**1/2 (out of ****)
Starring Woody Allen, Tea Leoni, Treat Williams, Debra Messing, George Hamilton, Mark Rydell, Yu Lu, Barney Cheng, and Tiffani-Amber Thiessen.
Directed & written by Woody Allen
2002 PG
It’s fun to see a master at play even if he doesn’t always win. Woody Allen’s “Hollywood Ending” is only a partially successful film, but it still has enough of Allen’s trademarks to make me smile. Like his last two endeavors, “Curse of the Jade Scorpion” and “Small Time Crooks,” “Hollywood Ending” is a PG tale of interesting characters, lightness, and whimsy. The acting on behalf of Allen and his latest ensemble is as engaging as ever, his mise-en-scene and camera work is lively, spacious, and rich, and the writing behind his characters is as detailed as we’ve come to expect. The premise of “Hollywood Ending” is an interesting one, in which a fallen director is given one last chance at greatness, only to be stricken with psychosomatic blindness. While faking his way through the production, we come to know him, his loves, both current and lost, and we witness the tug-of-war between the artist and the studio executive.
Mixing autobiography and fantasy, as he often does, Allen plays Val Waxman, a once-great filmmaker reduced to making breath-mint commercials. In a move that may be more inspired by guilt than artistry, his ex-wife of ten years (Tea Leoni, real-life wife of “The X-Files’” David Duchovny), now a Hollywood executive, vouches for him to direct the studio’s hot new screenplay titled “The City Never Sleeps.” Waxman, who is a bundle of nerves and mood-altering pills, gets the job and begins to assemble a crew, but on the first day of shooting tragedy strikes: he’s gone blind. His agent (Mark Rydell, who may well have been an agent in Allen’s “Broadway Danny Rose”) dreads that if Waxman loses this picture, he’s done for, and soon he has the former big name on the set and giving vague commands.
Waxman’s exploits on the set lead to some laughs, some sighs, and a few expository scenes that we could probably do without. The funniest scenes in the movie belong to the local business student (Barney Cheng) brought onto the set to translate for the Chinese cinematographer (Yu Lu). Waxman confides his blindness to him because he’s not really in the movie business and has nothing to lose. The translator’s deadpan descriptions of how the filming is going are brilliantly understated. The movie’s other threads include Waxman’s anxieties and his still-bubbling jealousy that Leoni left him for the senior executive (Treat Williams) currently in charge of “The City Never Sleeps.” Waxman’s insecurities come to a head in a surprisingly tender scene in which he confesses to his ex-wife how frightened he is (a pity he can’t see that it’s not his ex-wife sitting next to him).
“Hollywood Ending” wisely never lets us know for certain if Waxman really is any good as a filmmaker or not. We never see any of his old films, although we do certainly see what a neurotic, shy little man he has become. As the man with the money Treat Williams is not really the villain in any scene except one toward the end, and even in that scene his actions can, maybe, be justified. He is a friendly, subdued man grown a little inconsiderate with power, but mostly a pragmatist. Allen knows that vilifying him would be a mistake, even though several of his comments on the movie and video rental businesses might bother artistes. As in all of Allen’s films the bit parts are well-stocked, especially by Debra Messing as Allen’s bimbo girlfriend, who is so transparently using him to advance her career. As star of “The City Never Sleeps,” Tiffani-Amber Thiessen of “90210” fame is up to the same thing, except with more class. And George Hamilton is a man so California that he keeps the sleeves of a sweater wrapped around his neck even while he’s wearing a suit.
I’ve never out-and-out disliked any Woody Allen movie, but the only other picture of his that didn’t quite satisfy me was “Zelig” (1983), his faux documentary of a human chameleon in the 1920s. That film, while intellectually sound and very intriguing, ran too long for its own good. “Hollywood Ending,” which is so light, so insouciant, and, truth be told, doesn’t have all that much to say, probably could have been shaved down by twenty minutes or half-an-hour. Waxman, his ex-wife, and his agent are all pretty nice people, and their story is more funny than not, but “Hollywood Ending” doesn’t have quite enough substance to merit its current demand on the attention.
Finished September 23rd, 2002
Copyright © 2002 Friday & Saturday Night