Dear Woody,
Recently, while interviewing you about your new novel, What’s with Baum?, I asked if you were proud of it. You said, “Oh, I never experience a sense of pride. When I’m finished with a movie or, in this case, a book, I always have a sense of: I don’t want to re-read it, I don’t want to see it again. I’ll just want to make changes, and I’m not going to be able to, and so I walk away and move on to the next project.”
I know what you mean. One look at your own work and all you see is what’s wrong with it, why you’re not Proust (who, by the way, didn’t think he was Proust, either). We need dissatisfaction to create. Billy Friedkin once told me that some filmmakers get too comfortable in life and work and move to Beverly Hills, if not literally then figuratively. They sit by the pool and drown—slowly.
Then there are those who make perpetual dissatisfaction into their own Beverly Hills. They call their pessimism “the real world,” but they are, like those who have gone up from the subway to the Rolls-Royce, missing half of this wonderful, terrible condition we call life. One of my (many) shrinks suggested that depression, too, could be a defense. Which depressed me, and I immediately felt better.
For decades, your work, above and beyond your peers in all areas of show business, presented this modern predicament, this inner war between joy and despair, so pleasurably and so honestly and across genres and media in continually reimagined ways that it was for me and millions of others what, in Manhattan, Tracy was to Isaac: God’s answer to Job.
“He would have pointed to you,” Isaac says, in a beautiful shot by Gordon Willis filmed in the most beautiful park in the world and underscored by the most beautiful Gershwin, “and said, ‘You know, I do a lot of terrible things, but I can still make one of these.’”
Not quite believing you weren’t proud of your (50) films, and also not wanting to, but also remembering that the original title of Annie Hall was “Anhedonia”—an inability to experience pleasure—I asked if anything, ever, had made you proud.
“Well, I’m proud of the way Soon-Yi has turned out, and our daughters have made both of us proud,” you said. “But practically every parent would say that. What’s made me proud is … I don’t know. I guess nothing has made me proud.
“I have a little pride in the fact that I’ve lasted a long time. I started when I was in my teens, and I’ve been in every medium: nightclubs, radio, television, music, Broadway, movies. I’ve done a huge amount of show business.”
That answer knocked the life out of me.
That anxious relationship with faith and meaning—the remote, wavering, ambivalent, but-we-need-the-eggs possibility of 51 percent goodness—made the likes of Annie Hall, Manhattan, Hannah and Her Sisters, and Crimes and Misdemeanors meaningful and alive. You didn’t just make great movies; you gave a kind of secular faith to your fellow late-20th-century neurotics. You made America a little bit Jewish.
Then, in the early 90s, there was a change. Coincident with your separation from Mia Farrow, the allegations of sexual abuse, the public excavation of your romantic relationship with Soon-Yi, your films burned with fresh hellfire. Though you have denied this being a period of humiliation and great suffering for you, I saw it: the possibility of a just and sporadically beautiful world was looking less likely on-screen.
The sparkling rages of Judy Davis in Husbands and Wives and Deconstructing Harry and Celebrity, Sean Penn in Sweet and Lowdown, and the porno milieu of Mighty Aphrodite seemed to me a crossroads in your life and work: either you were going to burn up in glory, the Avenging Phoenix of the East Seventies, or flame out.
Reading of your personal life in the press, we in the audience responded as children of divorce. Sides were taken. Sister turned against brother. Your public was sliced in half. For those looking to build a case against you, even the fictional relationship between 42-year-old Isaac and 17-year-old Tracy became corroborating evidence. But we who remained were drawn together by a cause. Formerly a community, we were now, in our urgency of purpose, a family.
Then, in 2005, there came another shift. Match Point was, on the level of craft, a crack shot. But looking back, I can’t help but see it as a harbinger of surrender, a pirouette over the abyss. The primacy of luck and death, the meaninglessness of human endeavor so valiantly faced and debated throughout your film career, had at last won out. And it showed. It showed on-screen in what came after.
And yet, I know from your own work that life is not just meaningless. I am thinking now of that big, strong, sweeping tracking shot toward the very end of Manhattan, one of the precious few energizing visual choices in your career (and I know Willis didn’t like to move the camera, so I bet it was your idea), when Isaac is running, yes, running down the street, to see Tracy once last time before she leaves New York, body and soul, for good.
“Not everybody gets corrupted,” she assures him. “You have to have a little faith in people.”
Well, after our last conversation, I want to tell you the same thing. And I know that many of your fans, your champions, feel the same way.
Remember the look Tracy gives Isaac in the last scene? There, we see that Tracy, the seemingly naïve shiksa, turns out to be more grown up than all of Manhattan. Then, Isaac’s reaction: he sees it, admires it, derides it, and freezes. Will he or won’t he have faith? As if to answer, we cut to the sublime wide-screen glory of the city’s skyline and a passionate swell of Gershwin—but are they endorsements of Tracy or Isaac?
I prefer to think they are, like all of your best work, both.
But what do I know? It was you, after all, who taught me everything.
With enduring admiration,
Sam
Sam Wasson is a Writer at Large at AIR MAIL and the author of several books about Hollywood, including The Path to Paradise: A Francis Ford Coppola Story, as well as a co-author of Hollywood: The Oral History
