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-- Marcus Aurelius AD121-AD180 Roman Emperor
n his last movie, "Hollywood Ending," Woody Allen played a film director who had gone blind. Not a bad joke, except that it seemed to represent a case of what psychoanalysts might call displacement. Mr. Allen's recent movies, after all, look just fine, full of the usual gorgeous Manhattan light (courtesy of cinematographers like Zhao Fei) and warm, well-appointed interiors (thanks to the efforts of Mr. Allen's longtime production designer, Santo Loquasto). No, the problem with "Hollywood Ending," as with "Small Time Crooks" and especially "The Curse of the Jade Scorpion," was that the screenwriter (Mr. Allen, of course) was going deaf. His ear for the idioms of New York speech had faltered gravely, and the timing and concision of his jokes seemed terminally off.
While he may not be altogether cured, Mr. Allen is at least convalescing. "Anything Else," his tart new antiromantic comedy, which opens today nationwide, is small-scale and loose. It feels oddly long for a Woody Allen picture, but its relaxed, casual air gives the humor room to breathe, and a gratifyingly high proportion of the piled-up one-liners actually raise a laugh. "Funny is money," says Danny DeVito, who plays a desperate talent manager with a questionable talent for management, and "Anything Else," while no great bargain, is funny enough that your own dollars will not be wasted.
It helps that Mr. Allen, whom I am alarmed to find looking more like my late grandfather every time I see him, has declined to cast himself as the romantic lead. That role, also known as the Woody Allen surrogate, belongs to Jason Biggs, the amiable star of the recently consummated "American Pie" trilogy and other young adult entertainments like "Loser" and "Saving Silverman." Mr. Biggs plays Jerry Falk, a young comedy writer with the expected array of problems: an uncommunicative therapist (William Hill), the aforementioned manager and, above all, a spectacularly difficult girlfriend, Amanda, played with feral, neurotic glee by Christina Ricci.
On paper, Amanda — dishonest, unfaithful, manipulative, undermining and so on — might look like the figment of a sour, misogynistic imagination. But Ms. Ricci, backed up by Stockard Channing, who plays Amanda's wayward mother, turns her into a full-blooded comic monster. You can see why Jerry is so helplessly smitten with her, and not only when she stalks around their apartment in her underwear. Her reckless spontaneity and crazy emotional rhythms knock him out of his rut of responsibility and make him feel reassuringly sane.
The two of them also, less convincingly, share certain cultural passions and opinions; their riffs on Billie Holiday and Dostoyevsky sound spliced in from an old print of "Manhattan." But at least Mr. Allen has found the wit to portray younger New Yorkers with something other than contemptuous indifference.
In any case, as so often happens, Jerry and Amanda's relationship has gone terribly awry; it's not so much a dead shark, to steal a line from "Annie Hall," Mr. Allen's greatest breakup comedy, as one intent on devouring everything in its path. But poor Jerry is stuck: his defining neurosis is an inability to cut the ties that bind and gag him, which is why he needs an alter ego of his own, a father confessor and mentor to guide him toward a mature, responsible and fulfilling life.
Which sounds like a job for . . . Woody Allen? The director yammers and flails onto the screen in the role of David Dobel, an older comedy writer who takes Jerry under his skinny, perpetually flapping wing. The wonderful thing about Dobel is that he is both an extension of earlier characters Mr. Allen has played and a rebuke to much of what they stood for. "Do you know anything about psychoanalysis?" Jerry earnestly asks him, and the line gets an immediate laugh. Who does he think he's talking to? But it turns out that Dobel has no use for Freud, preferring the wisdom of Henny Youngman and other traditional Jewish sages.
Dobel works as a schoolteacher and favors big words like hebetudinous and tergiversation, but one of his defining traits is a gruff, finger-in-the-chest anti-intellectualism. Another is raging paranoia, most of it focused on the omnipresent specter of anti-Semitism. But whereas earlier characters might have expressed this state of mind through cringing and self-pity, Dobel, though nuts, is also tough minded, pragmatic and vengeful. He persuades Jerry to buy a gun, and — in a scene Woody Allen fans have been waiting 30 years to savor, whether we knew it or not — takes a crowbar to the car of a pair of enormous bullies who have stolen his parking space.
Though Manhattan (shot this time by Darius Khondji) is as lovely, and as loved, as ever — especially Central Park, which gives off an easy glow of enchantment in the background — "Anything Else" views the city as a land of traps and snares. Dobel, intervening on his young friend's behalf, nudges Jerry toward a future in Los Angeles, where a nice television job is waiting. In "Annie Hall," of course, California was a New York writer's worst nightmare, a land of endless vacuousness, without the friction and frenzy that make life interesting. (In "Hollywood Ending" it was the land of smooth talk and big money.)
This time, though, the golden West hovers as an attractive alternative, an escape from the enervating habits and connections that already, in his early 20's, threaten Jerry's sense of balance. The moral of this odd, diverting fable may not be all that shocking, unless of course, you consider the source. What solutions does Mr. Allen, in his aging wisdom, offer his young hero? Dump your girlfriend, fire your agent, buy a gun and — perhaps above all — terminate your analysis. Done.
"Anything Else" is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). It has many sexual references and a few sex scenes — none of them, thank goodness, featuring the director.
ANYTHING ELSE
Written and directed by Woody Allen; director of photography, Darius Khondji; edited by Alisa Lepselter; production designer, Santo Loquasto; produced by Letty Aronson; released by DreamWorks Pictures. Running time: 108 minutes. This film is rated R.
WITH: Woody Allen (David Dobel), Jason Biggs (Jerry Falk), Christina Ricci (Amanda), Stockard Channing (Paula), Danny DeVito (Harvey), Jimmy Fallon (Bob), William Hill (Psychiatrist).
