4 out of 7
Reviewing a Woody Allen film is one of the most intimidating projects a film critic can take on. It isn’t that he’s particularly vengeful to those who write negative reviews, but rather that any critic had better be as well read as this writer/director…and that is quite the feat.
As such, I will proclaim now that Allen is far more educated than I, but in the wonderful world of opinion, this must only limit me, not stop me.
Bullets Over Broadway (1994), a period piece that combines genres, is a story of a writer, David Shayne (John Cusack), who desperately wants his third play to receive the success and credit he feels his previous works warranted, but never got. To achieve this end, he must cast a mob boss’s girlfriend, Olive Neal (Jennifer Tilly), in a minor part, regardless of her lack of acting ability. He then suffers from a sort of artistic-integrity breakdown as he tries to negotiate between the many forces pushing on his art. Ultimately, after Neal’s bodyguard, Cheech (Chazz Palminteri), has re-written his entire play and then, because he cannot stand to see Neal destroy his work, kills her, Shayne breaks down under the pressure.
Of course, in true Woody Allen fashion, the story is one that is meant to disclose some sort of philosophic question. In this case, the question is: Which is more important, art or human life? The debate begins in a Greenwich Village debate about which is worth saving more, the only copy of a Shakespearian play or a no-name person. Shayne takes the artist’s answer of the play, only to later have that resolve tested by Neal’s death, which is done because she is destroying the art of his/Cheech’s play.
The movie ends after Shayne avoids the limelight finally due to him after a rave opening night in New York to rekindle his relationship with his girlfriend, who left him after he started to have an affair with one of his actresses. Not out of place, this also answers the above question, as Shayne chooses the woman who loves him, over the woman who inspires him as an artist.
The only real problem with this story is that Shayne, for all his mention in this review, is not the main character…or at least, not the most interesting. The most interesting is Cheech, this mobster-turned artist, who, upon discovering that he can tell a story in a very human voice, begins to value his art above all else. So, while the film may appear to support a life-over-art argument, Cheech, who eventually dies for murdering his mob boss’s girlfriend, proves that art is worth more than life. Indeed, his final words to Shayne are a new ending to the play, demonstrating his whole-hearted love for art, even over his own life.
The film gets such a low review, then, because it tells a fine story, but in doing so, opens a question that it does not then answer. Of course, one could say that this is the paradox of life/art and that Woody Allen is smart enough to avoid making a concrete answer, but such a stance then forces Allen’s work into a very post-modern reading, which does not seem to be what the author, nor the work, want at all. Therefore, if this isn’t a piece of post-modern work (and it isn’t good enough to say that merely asking the question is what is important, for it is hardly the first work to engage such a query), then we are only left to think that Woody Allen did not achieve with the film what the film should have achieved. As such, it is only a sub-par film.
From a story-teller’s point-of-view, all of Woody Allen’s work is great. He can tell an interesting story with interesting characters (often himself as the most interesting) and he can make you laugh and maybe a little smarter in the process. But, when one tries to use story telling for philosophical reasons, the answer either must be clear (which means being comfortable with being didactic) or the piece suffers.
