Woody Allen: A Documentary (Theatrical Cut)
Directed by: Robert B. Weide
2012
If you have ever turned up your nose at theone-per-year speed of Woody Allen’s movies, this documentary will give you agood reason to reconsider your opinion.
Woody Allen: A Documentary is a lively yet orderly portrait of the life, career and art of Woody Allen. Organized around three major themes, the documentary explores Woody’s childhood and beginning of his career; the history of his major films and their receptions and finally the artistic assessment of Woody’s voice and contribution to cinema. Despite this controlled progression, however, the documentary maintains a homogeneous tone, subtlety intertwining biography and artistic production; personal and professional relationships; critical and informative standpoints. And it is also, last but not least, quite funny.
Through its insights, Robert B. Weide’s documentary pleases both the lover of and the acquainted with Woody’s work. The interviews freely merge curiosities (you will learn when and how Woody fell for his signature black-rimmed glasses) with more specific insights (such as Woody’s collaboration with Gordon Willis). For the fanatics, the numerous references to Woody’s films provide a challenging and rich exercise of revision, sewing a surprisingly varied patchwork of his films. For the less familiar viewer, the ensemble reveals as many facets of Woody’s work as one can imagine, depicting Woody as a coherent, yet difficult figure to pinpoint down to a genre, a role or a style.
The documentary is at its best in the balance it creates between the biopic approach and the artistic assessment of Woody Allen’s career. Weide successfully avoids the luring trap of depicting the career of an artist who let psychoanalysis and neurosis enter his work as a life-hence-work-of-art causal relationship. The documentary’s section on Woody’s childhood is on this regard significantly well edited. Woody’s memories from his childhood are followed by abstracts from his movies that tellingly resonate with them. This juxtaposition, however, does not reduce the Woody’s films to his life, rather it gives new life to his movies, adding to their comedy genrea compelling subtext of lived experience and observed reality.
One is also grateful to be able to see, rubbing elbows on the screen, the bubbling young actor with the seventy-something self-observing director. In this regard, the documentary could have perhaps pushed further the self-portrait, leaving to the Woody of yesterday and the Woody of today more space for confrontation.
Despite all the comedies and laughs, Woody Allen’s career appears at last as Sisyphus’s labour. Despite what has been critically said about Woody’s prolific production, we learn from his lips that it is nothing but the result of a perpetual cycle of hope and deception in the attempt to finally create a ‘great film’. A sort of Law of the Large Numbers stubbornly applied to artistic production.
The figure of Woody Allen here meets with that of many other comedians: in its clash between the laughs and lightness on stage and a heavier and bleaker outlook in real life; in the persistent dissatisfactory feeling that comedy and greatness will never collude.
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