Cinema
Mighty Aphrodite (15, selected cinemas)
Words from Woody
Mark Steyn
In Mighty Aphrodite, Claire Bloom plays Woody Allen's mother-in-law. In real life, they're about the same age — though she's an elegant beauty with exquisite bone structure, while he seems to be fading from likeable schnook to a vague, wispy oatmeal blur. It's not just that his hair is thinning, but that his entire screen persona is. I think it's time, if only as a career move, that he made a film in which he runs off with Claire Bloom, or Angela Lansbury, or Katherine Hepburn, or any woman older than 22. Instead, since his liberation from Mia Farrow, he's become even more sin- gle-minded. These days, even the women he runs away from are a third his age.
Thus, in Mighty Aphrodite, he is married to Helena Bonham Carter and, in an auto- biographical touch, they have adopted a child. Disenchanted with his wife and impressed by his young son's wit and intel- ligence, he determines to seek out the real mother — feeling sure that such a bright, smart kid must come from bright, smart stock. The child was born in Philadelphia to a single mom, Lesley Wright. But, in tracking her down from Philly to New York through several increasingly unlikely name changes, he discovers that the mother of his son is now a hooker and star of such films as The Enchanted Pussy, Judy Cum. At which point, the movie flairs into life with the arrival of Mira Sorvino.
In her very first scene, she shows Allen an amusing picture of two humping pigs, from which amusing decorative novelty her performance takes its cue: Judy Cum is a sort of benign, slimline Miss Piggy, with the same honking porcine voice and plonking stilettoed gait. To judge from her apart- ment, her chief interest appears to be her extensive collection of phallic knick-knacks. Her late father was a drug-pusher. Her sen- tences are peppered with 'fuck' and `blowjob' — words rarely heard in a Woody Allen picture. He's so aghast he can barely breathe. He asks whether she's ever had a regular job. 'Sure,' she says. 'I worked in a massage parlour. I did phone sex.'
In his last film, Allen explored the ten- sion between an educated artist and a tal- ented natural. In this one, the tension's between a Woody Allen film and a most unWoodyish character. Compared to Sharon Stone and Elisabeth Shue, her fel- low Oscar-nominated hookers, Mira Sorvi- no gets closer to the real thing: not sensitive, not tortured, but cheerfully, philosophically banal. Everything about her is an intrusion into the restricted club of Woody Allen movies. As if sensing that she might prove too much for his audience, he shoehorns in an irrelevant framing device — a celebrity Greek chorus which marches round an amphitheatre declaiming anachronistically on the action: 'I see disas- ter! I see catastrophe!' wails Cassandra. 'I see lawyers!' The shrink 'n' lawyer gags are glib and tired, but they seem to be primari- ly to reassure his fans that, blowjob jokes aside, it's still a Woody Allen picture. The perky vulgarity of Sorvino's performance exposes the workings of his films. Profes- sionally, Woody has the same preoccupa- tions as Joe Eszterhas, screenwriter of Basic Instinct, Jade and Showgirls. He's invariably a middle-aged lech with the hots for young chicks, but, until his recent tra- vails, the veneer of urbane, cultured, neu- rotic, Upper East Side talkiness protected Woody from the opprobrium routinely shovelled on to Joe.
In its way, this is Woody's Pygmalion: he wants to transform Judy Cum into some- thing closer to a Woody Allen character. She'd like to star on Broadway, so he lends encouragement until he realises sadly that, aside from porn films where her mouth mainly has a non-speaking role, she's a rot- ten actress. So he adjusts his own ambitions for her and tries to help her become a hair- dresser. The relationship is tender and unusual, but the film gets badly out of whack towards the end: indeed, I'd go so far as to say it's the wrong end. It would have taken more courage for Allen to show that sometimes love transcends such hum- drum, computer-dating compatibilities as shared intelligence. Besides, Allen seems to define intelligence very narrowly, as a way with words — and his own behaviour is surely proof that articulate men can be just as dumb as muscle-bound bozos. The truest moment in Mighty Aphrodite shows a young couple crossing in front of Woody's taxi- cab: in the back, he and Helena Bonham Carter sit silently after another joyless evening, and in his bleak, crumpled face you can read all the sense of loss that so often accompanies romantic stability, It's a fine movie moment, but then he has to go and spoil it by explaining it in words.
`You may dismiss quietly, without running!'
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