “Scoop” is an effort to make a different kind of movie altogether; and one could also argue that I should have crawled further out on a limb and included Rebecca Hall from “Vicky Cristina Barcelona” on this list. (That film, one of Allen’s weirdest, darkest and funniest, sort of defeated me: Is Hall the main character? Is Johansson? It isn’t Penélope Cruz or Javier Bardem, who are basically human sex toys.)

What we can say clearly, I think, is that about a decade ago, Allen realized conclusively that he could no longer use his own screen persona as the canvas for his romantic and aesthetic fantasies. He’d experimented with other actors in leading roles before, casting John Cusack in the 1994 “Bullets Over Broadway” and Kenneth Branagh in the 1998 “Celebrity.” But the turning point seems to have been the alarmingly autobiographical “Hollywood Ending” of 2002, in which the 67-year-old Allen played a temporarily blind movie director who makes a film that is rejected by Americans but embraced by the French, along the way winning back his much younger ex-wife (Téa Leoni) from a better-looking guy.

“Hollywood Ending” was a lazy and sloppy film that failed at the box office and, worse yet, suggested that Allen was fatally out of touch with his own image and abilities. Since then, he has retreated to the director’s chair, occasionally playing comic sidekick roles although he claims not to enjoy them. At his Cannes press conference for “You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger,” Allen explained: “It’s no fun to play the guy who doesn’t get the girl. So I’m just over in the corner, directing the film. ‘See that old guy over there? He’s the director!’ I’d rather be the guy who sits opposite the girl in the restaurant and lies to her. If I can’t find a way to get the girl, I won’t do it at all.”

But I come to praise Woody Allen, not to bury him, honestly. Perhaps the most amazing consequence of Allen’s indefatigable persistence is that he has renewed himself at senior-citizen age, making by far the biggest hit of his long career (“Midnight in Paris,” which also garnered his third screenwriting Oscar), and working with a hand-picked roster of international stars. If “To Rome With Love” lacks the same box-office potential, it’s a frothy, slightly rueful tripartite farce set in the Eternal City, which brings together Eisenberg, Cruz, Roberto Benigni, Alec Baldwin and Ellen Page. So for this catalog of Woody Allen stand-ins, we’ll start there and move backward into the past, in the tradition of American cinema’s greatest nostalgic.

View the slide show

Andrew O

More Andrew O'Hehir.

Next Article

Related Stories

More Related Stories

Featured Slide Shows

The week in 10 pics

close X
  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11
  • Lisa Montgomery embraces her nephew Thursday after a tornado tore apart her home in Cleburne, Texas. The twister killed six people and destroyed entire swaths of the North Texas town.
    Credit: AP/LM Otero

    View the slide show

  • Jack McMahon, the defense attorney for abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell, speaks outside the Criminal Justice Center Philadelphia Tuesday. His client was convicted of killing three babies in his clinic, and will serve multiple life sentences.
    Credit: AP/Matt Rourke

    View the slide show

  • A photo taken Monday captures Vice President Joe Biden's response to a Milwaukee second-grader's innovative proposal to end America's epidemic of gun violence. This guy!
    Credit: AP/Jenny Aicher

    View the slide show

  • Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., flanked by a grouper-eyed Michele Bachmann, addresses the IRS' admission that it targeted Tea Party groups in advance of the 2012 election. In an op-ed for CNN Thursday, the Kentucky senator slammed the president for his faux outrage.
    Credit: AP/Molly Riley

    View the slide show

  • Ousted IRS chief Steven Miller is sworn in on Capitol Hill Friday. Miller testified before the House Ways and Means Committee on the extra scrutiny the agency gave conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status.
    Credit: AP/J. Scott Applewhite

    View the slide show

  • Attorney General Eric Holder pauses as he testifies on Capitol Hill before the House Judiciary Committee Wednesday. Holder is under fire, among other things, for the Justice Department's gathering of phone records at the Associated Press.
    Credit: AP/Carolyn Kaster

    View the slide show

  • O.J. Simpson sits during an evidentiary hearing at Clark County District Court in Las Vegas, Nev., Thursday. Simpson, who is currently serving a nine-to-33-year sentence in state prison for armed robbery and kidnapping, is using a writ of habeas corpus to seek a new trial.
    Credit: AP/Las Vegas Review-Journal/Jeff Scheid

    View the slide show

  • Major Tom to ground control: On Sunday astronaut Chris Hadfield recorded the first music video from space, a cover of David Bowie's "Space Oddity."
    Credit: AP/NASA/Chris Hadfield

    View the slide show

  • When it rains it pours. President Barack Obama speaks during a news conference Thursday with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, inexplicably inspiring an #umbrellagate Twitter meme.
    Credit: AP/Jacquelyn Martin

    View the slide show

  • A smoke plume rises high above a road block at the intersection of County A and Ross Road east of Solon Springs, Wis., Tuesday. No injuries were reported, but the the wildfire caused evacuations across northwestern Wisconsin.
    Credit: AP/The Duluth News-Tribune/Clint Austin

    View the slide show

  • Recent Slide Shows

  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11

Related Videos

Comments

 30 Comments

Comment Preview

Your name will appear as username

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href=""> <b> <em> <strong> <i> <blockquote>

follow salon

Most Read

Popular on Reddit

links from salon.com

From Around the Web

Presented by Scribol
listener_new_rect The Listener: So long, Sookie Stackhouse

Recommendations