- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - ALSO THIS WEEK Kundun Scorsese's exquisite Dalai Lama biopic The family values of "NYPD Blue" By Joyce Millman The most pro-family show on television - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - LAST WEEK The Boxer Daniel Day-Lewis is magnetic as a former IRA prisoner Wag the Dog De Niro and Hoffman in wicked satire on politics as showbiz - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - RECENTLY A full list of recent reviews, interviews and table talk. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Blue Glow DAILY TV PICKS - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - BROWSE THE MOVIE ARCHIVES TV ARCHIVES

YUCKY WOODY | PAGE 2 OF 2 My cautionary tale begins on a chilly evening late in 1975, when my real father and I set out from his shag-carpeted bachelor pad in El Cerrito, Calif. (which a few of you pop-culture mavens will identify as the hometown of Creedence Clearwater Revival), to go to the movies. We wound up in a converted warehouse called the Rialto, a counterculture repertory cinema on a deserted industrial street in North Berkeley, to see a Woody Allen triple bill. If memory serves, we had already seen "Love and Death" together that year, and now we were catching up on our homework: "Play It Again, Sam" (not directed by Allen, I know; hold that e-mail), "Take the Money and Run" and "Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask)." Things weren't going real well for me and my dad that year. In the grip of a late-40s panic attack, he had split up with my mother and was sharing the aforementioned El Cerrito apartment with an undergraduate girlfriend who was about six years older than I was. I was an ungainly teenager on the cusp of puberty who had read "Crime and Punishment" and cut school to drink beer or vodka almost every day, but was painfully shy around girls. But while we were sitting there in the dark, with the Rialto's old ceiling heaters rattling overhead, watching what seemed to me like outrageously risqué and sophisticated comedies, I felt like I could forgive my dad for 19-year-old Paulette and appreciate his diffident, embarrassed efforts to treat me like an adult for the first time. Adults were people who could discuss Freud and Mahler and who told dirty jokes that seemed intelligent rather than crude. They went to movies like these late on Saturday night, had a few drinks and then slept hedonistically late on Sunday morning, when they awoke in their spacious big-city apartments to good coffee, smart banter and the Arts & Leisure section. As I write this 20-odd years later, it seems to me that I've never quite escaped this conception of adulthood and never will. For better or worse, it allowed me to evade both the picket-fence suburban version of Middle America and the Volvo-and-granola variation I saw all around me in Berkeley. Other influences certainly played their part -- my older brother's copies of Playboy and Esquire, a particularly roguish high-school English teacher with a private poster of Diana Rigg taped in his coat closet, F. Scott Fitzgerald's "Tender Is the Night" -- but the imagined community built in and around Woody Allen's movies was a central factor in shaping who I have become. "Interiors," in 1978, was my first indication that Allen would change along with me as I grew up and inevitably grew away from my actual father. A few months after sweeping the Oscars with the universally adored "Annie Hall," Allen released a somber, wrenching WASPish drama of death and family trauma, a movie that bewildered most of his mainstream audience. Maybe it was a calculated career move; with another hit comedy, Allen might well have compromised his ability to make small films on his own terms. For me as a high school junior, trying to grow into that vision of urbanity I had glimpsed in the Rialto, it was a challenge. Along with Ingmar Bergman's "Autumn Sonata," released the same year, it was virtually the first art movie I'd gone to on my own volition. Both offered precisely the kind of downbeat, intimate aesthetic experience appreciated by the people in Woody Allen movies. In the community Allen was perhaps inadvertently creating, audience, characters and filmmaker shared an understanding of the world: Families tended to collapse, sexual relationships were fraught with danger and death waited on the horizon -- but recompense was to be found above all in the realm of art. If we began to lose track of the moral dividing line between art and entertainment, one of Allen's "difficult" small-audience films would come along to remind us. They were probably less important in themselves than for what our response to them said about us. They seemed to cement our communion with Allen, reassuring both himself and us that the neurotic tics and fixations so evident in his work stemmed from a profound existential dilemma and not merely from a defensive shield of Borscht Belt schtick. As I progressed through the 1980s, I began to associate the premiere of each new Allen film with a particular early-evening scene: standing in the fog, in a polite line of tastefully underdressed white people, outside a theater called the Vogue in the Pacific Heights District of San Francisco (which is about as close as you can get to the Upper East Side on the West Coast). I was resentful and cynical about the growing size of the cult, and I jealously guarded my idiosyncratic preferences -- "Stardust Memories" over "Manhattan," "The Purple Rose of Cairo" over "Broadway Danny Rose," almost anything over the yupscale hit "Hannah." As far as I know, I was the only film critic in the United States to write a favorable review of "September." (I haven't seen it since, and I'm not sure I should.) Looking back, I suppose I knew even then that Allen was working too much and too rapidly, and that he often seemed unable to escape what critic David Thomson calls his "claustrophobic self-regard." At the peak of his career, it hardly seemed to matter. In 1990, I might have told you Allen had made six masterpieces in the '80s; now it's hard for me to imagine any of his films after "Annie Hall" surviving l'affaire Soon-Yi without at least a slightly unpleasant tinge. You thought I wasn't going to talk about that, didn't you? Or that I was going to say it didn't matter, the way Wagner's anti-Semitism is sometimes alleged not to matter (which is also crap). The reason it matters is not entirely Allen's fault, although I'd argue that sleeping with your girlfriend's teenage adopted daughter is the sort of thing that might make a lot of guys' friends wonder about them. Allen's stupid personal life obviously ought to be his own business. But the fact is that a wide swath of the American intelligentsia had developed an unhealthy attachment to Allen's relationship with Mia Farrow; I can remember earnestly discussing it with friends as a model of artistic/personal partnership and non-bourgeois monogamy. As quasi-public figures with an interest in marketing their joint image, Allen and Farrow certainly participated in creating this myth. Their unspoken deal with us was that their neuroses got therapeutically rinsed into the work, while their private life was a well-adjusted and orderly ritual of Sibelius symphonies, Diebenkorn openings and parent-teacher conferences. The only reason I fell for this hogwash, I guess, is that I helped invent it and desperately wanted to believe it. Like the rest of the Allen cult, I had seen "Scenes From a Marriage" and ought to have known better. The truth was the exact opposite: The life we thought we were sharing with Allen was a transient fiction. All we had ever really had of him was the movies, and once they were stripped of the communal mystique we had built around them, they didn't look so good to us anymore. The split with Farrow splintered the Allen cult like a feuding Trotskyist sect. Many of Allen's female fans felt personally betrayed by a man who had somehow, they felt, acquired vaguely feminist credentials. As illogical as that seemed to me at the time, the people who bailed out were being more honest about the twisted nature of our relationship with Allen than were those of us who stayed onboard and tried to rationalize the iceberg away. Allen's first movie after the scandal broke almost made everything all right for me (and still almost does). "Husbands and Wives," a savagely funny marital-breakup comedy with clear undertones of loss and regret, is one of the finest and most honest movies of his career. If any of his late works survives his reputation, this one should. But despite his sudden notoriety (or because of it), the movie did little business. Over the next few years he retreated into a string of trivial comedies that did nothing more than reestablish his commercial viability while he battled Farrow in family court. He was no longer an avatar, only another celebrity entertainer whose screwed-up private life was discussed in the New York Post. It's probably going too far to suggest that Allen deliberately became tabloid fodder in order to rid himself of his hard-core fans, but he couldn't have done a better job if he'd tried. As "Deconstructing Harry" indirectly reminds us, Allen himself dropped out of college twice and then became a TV gag writer; it's reasonable to suppose that he's always viewed his intellectual acolytes with some mixture of envy and mistrust. Nonetheless, a few of us were left -- some of us will be with him, I'm sure, until Death drops by for us wearing that goony outfit from "The Seventh Seal." And we knew Allen had one more movie for us. We were right: It's a movie with all the viciousness of "Husbands and Wives" and all the self-loathing of "Stardust Memories," but without the perspective or tenderness of either. In Harry Block, Allen has willfully exaggerated his own foibles -- the lust for younger women, the obsessive self-regard, the New York chauvinism -- to the level of odious caricature. Harry shows up at a tribute in his honor (held at the college he never graduated from) with a hooker in hot pants, the corpse of a friend and his own kidnapped son, as if to say, "You think I'm a monster? All right, I'll show you a monster." Is the insufferable Harry Block any closer to the "real" Woody Allen than all the lovable-nebbish characters Allen has played over the years were? Of course we don't know, and that's exactly the point. "Deconstructing Harry" is often very funny in a desperate, queasy way. But the humor is designed to rub our noses in our own tendency to confuse art with life, to build idols out of our own fantasies and delusions and then tear them down when those fantasies make us sick. Allen's latest joke is to insist that we never knew him at all, that everything we ever believed about him and ourselves and our shared community was a con game: He was never more than the intellectual's answer to a circus geek, exaggerating his own freakishness for the entertainment of a gawking crowd who told themselves the spectacle was edifying. Allen's bitterness is understandable, but the hypocrisy of a man who lived off the devotion of his fans for years is not. As disgusted as I may feel with this surrogate father now, I'd like to think that he's wrong about himself and us, and that I didn't waste all those hours in the movie theater with him, inventing the man I would become. Before my real father died, I was able to forgive him for almost everything, no matter how buffoonish or horrifying he had sometimes seemed, because I saw so much of him in me and understood his weakness so well. But he was my father, after all. All I ever had of Woody Allen were some words and pictures, and, at least for now, those have lost their charm. SALON | Jan. 16, 1998  Andrew O'Hehir still lives in Manhattan and is a regular contributor to Salon.