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"I was always an exceptionally fine athlete, always the first chosen in any schoolyard game," insists Woody Allen. "I was popular in school. Always very successful. And so I never had any feelings of great schlemielism." It's his slight build and thick black-rimmed glasses that have betrayed him, he says, before applying this remarkable label to himself: "If there's such a thing as Joe Six-Pack, that's me. When I get home from work tonight, I'm not going to snap open Dostoyevsky. I'm going to get out a beer and watch the Yankees."
This, from a man who puts Schopenhauer No. 1 on his list of funniest German philosophers. This, from a man who can put Schopenhauer on any list.
Allen, 72, is undoubtedly a victim of his own success. He became famous playing roles like the abused product tester (abused by the products!) with the schlemielesque name Fielding Mellish in Bananas, who, when summoned by a South American dictator, arrives with a box of Danish (because you never go empty-handed to someone's home). And in Take the Money and Run, he portrayed an inept bank robber who has trouble convincing the tellers he's serious, which might have lent some oomph to that perception too.
Though he may be a beer-swilling Yankees fan, the fact is, Allen has never been just the guy next door. And his earliest recollections in comedy bear that out.
It was the mid '50s and the 20-year-old Allen had found the Holy Grail of humor-writing for Sid Caesar's Caesar's Hour. He'd be working alongside future legends Mel Brooks, Neil Simon, and Larry Gelbart. Although the writers were, to a man, mensches (Brooks, he says, was particularly "lovely to work with"), the crazed Caesar was intimidating.
One day Caesar summoned Allen and Gelbart to his house to work on a script. There Caesar and Gelbart decided to indulge in a steam bath. Not Allen.
"I wouldn't take my clothes off. I just didn't feel right doing it," he says, horrified at the thought of appearing naked in front of his boss. "And you know, they thought I was the oddball. I mean, the two of them peel off their clothes at the drop of a hat and get into a steam bath, and I'm the oddball." He was sounding downright schlemielly before further explaining, "I was not a cigar-smoking one-of-the-guys getting into steam baths. I was, you know, more fragile."
What Allen is, is complex. Don't file him under Nut and leave it at that; otherwise you'll miss out on the tangled genius that marks his work. He's one of the few filmmakers capable of delivering hysterical one-liners ("I don't want to achieve immortality through my work; I want to achieve immortality through not dying"), followed by a brilliant sight gag or a bit of inspired slapstick. He's the equivalent of the Beatles, trading ballads with hard rock.
Allen used this complexity to launch an incredibly successful film career -- on his own terms. Early on, he decided he would make the sort of movies he loved growing up. "When I was a kid," he says, "I enjoyed sophisticated comedy, movies with Champagne corks popping and people dressing for dinner and talking on white telephones and making witty conversation. Or the Marx Brothers or W. C. Fields -- you know, kind of a very high level of comedy."
Of course, he added some decidedly Woody Allen modifications to his flicks. Instead of a William Powell or a Myrna Loy, you'll meet characters who are "bright Upper East Side New Yorkers," he says, "who are in psychoanalysis and have difficulty with their interpersonal relationships."
Difficult relationships are at the heart of Allen's latest offering, Vicky Cristina Barcelona, due out this month. But he also uses the film to examine another chief obsession of his: just how unfair life can be. At one point, an artist says of his father, a poet who refuses to publish his work, "He affirms life in spite of everything."
"I am, unfortunately, not like that character. I'm like the squire in Bergman's The Seventh Seal," says Allen, of a servant who follows his knight to his death. "I go at the end, but under protest.
"Moral dilemmas are the same now as they were in the beginning of time. People are predatory and competitive," he says matter-of-factly. "The issues today may be global warming and Darfur, but it's the same thing. We still don't like each other. I always felt if the bigots got their way and they eliminated all the blacks and all the Jews, then they would turn on the next group of people and the next group. Finally, when there were just two people left on earth, the right-hander would turn on the left-hander."
Of course, the obvious question when discussing moral dilemmas with Woody Allen would be to raise his own, particularly the Woody-Mia-Soon-Yi fiasco. For those of you living in a monastery in the '90s, Soon-Yi was Mia Farrow's adopted daughter. Woody was Mia's beau. It got ugly quickly after the 56-year-old Woody lit out with the 21-year-old Soon-Yi. The two have been married for 11 years and have two children.
I don't ask about it, though. It's lousy journalism, I know. But the topic has been played to death. And besides, I like the guy. He's as pleasant as can be, and his telltale New Yawkese has put me at ease. Besides, like most fans, even if I don't condone what he did, I can relate to his neurosis and his defiant "I'm no schlemiel" stance.
So instead I ask the only question that pops to mind: "Why are you so depressing?" "I don't know. Maybe it's chemical," he says. "My mother said when I turned five, I turned gloomy."
How gloomy? One of his least favorite movies is the Frank Capra life-affirming tearjerker, It's a Wonderful Life.
"I think it's dopey," he says.
The movie, of course, is a shot of curare to a life-stinks kind of guy like Woody Allen. "So how would you remake it so it's not dopey?"
"I'd make it," he says, "where the guardian angel saves Jimmy Stewart's life on the bridge and Jimmy Stewart decides to become a serial killer."
"Why don't you just find God?" I ask Allen. "Wouldn't it make your life easier?" Allen is a nonbeliever. He famously summed up his position this way: "To you, I'm an atheist; to God, I'm the loyal opposition."
"If you actually have faith, if you believe that there's more to life in a positive sense, then of course it's a wonderful, wonderful thing," he says.
But …
"I can't bring myself to do it. If I'm sitting next to a guy and he has true belief, I look at him and think, Poor thing, you really are deluded. But," he concedes, "his life is much better than mine."
What keeps Woody Allen from going over the brink is his work, one reason he's been averaging a film a year over the past decade. And now he's off on a new adventure: directing a Puccini comedy for the Los Angeles Opera later this month.
"I got badgered into it," he whines. "I'm sure it will be a disaster. I mean, I would rather coach the New York Knicks than direct the opera. I've never done either, but I think I could do a better job coaching the Knicks."
The problem, he assures me, will not be with the singers. "They'll be great. The problem will be that I'll have them bumping into each other."
In the meantime, Allen is working on two new films, one that he's editing and one that he's writing. And the schlemiel/depressive/comic genius … whatever … sounds genuinely happy. His work relaxes him, he says. "It's like therapy for an inpatient in an institution."
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