Woody Allen's movies have always been saturated with references to other movies and with self-referential commentary on the artistic process, but 'Hollywood Ending' is his first thoroughgoing 'movie movie.' From its credit sequence, accompanied by '30s tunes like 'Hooray for Hollywood' and 'Goin' Hollywood,' to its not quite Hollywood ending, 'Hollywood Ending' is Allen's most complete skewering of the American movie-making business and his own place therein.
Probably the film's weakest element is Allen's own acting, always limited to a few comic tics, but lately reduced to non-stop spastic arm movements and a stammering speech that borders on post-stroke aphasia. His self-casting in comic romantic lead roles, once a charming anti- type element of his persona, has become increasingly grotesque as the age of his leading ladies - in art as in life - has descended from his own ballpark to half and now a third of that. Nevertheless, in 'Hollywood Ending,' Allen is so perfectly cast as has-been 'auteur' Val Waxman these weaknesses are easy to overlook.
In most respects, 'Hollywood Ending' is very smoothly structured. For instance, the film's crosscut opening scenes economically set up both the film-making plot and its love triangle. Val's former wife Ellie (Tea Leonie) lobbies her new love interest Hal Jaeger, the head honcho at Galaxy Pictures (Treat Williams), to hire Val to direct a new studio 'property' set in New York. Prompted by her own ambition, a little guilt, and what turns out to be a lingering soft spot for Val, Ellie fends off objections that Val is a demanding, budget-overrunning 'artiste' with the argument that he's perfect for the movie because (like Allen himself) 'the streets of New York are in his marrow.' She also counters the claim that 'Val's a raving, incompetent, psychotic' with the first of many familiar Allen backhanded quips: 'He is NOT incompetent!' Meanwhile, we cut to Val, now reduced to doing a deodorant commercial in a driving Canadian blizzard. On the phone to his live-in would be starlet girlfriend (Debra Messing) he kvetches in perfect Allen pitch: 'I've got two Oscars. Up here you don't need Oscars. You need Antlers.'
After Val returns to New York, his smarmy agent (charmingly played by Mark Rydell) convinces him to meet with Hal and Ellie despite Val's contempt for the first ('he's a Philistine') and betrayed anger at the other ('she's a Quisling). Val's approach-avoidance conflict is expressed in a witty variation of Allen's favorite Groucho Marx joke: 'I'd kill for this job, but the people I want to kill are the ones offering me the job.' Val eventually does 'take a meeting' with the studio people, including Hal, Ellie, and a wisecracking associate producer (George Hamilton). Through Val's hapless participation in discussions about the film's box office potential and 'demographics,' Allen manages some telling satiric jabs at Hollywood commercialism. 'Hal,' Ellie tells Val in a follow-up private meeting, 'has made some very financially successful American films.' To which Val responds: 'That should tell you all you need to know about him. He's the white line down the middle of the road.'
Along with sardonic comments on the movie industry, Allen mixes in much of his familiar shtick like hypochondria jokes (Ellie blames their marriage breakup on Val's fears of such imaginary illnesses as black plague, allergy to oxygen, and elm blight), invidious California New York comparisons (California is the land of power failures, herbalist gurus, and routine skin cancer removals), masturbation endorsements ('the best part is afterward, the cuddling time'), and illusion-breaking asides ('Follow the story,' Val admonishes a restaurant patron who can't answer his plot questions ). Many of these one-liners and routines, along with other situational materials in 'Hollywood Ending,' resonate with deliberate (at least one hopes deliberate) recycling from great Allen films like 'Annie Hall,' 'Manhattan,' and 'Crimes and Misdemeanors.'
'Hollywood Ending's' second act consists of the preproduction and production of 'The City that Never Sleeps,' apparently intended as a dumbed-down remake of a gritty '40s urban drama. Val's first step is to hire a Chinese cameraman who knows no English and a business grad student translator who becomes his on-the-set conspirator after the psychosomatic blindness sets in. The translator eventually becomes a bit of a film critic a la the hit man in 'Bullets Over Broadway.' The location-scouting scenes with a gay art director who decides he simply must rebuild Times Square, Harlem, Central Park, and the Empire State Building are among the film's funniest, leading finally to the shooting sequences, Val's hysterical (in both senses) blindness, and a series of physical humor and cross purposes gags that owe as much to Abbott and Costello as to any of Allen's American comic film predecessors.
When, as the result of a weak plot device involving his strange/estranged son, Val recovers his sight and gets to see the footage he has created, his two word response is a side-splitter: 'Call Dr. Kevorkian!' Ironically, however, Val's blindness has transformed a commercial potboiler into an avant garde, Godardish anti-film that bombs in the U.S. but is a triumph in France. Like much of Allen's own work since 'Annie Hall,' Val Waxman's 'The City That Never Sleeps' is much too artsy-foreign for American audience tastes, but as he exclaims: 'Thank God the French exist. . . . Here I'm a bum, there I'm a genius.' In 'Hollywood Ending's' Hollywood ending, Val and the reconciled Ellie are off to Paris to live and film a love story - that is, if they haven't forgotten the Dramamine.
Although 'Hollywood Ending' does not compare favorably with Robert Altman's 'The Player' when it comes to Hollywood-bashing nor with Allen's more ambitious films of the last decade like 'Husbands and Wives' and 'Deconstructing Harry' in terms of artistic success, it has a sharply written, witty script and far more hits than misses among its (no)sight gags. On its most satisfying level, the film is a movable feast of in-joke bonbons for long-time Allen fans.
Probably the film's weakest element is Allen's own acting, always limited to a few comic tics, but lately reduced to non-stop spastic arm movements and a stammering speech that borders on post-stroke aphasia. His self-casting in comic romantic lead roles, once a charming anti- type element of his persona, has become increasingly grotesque as the age of his leading ladies - in art as in life - has descended from his own ballpark to half and now a third of that. Nevertheless, in 'Hollywood Ending,' Allen is so perfectly cast as has-been 'auteur' Val Waxman these weaknesses are easy to overlook.
In most respects, 'Hollywood Ending' is very smoothly structured. For instance, the film's crosscut opening scenes economically set up both the film-making plot and its love triangle. Val's former wife Ellie (Tea Leonie) lobbies her new love interest Hal Jaeger, the head honcho at Galaxy Pictures (Treat Williams), to hire Val to direct a new studio 'property' set in New York. Prompted by her own ambition, a little guilt, and what turns out to be a lingering soft spot for Val, Ellie fends off objections that Val is a demanding, budget-overrunning 'artiste' with the argument that he's perfect for the movie because (like Allen himself) 'the streets of New York are in his marrow.' She also counters the claim that 'Val's a raving, incompetent, psychotic' with the first of many familiar Allen backhanded quips: 'He is NOT incompetent!' Meanwhile, we cut to Val, now reduced to doing a deodorant commercial in a driving Canadian blizzard. On the phone to his live-in would be starlet girlfriend (Debra Messing) he kvetches in perfect Allen pitch: 'I've got two Oscars. Up here you don't need Oscars. You need Antlers.'
After Val returns to New York, his smarmy agent (charmingly played by Mark Rydell) convinces him to meet with Hal and Ellie despite Val's contempt for the first ('he's a Philistine') and betrayed anger at the other ('she's a Quisling). Val's approach-avoidance conflict is expressed in a witty variation of Allen's favorite Groucho Marx joke: 'I'd kill for this job, but the people I want to kill are the ones offering me the job.' Val eventually does 'take a meeting' with the studio people, including Hal, Ellie, and a wisecracking associate producer (George Hamilton). Through Val's hapless participation in discussions about the film's box office potential and 'demographics,' Allen manages some telling satiric jabs at Hollywood commercialism. 'Hal,' Ellie tells Val in a follow-up private meeting, 'has made some very financially successful American films.' To which Val responds: 'That should tell you all you need to know about him. He's the white line down the middle of the road.'
Along with sardonic comments on the movie industry, Allen mixes in much of his familiar shtick like hypochondria jokes (Ellie blames their marriage breakup on Val's fears of such imaginary illnesses as black plague, allergy to oxygen, and elm blight), invidious California New York comparisons (California is the land of power failures, herbalist gurus, and routine skin cancer removals), masturbation endorsements ('the best part is afterward, the cuddling time'), and illusion-breaking asides ('Follow the story,' Val admonishes a restaurant patron who can't answer his plot questions ). Many of these one-liners and routines, along with other situational materials in 'Hollywood Ending,' resonate with deliberate (at least one hopes deliberate) recycling from great Allen films like 'Annie Hall,' 'Manhattan,' and 'Crimes and Misdemeanors.'
'Hollywood Ending's' second act consists of the preproduction and production of 'The City that Never Sleeps,' apparently intended as a dumbed-down remake of a gritty '40s urban drama. Val's first step is to hire a Chinese cameraman who knows no English and a business grad student translator who becomes his on-the-set conspirator after the psychosomatic blindness sets in. The translator eventually becomes a bit of a film critic a la the hit man in 'Bullets Over Broadway.' The location-scouting scenes with a gay art director who decides he simply must rebuild Times Square, Harlem, Central Park, and the Empire State Building are among the film's funniest, leading finally to the shooting sequences, Val's hysterical (in both senses) blindness, and a series of physical humor and cross purposes gags that owe as much to Abbott and Costello as to any of Allen's American comic film predecessors.
When, as the result of a weak plot device involving his strange/estranged son, Val recovers his sight and gets to see the footage he has created, his two word response is a side-splitter: 'Call Dr. Kevorkian!' Ironically, however, Val's blindness has transformed a commercial potboiler into an avant garde, Godardish anti-film that bombs in the U.S. but is a triumph in France. Like much of Allen's own work since 'Annie Hall,' Val Waxman's 'The City That Never Sleeps' is much too artsy-foreign for American audience tastes, but as he exclaims: 'Thank God the French exist. . . . Here I'm a bum, there I'm a genius.' In 'Hollywood Ending's' Hollywood ending, Val and the reconciled Ellie are off to Paris to live and film a love story - that is, if they haven't forgotten the Dramamine.
Although 'Hollywood Ending' does not compare favorably with Robert Altman's 'The Player' when it comes to Hollywood-bashing nor with Allen's more ambitious films of the last decade like 'Husbands and Wives' and 'Deconstructing Harry' in terms of artistic success, it has a sharply written, witty script and far more hits than misses among its (no)sight gags. On its most satisfying level, the film is a movable feast of in-joke bonbons for long-time Allen fans.