What comes through most in “Woody Allen: A Documentary,” Robert Weide’s thoroughgoing two-part PBS profile of the nebbishy auteur, is that Allen, who has made such a career out of neuroses, phobias and other assorted worries, seems nearly unaffected by what anyone has ever said about him or his work.
That’s a shame, if only because so much has been said and written about Allen. Millions of words, thousands of column inches, entire film-theory dissertations, bestselling biographies; critical raves, pans and verbose analyses. Entire forests have fallen so that people could tell other people what they think of Woody Allen and what his movies have meant. (And still another forest fell in the tabloid chronicling of his scandalous breakup and custody battle with Mia Farrow in the 1990s.) None of it ever made much of a dent, according to the man himself.
Hank Stuever
Hank Stuever is The Washington Post’s TV critic and author of two books, “Tinsel” and “Off Ramp.”
“Woody Allen” does a nice job of surmounting all that has been said before and packaging it into a tidy, informative mini-epic. The film, part of the “American Masters” series, is helped immensely by the fact that Allen, who will turn 76 on Dec. 1, cooperated happily and at quite some length, granting Weide lots of access to his closest collaborators and his thought processes. He answers questions this time around about his work and life in ways that he’s been reluctant to do in the past. Even now, he is still far too humble. When he saw the finished print of his 1979 film “Manhattan,” one of his greatest, he recalls being so sickened that he offered United Artists an entirely new movie, free of charge, if they’d agree to shelve it.
At 195 minutes in length (split in two partsis exhaustive without being overwhelming., Sunday and Monday nights at 9 p.m. on most PBS stations), “Woody Allen” It’s not entirely clear why the time has come for what, in some moments, feels like a sunset homage — especially because Allen is still cranking out a film every year, is physically fit and had parents who lived to the ages of 96 and 100. His most recent film, “Midnight in Paris,” has become his biggest box-office hit. “My relationship with death remains the same,” Allen is seen telling a press conference at a film festival. “I am strongly against it.” There is no indication that he intends to slow down.
Nevertheless, the time has come to talk about methods, theories, inspiration, legacy. This includes opening the nightstand drawer in his master bedroom, where Allen keeps a disorganized pile of scraps of paper on which he has jotted stray ideas for movies. When it’s time to make another one (which is always), he returns to this drawer to scrounge around for a little more brilliance.
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“Woody Allen” begins with his unremarkable if slightly odd Brooklyn boyhood (he was born Allen Stewart Konigsberg); his utter failure as a student (“I hated school with a passion. . . . To this day I think of it as a curse,” he says, walking past P.S. 99); his early love for films at the neighborhood Jewel theater (immortalized in 1985’s “The Purple Rose of Cairo”), and how his childhood memories have inspired scenes or themes in some of his movies. The documentary then works forward chronologically with Allen’s earliest attempts at writing and performing stand-up comedy in Manhattan nightclubs and Upstate resort towns.
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