It’s weird watching a movie star on screen in a film that lasts one hour and a half and then, immediately afterward, seeing the man in person. That was my experience last week when Woody Allen came to town for a preview showing of his newest film “Small Time Crooks.”
The film itself I found hilarious. It’s an old-fashioned comedy graced with the wit and sophistication of a contemporary master of the medium. Two top per-formances by Tracey Ullman and Elaine May place the film among Woody’s best, in my opinion. Revealing too much about the plot would spoil it for fans planning to see it for themselves.
It turns on an effort by Ray Winkler, Woody’s character, and two of his former prison mates to tunnel into a bank. If that does not sound like promising material, wait until you see what this triple threat director-writer-actor does with it. At one point I felt a tear flowing down my cheek, a delicious but uncommon experience for me to find such amusement in a film.
In person, Woody is slight and rather shy, though seemingly not so neurot-ic as the image he has long cultivated. Of course, he was bound to seem dimi-nished after his image was shown for so long on a large screen. And, in the course of the film he appears in various settings and guises that can make him larger than life.
Answering questions from a large audience composed mostly of Harvard students, he held everyone’s attention. The very first question seemed to throw him, however. A young woman asked him “What is comedy?” He acknowledged it to be appropriate but did not quite know how to answer it. There was something intriguing about seeing an acknowledged master of the genre wrestle with its meaning.
Of course, Woody did not need to feel embarrassed at inability to define an art form that defies almost anyone’s definition. Ultimately, his answer seemed to be something like – comedy is what makes people laugh.
Philosophers would probably focus on incongruity. That means the gap between what you expect and what actually happens or is. For instance, in the film Ray comes home to the apartment where he and his wife Frenchy live. He turns the key to the front door and steps inside. He calls to Frenchy and she an-swers “Who’s that?” Ray then says, “the pope” and explains that the pope has al-ways wanted to visit their place.
Many other incongruities occur as the film moves along. They provide a running series of events calculated to draw laughter. Some of them happen, not because of clever one-liners but because the characters are so full of amusing and often contradictory personality traits.
If I could have broken into the students’ question period, I would have in-quired about Woody’s experience of aging. At age 65 he is now no longer young; his film career has lasted thirty-five years.
I hope that he will continue to be a productive artist for many years to come. For that to happen, I don’t know whether it’s an advantage or disadvantage to have a physician for every part of his body, as Woody has claimed to have.
The methodology Woody follows in coming up with ideas for new films I found particularly interesting. He takes events that he has heard about and gives them various twists. In the most recent instance, he read of the attempt by thieves to tunnel through to a bank from a building nearby and used his imagination to develop a twist in the plot that upsets expectations.
That approach makes writing comedy not seem very far from anyone’s grasp. But those of us who have attempted to be funny in print know better. We can all testify that nothing is harder than making people laugh when they read words you have written. The authors of failed comedies are legion, while the ranks of those who have succeeded at it remain paper thin.
Another question had the great merit of giving Woody the chance to show his mythic self. A young-looking student asked him about his mother’s habit of deflavorizing the chicken. Woody responded with animation and said that indeed his mother used to do that to all the chickens she served. That made the chicken taste “like blotter,” Woody assured us. As a result, he used to love being invited to the homes of friends and neighbors where real chicken would be served.
Woody’s mother, incidentally, is ninety-four and his father one hundred. So Woody knows something about old age. Perhaps, as he grows older, we can look to him for a wry gerontological masterpiece that will have us laughing at the experiences of advanced years. And it will be good, too, if he mixes in some of the strange surprises the onset of age springs on us.
Richard Griffin