Rom-com with a high IQ

I've been falling out of love with Woody Allen for a long time. As the son of a New York Jewish mother, growing up in north London in the Sixties and Seventies, for me Allen’s humour pieces for the New Yorker, his nightclub routines and his early films represented the very acme of sophistication and wit from across the pond.

Here was a cosmopolitanism and brio that scintillated against the dull

insipidity of the domestic scene. I’d go further: the widespread acceptance here of Allen and his work — which I date precisely to the release of Annie Hall (1977) — was a key part of London itself becoming a quickfire, wiseacre metropolis.

But the cinematic vision of Annie Hall and Manhattan (1979) was never really capitalised on. On the one hand, Allen tried to get serious and ape his directorial hero, Ingmar Bergman (Interiors, 1978); on the other, he dissipated himself on pedestrian outing after pedestrian outing, in which his status as the world’s most famous shlemiel became increasingly self-parodic.

Yes, there were well-crafted movies (Hannah and Her Sisters, 1986) and those which essayed a darker moral hue (Crimes and Misdemeanours, 1989), while Allen became a virtuoso at handling ensemble casts, but ultimately it was all a little vapid. Even when he wasn’t working with the same editors and cinematographers — which usually he was — Allen’s films acquired the feel of predictable, well-mannered chamber pieces: the same shots of Manhattan, the same kvetching couples, the same jazz soundtracks.

People liked Radio Days (1987), but I thought it mere whimsy; they lauded
Deconstructing Harry (1997), but I found it frankly embarrassing, with its speed-comedown jump cuts and sub-Phillip Roth profundity. In between these two there was a lot of celluloid infill.

Actually, if I’m honest, it wasn’t the editing or the script that bothered me
with Deconstructing Harry, it was Allen himself. The spectacle of a 62-year-old man still casting himself as the sexual focus of a film was distinctly icky, especially given that he was never much to salivate over in the first place.

When my mother began to fall out of love with him as well, she was prone to saying: "He only makes these movies so he can get to screw blonde shiksas; how lse would a little Jewish guy manage it?" The grain of truth in this was then
unpleasantly cultured in the public mind by the abuse accusations following the break up Allen’s marriage to Mia Farrow. Allen had suffered the fate of is private life toppling over into his work, but he seemed lacking in the artistry needed to wring significance out of it.

Finally, with Anything Else, Allen has demoted himself from romantic lead to a supporting role. So radical a transformation does this wreak, that this is the first Allen film that I’ve truly enjoyed in 15 years. Of course, Allen can’t quite let go of the idea that he might be the one shtupping the pretty young girl; so to do the job he has written a Woody petit-fils, in the form of one Jerry Falk (Jason Biggs, struggling free from the gloop of American Pie), a
21-year-old comedy writer trapped in a doomed love affair with Amanda (Christina Ricci).

Amanda is a wild-child wannabe actress who acts up quite as much as she acts out. It was love at first sight between her and Jerry, but a year into the relationship they have stalled, and she has panic attacks whenever he tries to have sex with her.

At a meeting with a comedian organised by his mad loser of an agent, Harvey (the sublime Danny DeVito), Jerry meets David Dobel (Allen), a teacher who wants to break into the writing business. Dobel is an edgy, paranoiac Jewish survivalist, whose shtick is a combination of sesquipedalian erudition — at one point he tells Jerry not to "tergiversate" — and pithy oneliners: "Your analyst, like God, he never speaks, and, like God, because he’s dead."