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With nothing else to say in the face of Hollywood Ending, one can at least bother with the lazy assertion that Allen's wit is wearing thin in his old age, as far as the viewer can deem by measuring this latest production against the crafty finesse of Mighty Aphrodite and Deconstructing Harry. But the story's central conceit, however forced, still catches the audience off-guard this time around: a film director (Allen) trying to salvage his career from a lethal downward spiral (notice any parallels?) nabs one last shot at a big-budget studio picture, but subsequently induces his own psychosomatic blindness and is forced to continue directing the film while keeping his handicap secret from his producers. Though viewers may surely be stricken aghast by the single-mindedness with which Allen pursues the film's few disastrous gags (for one instance, the blind lead struggles vainly to memorize the geography of a living room in the most cruelly, torturously overextended scene of Allen's whole oeuvre), moviegoers might also be charmed to discover how the premise generally holds up anyway, thanks mostly in part to the acid sharpness of the rapport fashioned in Allen's screenplay, an offhand job displaying considerably more comic polish than that of last year's Curse of the Jade Scorpion. Noteworthy, too, is the way in which the writer-director talent also vaguely harkens back to the pseudo-Felliniesque self-importance of Stardust Memories when he spells out the concept of "blindness as metaphor" as something we should honestly care about, presumably to satiate the upper-middle-class intelligentsia that comprise his audience and, just perhaps, to frazzle movie critics like Kauffman, Kehr, and Rosenbaum who so love to despise all his cinematic pretensions. Allen's script may be riddled with one too many bad puns about "artistic vision," but at least the guy thinks he's chewing on a bit of tasty metaphysical meat, even if he clearly isn't. |
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Hollywood Ending |
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capsule review by André de Alencar Lyon |
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Woody Allen |
