LGM Film Club, Part 495: Husbands and Wives

I’ve been occasionally revisiting Woody Allen’s best films after quite awhile off. I’ve long been on the record about not making my decisions about what art to enjoy based on the personal behavior of the artist and the recent discoveries of somewhere between creepy and horrible behavior from authors as varied as Cormac McCarthy, Alice Munro, and Neil Gaiman demonstrates why you have to do that if you are going to enjoy art and culture. It’s most certainly not that such behavior is required or should be allowed, but there sure as well was a huge generation of now aging people where super transgressive behavior was openly allowed and encouraged. Hell, even the radical queer feminist Shulamith Firestone called for open sexuality among children, So unless you just aren’t going to deal with anyone who came up in the 60s and 70s, you have to figure out how to manage those minefields.

So that leads me back to Woody Allen. Annie Hall is still completely brilliant. Zelig remains one of the most clever movies of all time. Manhattan may be creepy, but it’s an absolute killer film. And the fact that it was creepy when it came out and it remained creepy when he started dating Soon-Yi and everyone remained cool with it until a somewhat arbitrary later point says more about us than anything else, though he needed to be shut off from making films because they were increasingly terrible. So I decided to watch Husbands and Wives the other day. That…..does not hold up. At all. It’s really quite painful to watch at this point.

The problem here isn’t so much that none of the characters are likable, which is true. It’s that you are supposed to be sympathetic with Woody and Sydney Pollack and Liam Neeson and not with Judy Davis or Juliette Lewis or Mia Farrow. But everyone is unsympathetic. The only funny joke in the movie is when Woody is reading his student’s essay “Oral Sex in the Age of Deconstruction,” which is a good postmodernist joke from a very specific time. Then again, there aren’t that many jokes in the movie period. But the Davis character is written as an insane shrew bitch and the Farrow character is written as the ultimate passive-aggressive individual who manages to move between men getting everything she wants. And while I’d leave Woody Allen for Liam Neeson too, the whole movie just comes across as deeply painful, just a whole group of people I’d like to see drive off a bridge. Worse is drawing the young workout instructor Pollack dates (more absurd that Woody and Juliette Lewis and that’s a high bar) as a complete idiot who just talks about astrology and isn’t worth anyone’s time of day. It’s a movie that tries so hard to be sophisticated, but just comes across as annoying. Maybe it always did and I just wanted to see it differently.

There was a time I really liked this film. I do not like this film now. Doubt I will ever watch it again and certainly not for the next 5 years or so. Unless it was between this and the Trump speech. I would totally watch this again right now if that was the choice.