Cinema
Bullets over Broadway ('15', selected cinemas)
His private life is his own affair
Mark Steyn
If you want, you can find autobiographical echoes in almost anything of Woody Allen's. He currently has a one-act play runing off- Broadway — about a marital break-up with a middle-aged guy who takes off with a young girl! and a Japanese joke, too: 'What's the difference between sushi and pussy? Rice. 'But we're looking at it the wrong way round. Allen's dramas aren't driven by the specifics of his personal life; rather, his per- sonal life drearily subscribes to the universal banalities of any humdrum sex comedy. Allen's play has the unprejudiced heartless- ness of the professional gag writer rather than the targeted venom of the personally motivated; it is autobiographically revealing not in its content but in its underpinnings in the rice rather than the sushi. The same is true of 1993's Manhattan Murder Mystery, in which Woody finally wised up and decided he'd rather be Bob Hope than Ingmar Bergman. Unfortunately, it's harder to be Bob Hope than Ingmar Bergman. Unfortu- nately, it's harder to be Bob Hope than a morbid Scandinavian, and the film suffered from Wood's weakness in the leading role: it was literally, a no-Hoper. It was interesting, however, as a self-adjustment of his image. In Bullets Over Broadway, with consummate professionalism, Woody recycles his alleged self-doubt and enlarges it into a meditation on the artistic gift — and it's funny, too! What's more, unlike Murder Mystery, where Woody made a hopeless Hope, in Bullets John Cusack in the lead role makes a per- fectly fine Woody substitute.
Cusack plays a young playwright who has everything it takes to be an artist. That's to say, when it comes to being a playwright, he plays it right: he sits around in Greenwich Village coffee houses all day agonising with other self-declared artists about the nature `Typical, you wait all day for one and then three come along at once.' of art and the need for an artist to live in his art, etc. But this is the 1920s and, to get his bag break on Broadway, Cusack is forced to accept a mobster as backer and, worse, the mobster's dimwit moll in a prime role. To ensure his baby's rovin' eyes don't rove too far, the thug assigns a minion to sit in on rehearsals and act as bodyguard. This is Cheech, played by a guy called Chazz, who has the great merit of seeming as if he's wan- dered into the movie en mute to a contract killing. Eventually, he steals the film out from under Cusack, but that's okay because it's the theme of the picture. As rehearsals proceed and rewrites are required, it tran- spires that it's the gangster not the artist who understands plot structure, has an ear for dialogue and is sensitive to character motiva- tion. This is God's joke and Woody's point: artists are born not made; Cusack dresses and socialises and theorises like an artist but he's a hack. Cheech, by contrast, is a paid killer but a true artist, with true integri- ty. Unfortunately, he approaches the inevitable casting compromises of Broadway the same way he would finding a stool- pigeon among the boys: artistic integrity, like organised crime, requires ruthlessness.
This is a nifty theme for a comedy, partic- ularly when you've got Dianne Wiest, Tracey Ullman and Jim Broadbent swanning about as plausible Broadway grotesques. The peri- od detail is spot on, too especially the cock- tail chatter about Eugene O'Neill and George Abbott. But those two names set me thinking. Allen seems to think that, no mat- ter how he tries, he'll never be a great artist. Good for him. There are more people going around calling themselves artists today than at any point in human history, and it's all bunk. But is Cheech an artist anyway? It seems to me that what he does to Cusack's play is apply good, practical, honest crafts- manship to it — just like Allen. Whatever else he is, Woody is a superb craftsman and craft enables art. For example, you could pull the literate playwright/bluecollar thug switch in any number of ways. But, by setting it in the Twenties, when theatre and gang- land were closely interwined, it's both uncon- trived and pushed to its extremes: we all know about guys who'll die for their art but what about guys who'll kill for it? The con- struction doesn't show — it's effortless, unobtrusive, but brilliantly efficient.
Hardcore Woody buffs — the sort who compile and buy The Woody Allen Reader have got him wrong. The Allen screen per- sonal doesn't exist anymore than Hope's does. It's ludicrous to suggest that Woody has the no-brain Jane play a psychiatrisst in Cusack's play because, after recent travails, he's peeved at shrinks; he made her a psychi- atrist because that's a funny idea. Allen is the least personal and obsessive, the most dispassionate and objective of film-makers more Abbott than O'Neill. That's why his work hasn't been affected by his off-screen difficulties. The only telling autobiographical resonance is that there are no autobiographi- cal resonances.
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