I Liked Their Earlier Funny Stuff Wood Allen
Books of The Times
Woody Allen'due south New Memoir Is Sometimes Funny — and Tone Deaf and Bland
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During the Cuban missile crisis, the writer Christopher Isherwood was surprised to find himself going to the gym. "If we are to exist fried live," he wrote in his diary, "it seems funny to be working out."
During the Covid-nineteen crisis, I'thousand surprised to find myself reviewing "Apropos of Cipher," the memoir from the 84-twelvemonth-former Woody Allen. Information technology's hardly the book I'd want to go out on.
Volunteering to review it, in our moral climate, is akin to volunteering for the 2021 Olympic javelin-catching team. I told my married woman and daughter my programme, and they stared at me as if I'd announced my intention to detect the nearest performance salad bar and lick the sneeze guard.
This isn't going to be a verdict piece on Allen's morality. There accept been a lot of verdict pieces. But so we're on the same page, I'll tell y'all where I stood before my editor emailed me a PDF of "Apropos of Nothing."
I believe Allen'due south sexual relationship with Soon-Yi Previn, the adopted daughter of his longtime partner Mia Farrow, which began when Previn was 21, was plainly the perverse act of a man whose brain salts are dangerously out of balance. He was nearly pushed out the door of American culture, only to sneak back in through a window. There's queasy-making prove of his sexual pursuit of other teenage girls. If these acts make you want to scrub his movies permanently from your Netflix queue, scrub.
The allegation that in 1992 he molested his adopted daughter, the 7-year-erstwhile Dylan Farrow, is a charge of another magnitude. I believe that the less yous've read about this case, the easier it is to return judgment on it.
I believe that Hachette, the publishing business firm that caused and and then canceled "Apropos of Nothing," behaved cravenly. I wish Nat Hentoff, the free speech absolutist whose columns in The Village Voice fabricated me desire to get into journalism in the starting time identify, were still around to write a 25,000-word essay about publishing writ large circa 2020 that would run under the sardonic title "Profiles in Backbone."
So impale me now or come forth, there'southward a book to talk about.
Here's Allen's offset sentence: "Like Holden, I don't feel like going into all that David Copperfield kind of crap, although in my case, a fiddling about my parents you may find more interesting than reading about me."
Anyone who'due south read Allen's previous books — "Without Feathers," "Side Effects," "Getting Fifty-fifty" — knows he has an accurate and easygoing voice on the folio. That'south true in "Concerning of Zilch," besides, at least for a while. Later this book begins to make the clicking audio cars exercise when the battery has expired.
Allen takes us from his childhood in Brooklyn (his male parent was a bookmaker who held a diverseness of menial jobs, his female parent worked for a bloom shop) through his early days submitting jokes to newspaper columnists. He was quick, funny, difficult to top. He was hired young equally a comedy writer for television set shows, including some of Sid Caesar's, before condign a stand-upward comic and beginning to directly movies. He had 2 early marriages, to Harlene Rosen and Louise Lasser.
There were ii surprises, for me, in this early material. Near memoirists exaggerate their sense of outsidership when young. Conversely, Allen writes that while you might presume he was a solitary nebbish in high school, he was in truth very popular and good at many sports, specially baseball.
The 2d surprise is how hard he pushes dorsum at the notion that he is whatsoever kind of intellectual. He presents lists of the authors he hasn't read, the movies he hasn't seen.
"I have no insights, no lofty thoughts, no understanding of most poems that practice non begin, 'Roses are reddish, violets are bluish,'" he writes. "What I practice take, however, is a pair of black-rimmed glasses, and I advise that it is these specs, combined with a flair for appropriating snippets from erudite sources too deep for me to grasp but which can be utilized in my piece of work to give the deceptive impression of knowing more than than I exercise that keeps this fairy tale afloat."
Like many of our fathers and grandfathers, Allen is a 20th-century man in a 21st-century world. His friends should take warned him that "Apropos of Nix" is incredibly, unbelievably tone deafened on the field of study of women.
This tone deafness starts earlier the book has even properly begun. On the dedication page, he writes, "For Shortly-Yi, the all-time. I had her eating out of my hand then I noticed my arm was missing." I had to rub my eyes with my freshly sanitized fingers and read that second sentence over again.
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About every time a woman is mentioned, in that location's a costless pronouncement on her looks. Early on, he chases "delectable bohemian little kumquats" in New York Urban center. While in London filming "Casino Royale" (1967), a James Bond spoof, he writes, "i could stroll on the Kings Road and pick up the most adorable birds in their miniskirts." Birds? I kept waiting for him to sail to Australia to scoop up a handbasket of "Sheilas."
The heavy breathing gets more than intense as the book moves on. Little pats of butter are deposited. Christina Ricci "was plenty desirable." Léa Seydoux "was a 10 plus." Rachel McAdams "looks like a million bucks from any angle." He tin can sound like our current president.
"When yous see her you have to fight your way through the pheromones," he writes nigh Scarlett Johansson, 19 when he first worked with her. "Not only was she gifted and beautiful, merely sexually she was radioactive." He manages to get Penélope Cruz into a movie with Johansson, which "caused each woman's erotic valence to cube itself."
It was Mia Farrow'due south looks, her "drop-dead punim," that blinded him to the fact that she was, in his view, mentally unstable, he writes. The Farrow, Soon-Yi and Dylan textile takes upwardly about a 3rd of this memoir, and entirely drains it of oxygen.
Allen writes near dysfunction in Farrow's own family unit. One of her brothers was a suicide; some other was imprisoned for child sex abuse. He suggests she visited dysfunction on her own children, adopted or otherwise.
"Mia enjoyed adopting, loved the excitement, like 1 buys a new toy," he writes. "She liked the saintly reputation, the admiring publicity, merely she didn't like raising the kids and didn't really look later them." He alleges some pretty horrific parental misbehavior and neglect on Farrow'southward office.
Farrow discovered Allen was sleeping with Soon-Yi after finding erotic Polaroids of her adopted girl in Allen's flat. "Of grade I understand her shock, her dismay, her rage, everything," he writes. "Information technology was the correct reaction." It'due south Allen's contention that, in her rage, Farrow decided to frame him for molestation.
He speaks nearly two investigations that did non lead to criminal charges. He says he passed a polygraph examination while Farrow refused to have i. About the notion that we should simply believe all women, he writes: "I hateful, tell it to the Scottsboro Boys."
At this book's nadir, he broaches the thought that Farrow may have slept with a land judge and a state attorney in guild to endeavour and influence their opinions during a custody battle. ("I find that hard to believe, merely I tend to exist naïve in such matters," he coyly writes.)
Together Allen and Farrow had a biological son, Satchel, who now goes by Ronan. "Despite her suggesting Satchel was Frank Sinatra's child, I recall he's mine," Allen writes, "though I'll never really know."
Allen suggests that Ronan was groomed by Farrow to despise him. He alleges that Farrow had Ronan undergo cosmetic surgery to add a few inches to his meridian, which required the breaking and rebreaking of his legs. He calls this "atrocity."
Ronan Farrow has of course grown up to get a journalist, a determined and righteous exposer of the evil that powerful men do. Allen writes that he would however like to have a human relationship with Ronan, but he cites instances of what he considers to be his son's hypocrisy. Nigh one such case, he writes: "Ronan Farrow always publicly urged women to speak out, but when Shortly-Yi did tell her story, he did non like what he heard."
There'southward a lot more in this book that there'south no room to talk about hither: Allen's relationship with Diane Keaton; details about the making of many of his films; tours with his jazz band; what it was like to know Mel Brooks and Pauline Kael and Norman Mailer and eat a lot of meals at Elaine'south. He remembers to thank many, many people who were generous to him over the years.
The final third of this volume falls apart dreadfully. It'southward a rolling of credits, a handing out of goody bags. Alan Alda is "a wonderfully gifted actor." Owen Wilson is "wonderful and a pleasure to direct." Goldie Hawn is "a major, major talent." Multiply these banalities by a hundred.
He's been married to Soon-Yi now for more xx years. They accept ii adopted daughters who are now higher-age. The upside of beingness a pariah, he writes, is that he doesn't have to blurb whatsoever more than books or sit down on any more panels.
He tin live with being reviled past many, he says, because he doesn't read the articles. He lives in a bubble. He's making a new movie.
Near the end of this sometimes highly-seasoned, occasionally funny, deplorable and somewhat tawdry book, he writes: "I'chiliad 84; my life is nearly half over. At my historic period, I'm playing with firm money. Not believing in a hereafter, I really can't see whatever practical difference if people think me every bit a film director or a pedophile or at all. All that I ask is my ashes exist scattered close to a pharmacy."
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Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/26/books/review-apropos-of-nothing-memoir-woody-allen.html
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