The semi-canceled filmmaker goes meta in Rifkin’s Festival, which feels like his final feature.
The semi-canceled filmmaker goes meta in Rifkin’s Festival, which feels like his final feature.
T he way things are going for Woody Allen, Rifkin’s Festival may be his last film. He shot it three years ago after being ushered into the Phantom Zone of semi-cancellation and has announced nothing new since. Now the film is skulking into U.S. circulation with almost no publicity budget, in a few theaters plus video-on-demand: a humiliating possible last act for the most acclaimed screenwriter alive.
I’d love to be able to report that the film is good. It isn’t. But there are little glimmers of smart ideas in it, and I’m not just talking about the inspiration that went into what will stand forever as one of the greatest screen credits in cinema history:
Death . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Christoph Waltz
Rifkin’s Festival is Allen’s 48th feature-length film (What’s Up, Tiger Lily doesn’t count), and if it should prove to be his swan song, certain aspects of it are fitting. Like 1980s brilliant meta-work Stardust Memories, it concerns a fretful film professional (this time a critic/professor, not a director) looking back over his life at a film festival. So: The new movie is about old movies that inspired Allen, with a nod toward Allen’s own old movie reflecting on his own even older movies.
The titular figure, played by Wallace Shawn, is a joke that Allen is telling about himself. He’s a sardonic but likable oldster who exasperates everyone with his snobbish film taste: If it isn’t black and white with subtitles, he’s not interested. Several European art-house classics that Allen has described as among his ten favorite films of all time come in for spoofs, interspersed as Rifkin’s dreams and visions. Great idea! Except none of these parodies is especially funny. Allen’s idea of a gag about Citizen Kane (the one American film he lampoons) is that the hero is obsessed with a sled named Rose Bud . . . nick.
As an Allen fan, I was frantically trying to save the movie by reworking it in my head. Allen’s biggest and most obvious mistake is the casting. Visiting the San Sebastián film festival (where Rifkin’s Festival itself would later debut), Rifkin is drifting apart from his wife (Gina Gershon), a publicist for a hot new director (Louis Garrel) with whom Rifkin suspects she wants to have an affair. Allen seems completely blind to the concept of getting the ages of his actors right; what on earth could the statuesque Gershon be doing with the pigeonesque Shawn? He’s 78, she’s 59. On the flip side, why would Garrel (36, tall, dashing) be lusting after a woman 23 years his senior? The Garrels of the film world are helping themselves to all of the 26-year-old iterations of Gershon.
Moreover, a man of Shawn’s age is far too old to be trying to break into novel-writing, much less seeking to compete with Joyce and Dostoyevsky, so his fretting about his future as a novelist comes across as bizarre. Allen should have hired a 50-year-old actor to play the role, somebody who at least comes up past Gershon’s knees. There is zero tension in the supposed love triangle anyway, given that the two marrieds don’t much like each other, even before Rifkin goes off to fling himself at another beauty, a cardiologist (Elena Anaya) who is 30-some years younger. The two of them go on romantic walks around town together in a series of scenes that are so preposterous as to border on science fiction, and the glowy, softly photographed film starts to feel like a 90-minute commercial funded by the San Sebastián tourist board. Does Allen imagine doughy, wee, grouchy film homunculi such as Shawn would be able to elicit anything but polite dismissal from a beautiful, sophisticated Spanish doctor in her 40s? If you lined up all the men in Spain in order of desirability, Shawn would be just about the last one on the list who wasn’t actually hooked up to hospital machinery. It may be that Allen himself has been a celebrity for so long — more than 60 years — that he doesn’t understand that unattractive, non-wealthy, irrelevant little grumps who aren’t world-renowned don’t do quite as well with the ladies as he has done.
Imagine the film with, say, Ben Stiller in the lead role and it might have worked. Stiller is 56: old enough to have regrets, young enough to imagine that he might be able to change (and flirt with lady doctors without risking thrombosis). Stiller would also have been able to deliver the character’s waspish putdowns — some of which weren’t bad — with the proper flash; Shawn delivers them with a slow, chewy cadence that (a) completely ruins them and (b) made me feel like I was stuck on the highway behind a retiree in a porkpie hat doing 45 mph in a Ford LTD.
Some promising ideas go begging. Allen sets up an amusing contrast between an American who likes only European films and a European filmmaker who delivers Hollywood-level meretriciousness dressed up with serious clichés. Early in the movie, we hear people marveling that the Garrel character’s movie is deep because it delivers the information that war is hell. His next film, he imagines, will bring about peace between Israel and the Palestinians. More of this could have yielded some comic spark, but Allen doesn’t pursue it very far.
It may be that banishment to the filmic shadowlands after being re-accused of an obviously false and already thoroughly litigated charge has made moviemaking impossible for Allen at the level we expect — maybe Shawn is in this movie because Allen couldn’t get anybody better. But since I haven’t liked Allen’s last eleven consecutive features (2008’s Vicky Cristina Barcelona was his last success in my book), I can’t pretend that I ache to hear more from him at the cinema. One thing they can’t take away from the Woodman is his typewriter, and the book he wrote just two years ago is hilarious. He began as a writer, and if he should end his career the same way, that’ll be fine with me.
