By Woody Allen, 1996.
Starring Alan Alda, Woody Allen, Drew Barrymore, Lukas Haas, Goldie Hawn, Gaby Hoffman, Natasha Lyonne, Edward Norton, Natalie Portman, Julia Roberts, Tim Roth.
Rating: 10/10, 8/10.
I still can’t figure out my attitude towards musicals. I think they’re a brilliant concept, that I know. Some of my very favorite movies are musicals. But I still hate most of them. Everyone Says I Love You is a musical, and it’s one of my very favorite movies. I don’t hate it.
The characters in the movie, as in most of Woody Allen’s movies, are charmingly intelligent liberals living in New York City. They’re wealthier than usual this time, though, in the way that they’re always doing charity things and going to France, and most of them are members of two or three generations of the same family, the Dandridges, which is also unusual for Allen. Oh, and every once in a while there’ll be an exuberant song-and-dance number, always to some standard or other—Makin’ Whoopy, My Baby Just Cares For Me, the title song.
I know a lot of people really dislike Woody Allen movies. I love them. One of my favorite things about them is that they’re their own genre. The Woody Allen Movie is a kind of movie just as surely as the film noir or the teen horror movie is a kind of movie. This is great, because, rather than make the same movie over and over again, as some accuse him of doing, he makes his genre—his movie, if you must—make babies with all sorts of different ones. Manhattan Murder Mystery was the spawn of the Woody Allen movie and the amateur sleuth movie. Bullets Over Broadway was the result of the coupling of the Woody Allen movie and the Mafia movie. Love & Death was the bastard child of the Woody Allen movie and the Russian epic. And Everyone Says I Love You is the Woody Allen movie’s baby out of wedlock with the movie musical.
What’s so great about this is that all of Woody Allen’s usual characteristics—the quick, smart, and utterly realistic dialogue, the neuroses, the long, long shots of multiple characters, just talking—are all there, mixed with the usual characteristics—singing and dancing—of musicals. So when Holden Spence (Norton) is proposing to Schuyler Dandridge (Barrymore) at the beginning, say, we see them walking through a park, singing about love, and we’re far away from them. It’s really cool.
The story barely need be mentioned. It’s convoluted as all get-out, anyway, and has eighty thousand characters. Really, very little need be said about the movie at all, other than the fact that it’s perfect in nearly every regard. It’s joyous and beautiful the way the best musicals are. The way all the actors (except Barrymore, for some reason relating to her claim that she didn’t know she was signing on for a musical) do their own singing, ranging from Allen and Alda’s tinny warbling to Hawn’s gorgeous loungey voice, but always just sounding like real people carried away by emotion and just havingto burst into song, is fantastic. And there’s a scene towards the end, with Woody Allen and Goldie Hawn singing to one another, where she just starts floating through the air and gliding effortlessly across the ground in an utterly impossible fashion that is also utterly perfect and utterly beautiful, that it is by itself worth whatever money it takes to see the movie.