Art vs. Life

Woody Allen has long wanted to be Ingmar Bergman, the Swedish director of artful films, but the former gag writer and standup comedian has always been too funny for that. His funniest films usually have jokes about death, art and other serious subject matter. His serious films usually have witty asides or nostalgic references to the lighter side of life. Allen has always been conflicted, and this is the subject of Peter J. Bailey's 2001 book The Reluctant Film Art of Woody Allen.

Being nearly 20 years old, the book omits a lot of Allen films and focuses mainly on those he made in the 1990s, yet most of what Bailey says still holds up.

A bigger problem is that being published by a university press (University of Kentucky), the book aims for a cerebral audience. A couple of times Bailey delights in reliving the scene in Annie Hall where Marshall McLuhan steps out from behind a movie poster in a theater line to put in place a pompous professor talking about his work. Unfortunately, Bailey too often sounds like the pompous professor.

So many Allen characters, Bailey points out, struggle between the lures of creating lasting art and living a life filled with love, laughs, good food and other common pleasures, as if they were mutually exclusive. The latter is often portrayed as an illusion, or as magic. (Watch Magic in the Moonlight, an Allen film made after this book was published.) As Danny Rose says in Broadway Danny Rose, "It's important to have some laughs, no question about it, but you got to suffer a little, too. Because otherwise, you miss the whole point of life." Yet another Allen character finds the meaning of life by watching Marx Brothers films.

While Allen is making up his mind, we movie fans can find art and Bergman-style suffering in Allen's films, but also laughs, love and endless magic.