Ending on a Sour Note

by Sean Burns

HOLLYWOOD ENDING
D
Director: Woody Allen
Starring: Woody Allen, Téa Leoni,
Debra Messing, Treat Williams.
Opens Fri., May 3

Hollywood Ending is Woody Allen's 33rd feature, and probably his worst. (I throw in the "probably" only because to unequivocally claim that this is as bad as it gets would require a second look at some of those ersatz Bergman psychodramas from the Mia Farrow era, a task for which I am gastrointestinally ill-equipped.) It's a slipshod collection of half-realized comic conceits--a filmed doodle from the sketchpad of a former perfectionist who once upon a time knew better than to start shooting a script that he clearly hadn't finished yet.

The salad days in which Woody Allen worked as a reclusive resident auteur for hands-off patron studios have long since passed him by. Though it is a novelty to see him flexing those old stand-up muscles while pimping his pictures on the interview circuit, it's also hard not to recognize such glad- handing showbiz nonsense as one of the things Allen made an entire career out of ridiculing.

To be dragged kicking and screaming from an ivory tower of artistic freedom and dumped into the DreamWorks' publicity machine must have been one hell of an ego-smasher for the Woodman. But any artist who muddies the waters of autobiography to muster masterpieces as often as Allen does has probably realized there's pretty good grist for a story in there.

So why isn't Hollywood Ending the perfect poison-pen letter to a studio system that Woody Allen both despises and depends on?

The film's rank incompetence, coupled with a laziness so brazen that it borders on contempt, left me almost too numb to formulate words, let alone a coherent analysis of every wreck in this four-lane pileup.

Allen stars as Val Waxman, a once-legendary director who has been reduced to shooting deodorant commercials in Canada. Val gets one last chance for a comeback on a big-budget studio picture, thanks to the producing efforts of his ex-wife Ellie (Téa Leoni). It seems at first that the only catch will be working under Ellie's new fiancé--a ruthless studio executive played without any discernable personality by Treat Williams. Alas, only a couple of days before production, Val goes blind.

It's purely psychosomatic--a hypochondriac reaction to stress that functions intermittently as clumsy metaphor. Val's agent (Mark Rydell, awful) convinces him that he can't afford to pass up what could be his last big picture, so naturally Val has no choice but to go ahead and direct the movie blind.

Right away you can tell something's gone horribly wrong in Woody-ville, with all the characters shouting gigantic passages of repetitive exposition on top of one another and amateurishly fumbling with their lines. (I swear I caught a bit player glancing at a cue card.)

As is Allen's recent custom, scenes are shot entirely in single long takes, leaving no cutaway opportunities to rescue his actors from the awkward pauses that suffocate any laughter and grind the pacing to a halt.

It's also a grotesquely ugly picture, awash in harsh overhead lighting that makes the performers look like death warmed over. Naturally, this does little to dispel the ick factor inherent in the 66-year-old Allen's painful penchant for casting love interests half his age. (I spent the first portion of the movie assuming that Will & Grace's Debra Messing was playing Val's daughter, only to stifle a groan upon realizing she was his girlfriend. I bet Woody gets that a lot.)

Most devastating is that even after sitting through the whole damned thing, I still can't tell you what Hollywood Ending is supposed to be about. Is Allen ragging on a bureaucratic system so full of yes-men and sycophants that it would indeed be possible for a blind man to get away with directing a picture? Maybe, but his rare slapstick moments play like such bored afterthoughts, and the actual shooting of Val's picture is so uneventful that any satire hardly registers.

Meanwhile, crucial characters are left underdeveloped to the point of anonymity. Is Treat Williams' exec a cold-hearted villain or a deep-down decent guy? And what exactly are we to make of Val's long-lost son, who appears from so far out of nowhere in the middle of the third act that his character should have been named Deus Ex Machina?

Woody never bothers to show us any of the footage from Val's movie, though he often dwells upon the horrified reactions of executives in the screening room. Is this yet another ripe comic possibility ignored by Allen's apathy?

Perhaps he worried that a film directed by a blind man would appear more professional than the picture we'd just been watching.