Woody Allen (1992)
This must be one of the best-acted of all Woody Allen’s films and it’s his writing that enables the actors to fly. The script has thought out characters as well as an abundance of funny lines. The principals talk to camera – apparently to an unseen and unheard interviewer. The last fragment of interview is with Gabe, the character played by Woody Allen. He asks, with a note of desperation in his voice, ‘Can I go? Is this over?’ and the film ends. The interview framework allows the characters to present their public faces and to say things about how they felt or behaved which the intervening sequences that describe their private lives often contradict. This is particularly so in the case of Gabe’s ‘passive-aggressive’ wife Judy, played by Mia Farrow. The relationship between Woody Allen and Soon-Yi Previn became known to Farrow in January 1992 and this film, the last that Allen and Farrow made together, was released in September of that year. The interview sequences may be a way of Allen’s pointing up the impossibility of privacy for a film celebrity (because of media interest) or film artist (because the artist, Allen anyway, puts a lot of his own life on screen). In exposing Judy’s two-faced quality, he could be commenting on something he sees as dislikeable in Mia Farrow (at a time when he was about to be pilloried for deceiving her). In any event, it’s impossible not to connect Husbands and Wives with the couple’s biography.
The film is, to put it simply, a tale of two marriages. Gabe and Judy (he’s an academic, she works on a magazine) are meeting old friends for dinner. This couple – Jack (Sydney Pollack) and Sally (Judy Davis) – have news: they’ve decided to separate. Gabe and Judy seem not only shocked by the news but a little resentful – she especially. It becomes increasingly clear that those immediate reactions have to do with the frailty of Gabe’s and Judy’s own marriage. Judy introduces Sally to a work colleague, Michael (Liam Neeson), and encourages them to go out together. Pretty soon, Judy comes to realise that she’s in love with Michael – although he really likes Sally. Gabe, meanwhile, is increasingly fascinated by one of his English students, Rain (Juliette Lewis). Jack’s affair with a much younger woman, an aerobics trainer called Sam (Lysette Anthony), blooms and withers. By the end of Husbands and Wives, Jack and Sally are cautiously back together again; Judy has married Michael; Gabe is living alone.
The film takes time to settle down visually. The early scenes look to be the work of a DoP drunk in charge of a handheld camera (in fact it was Carlo Di Palma) but the jittery faux-documentary style is used more and more intermittently and, in the end, is pretty well dropped. The reversal of marital fortune is a familiar story; the idea of a matchmaker with a conflict of interest isn’t novel either. But the writing and playing are penetrating enough to make these things seem fresh. Judy Davis’s Sally is a brittle ballbreaker, a woman with a powerful sexual presence who is much more talk than action once she’s in bed with a man. Davis creates a really intimidating character – the electric brilliance of her acting is a large part of the intimidation. Sydney Pollack had shown his comic flair in Tootsie ten years earlier but his famous cameo in that film doesn’t prepare you for the richness of his portrait of Jack, who is both the most affable and the most obviously self-serving of the four principals. The sequence in which Jack takes Sam to a party where all the other guests are intellectually on message and she keeps rattling on about astrology is powerfully unpleasant: Jack’s rejection of Sam because she’s made a fool of him as well as of herself – by being herself – is a good illustration of how uncompromising Woody Allen is in this film. He himself acts with more urgency than usual; Husbands and Wives also features the most layered and emotionally various acting I’ve seen from Mia Farrow.
As the young and heartless Rain, Juliette Lewis is disconcerting – she’s both indolent and wolfish. Compared with the others, Lewis is vocally monotonous and her early scenes with Woody Allen don’t have as much snap as the rest of the film. But once Rain begins to give away what she feels about Gabe as her literary mentor, Lewis comes to life – and she, Davis and Farrow are very effectively balanced. Liam Neeson’s characteristically slow tempo, and the slow-wittedness it seems to imply, also works well here and Blythe Danner is good in the small role of Rain’s mother. The film naturally calls to mind Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage but this is one instance where Woody Allen eclipses the original. As far as I know, Husbands and Wives is as far as Allen has ever gone in getting deeper into character and staying funny at the same time.
10 January 2012
