Once upon a time, I happened to live in Madrid (Spain) and be a dedicated fan of all things Woody Allen. 5000 miles from New York, everything Woody presented as genuinely Manhattanite, I took it, proudly. After all, I hadn’t visited the city yet, and everybody seemed to agree that Woody Allen was the storyteller of New York as original as it can be. New Yorkers were like that.
Now I live in Manhattan, New York. Woody Allen’s films look totally and shockingly different from here. I saw first Annie Hall and Manhattan, and they passed the test. They are not as magic as they were seen in Spain, for Manhattan is mine, here now, but they are great films nevertheless. Great human and urban stories of the city of our dreams.
Then came Melinda & Melinda, his latest release and my 30th Woody Allen movie (that is devotion). It opened first in Europe, last year, and only now, spring 2005, in America. My friends in Madrid were shocked to know it took so long to have the movie here, and only in one single theater in Manhattan. I mean, this island was supposed to be Allen’s refuge out of Europe. We do not expect Woody’s features to open in multiplexes along Nebraska and South Dakota, but New York! Manhattan! I guess nobody cares anymore about Woody Allen in America, not even in Manhattan, New York City?
I can understand why that would happen. It’s called “Woody’s world”. A very peculiar, ludicrously unrealistic, out-of-any-real-touch bubble that happens only in Woody Allen and friend’s existences. You, reader in Europe, think this that you saw in Melinda & Melinda was about New York. Oh were you wrong!
As a New Yorker, I thoroughly enjoy and live everyday this amazing city composed of five boroughs. New York is noise, crowds, skyscrapers, pollution, clogged roads, harsh snowstorms, torrid asphalt-melting summers, smells (nice and awful), different languages, many skin colors, annoying tourists, immigrants, a subway falling to pieces, garbage on the sidewalks. Art everywhere.
New York is an outdoor city to be walked and experienced. New York is a super expensive city where high-salary Wall Street professionals live in average-to-small apartments or migrate to the suburbs of New Jersey. New York is an ever-boiling melting pot, the crossroads of the world where everything happens and everything can be found. New York is awe-inspiring and weird, approachable and untreatable, beautiful and brutal. New York City is a bigger-than-big megalopolis whose nuances and details cannot be grasped in a whole life.
And then there’s the New York Woody Allen presents. Which is NOT New York, but the Upper East Side. And not even the Upper East Side but certain carefully selected tree-lined, neatly clean streets with rows of perfectly immaculate townhouses suffused with the most beautiful light. Woody Allen lives in that elitist, closed community of rich people, heirs and socialites that is the Upper East Side, where he had a 22-room Georgian townhouse in 92nd and Park bought for $17.7 in 1999 and sold in 2004 for $25 million, establishing a record for the Carnegie Hill neighborhood (he is wealthier for his real estate movements than for the revenue of his movies).
Woody Allen lives in the UES, and never leaves. The Upper is his haven and his prison. He has lived New York from the crime-porn-crack years to the present day of booming prices, tourists all over and brightness on the city. But he has not reflected these changes- on the contrary, while the people in his films have more or less remained the same (struggling actors, directors, writers), their houses seem to have grown disproportionally bigger until become a ridiculous anachronism.
More and more, he has been losing touch with the city he loves and the people inhabiting Manhattan Island. He has locked himself and his tribe in increasingly narrower places that read as refuges from the reality of present New York. Sheltered luxury caves where they live their odd, bizarre lives far from the flow of New York.
In Woody Allen’s dreamy world, Manhattanites declaim like Shakespeare characters whether in social parties or buying the newspaper. Woody’s world has people, young and old, whose favorite Saturday-night pastime is going to a studio to watch a trio of Koreans record a Bartok piece. A tribe that throws parties to match single friends in $5-million lofts and apartments despite being struggling actors, unemployed art historians, fresh filmmakers with no film to make. A.O. Scott, the New York Times film critic, calls Woody Allen a “Real Estate Pornographer”. The characters of Melinda & Melinda talk about being penniless while walking through endless aisles, ample living rooms, halls and magnificent bedrooms.
The New York Woody Allen imagines is not the New York a New Yorker lives everyday, as I’ve said. In fact, there is no trace of New York in Melinda & Melinda. The crowds, the noises, the races, the colors, the traffic, the mass transit? None of that. Woody’s world goes from the interior of swanky lofts to the interior of wealthy apartments, taxi ride and a visit to The Hamptons in between. The most city we see is a brief stroll of two of the characters walking around Madison and 77th, passing by the Carlyle where Woody plays the clarinet every Monday night at an $80 cover charge for excited tourists.
The aristocrat, elitist, racist, old-fashioned or plain non-existent fenced world Woody gives on film is a ludicrous fantasy of outrageous unrealism. There is no real life anymore- not only the places but the people are a product of his imagination. Young professionals in their 20’s and 30’s talk, live and behave like the 60-something denizens Woody knows. The first black character he introduces ever is a white in the body and voice of a black man.
Where once his personages appeared as appealing examples of intellectualism, high culture and the struggles of life and human relations, now are mummies stuck in their boring hobbies and habits of an era long gone. Woody’s white rich liberals are rejectable snobbies, unmoral hypocrites- extramarital relations are cheerfully accepted. Couples and friends lie on an every-hour basis, and it’s right. Their selfish, self-centered dysfunctional lives with their neurosis and psychiatric stupidities do not attract anymore but annoy and bother.
In 21st century New York, who cares anymore about the personages of this ghetto populated by “urban rednecks”, like one critic labels the people in Melinda & Melinda?
The film critic for the Washington Post says: “After some 40 years of watching Woody Allen films, starting with 1965's "What's New Pussycat?", it's finally time for me to acknowledge the sobering truth: I don't like his people anymore. The characters, I mean. Those inhabitants of New York. Not real New Yorkers, mind you, but his New Yorkers.”
That the mixture of comedy and drama Woody Allen has tried in Melinda & Melinda does not work (the drama is not dramatic, the comedy is not funny) and the whole movie is tremendously boring and unappealing probably does not matter. The people and places of Woody’s world are so exorbitantly and offensively out of any reality that is difficult to get passed that.
If all those white rich people in matching parties, Bartok sessions and failed humanity would at last and least laugh about themselves, the comedy would work. But these irritant idiots take themselves so grossly serious that you have to laugh at their arrogant stupidity to avoid jumping on the screen and rip them off yelling “I love New York”.
