A biography of Woody Allen for the rest of us, not enemies or superfans

It is certainly possible not to have an opinion about Woody Allen at this time, but would take some work. Did she beamed her adopted daughter, Dylan (as she says), or her former partner, Mia Farrow, coach Dylan to stain Allen? Are you really well to cut (and eventually marry the teenager whom your partner (Farrow Again) already adopted who attended the sweet party? Or is it just a preparation for textbooks?

The exhaustive biography of Patrick McGilligan “Woody Allen: a parody of a mockery of a farce” addresses such questions, although it would be an exaggeration to say that weighs in them. To the extent that it does, place a thumb on the scale in favor of the subject to which he dedicates about 848 pages.

McGilligan writes that Allen's issue with Soon-Yi Previn “lifted Puritan eyebrows”, as if anyone who opposed that behavior was stuck in an obsolete bourgeois routine. Treat Allen's 70's appointments with teenagers as a sign of the times. (The author also gets dizzy phrases as “The Woke Generation” in a way that suggests that he would like him to leave his grass). He spends a lot of time writing about how long Farrow mounted the son he had with Allen, Satchel Ronan O'Sullivan Farrow (which would grow to be a spokesman for Dylan and Farrow and a leading journalist of the #MeToo movement). In such moments, the book becomes quite strange, although its general dissection of the Allen/Farrow family immensely dysfunctional is finely detailed and deeply sad.

Once you overcome the sordid things, if you can overcome it enough to collect the book in the first place, you will find a committed, attractive and tireless story of Allen's life and career, a writer who has few classmates in the business of The biography of cinema. McGilligan, whose previous subjects include Alfred Hitchcock and Nicholas Ray, is a professional biographer, a excavator of documents that knows how to use an artist's life to reflect on his body of work, and vice versa. He writes with authority and ingenuity in the most outstanding aspects of Allen's career (“Annie Hall”, “Hannah and her sisters”, “Minor crimes and crimes), and has blessed blessings in later three trifes such as” small time crooks “,” Hollywood final “and” The curse of the Jade Scorpion “, which, among others, made it clear that a new Woody Allen movie could be a reason for as much disappointment as emotion.

McGilligan is particularly strong at the beginning of Allen's show, or, as he writes, his “crucial development of a neophyte television writer to a Knock-Kneed foot comic with a crazy neurotic personality.” His ascent was really remarkable. Allen began sending Gags to newspaper columnists as a high school student, he used that job to enter the television writing business, he collected mentors, including Neil Simon's older brother, Danny, and finally met the two men who, slowly , they would throw it into stardom. . Jack Rollins and Charles H. Joffe saw a comedian in Allen long before Allen himself; As his personal managers pushed him to the service in the New York comedy clubs.

Initially, he staggered, with no idea in matters of connecting with the public and maintaining a performance, but found his balance as a type of digresive, less topical and self -critical mort. Although even Allen admits that his brand of intellectualism is quite superficial, he never had much use or interest in the university, he developed the Allen personality that we would know, an anguished, terrified fog, terrified by the inevitability of death, quickly to fall. A reference to Sartre or Joyce in a comic context.

It is not surprising, given his cinema in good faith, McGilligan manages the development of Allen as a filmmaker with an enthusiastic vision. Allen's collaboration is deepened with photography director Gordon Willis, called “The Prince of Darkness” due to his fans for deep shadow groups. Like Allen, Willis was a stranger from New York. McGilligan writes: “Both boasted of a tireless work ethic and stubbornly avoided any 'deceiving' during filming. Both despised cinematographic clichés. “His first collaboration, in Allen's masterpiece” Annie Hall “, was particularly fruitful. In the words of the star of the film, Diane Keaton, who won an Oscar (and began a fashion of casual fashion) For playing the main character of free spirit, Willis showed Allen how a master shot “could be used to offer the variety and impact a necessary audience without cutting the first planes.”

Willis worked in seven more films by Allen, but “Annie Hall” remains the most visually living and imaginative creation of the director. When both the director and the cinema won the Oscars, Allen stayed in New York, playing in the clarinet in Michael's Pub, instead of attending the ceremony.

Unlike “Woody Allen: A Biography” of 1991 by Eric Lax, which was celebrated, if not terribly inquisitive, McGilligan's book is not authorized. This means that McGilligan had no one and nothing to respond to himself and the truth. However, as we have learned, the truth about Woody Allen can be elusive, which was the case even before the fog that surrounds its various scandals descended. Not for nothing the variety called it “Mr. Reserved.” More impressive, then, that McGilligan was able to rebuild what he has here. This is not the demolition that Allen enemies could have wanted, but it is not hagiography either. It is, for the moment, the definitive study of a man and an artist on which it is still difficult to be neutral.

Chris Vognar is an independent culture writer.