In Hannah and Her Sisters, Woody Allen accomplishes the impossible: He makes that great actor, Max von Sydow, look bad for the first time. He who survived everything from The Kremlin Letter to Three Days of the Condor, from The Exorcist to playing Christ in The Greatest Story Ever Told, looks dull and insignificant as Frederick, the gruff and anti-social painter with whom sexy, flighty Lee, the youngest of our eponymous sisters, is living. But that is because Allen gives him only an attitude and no character to play. Frederick does not attend the family Thanksgiving dinners given by Hannah, the eldest sister, and he insults his crude would-be customers. He seems to have taught the dilettantish, ex-dipsomaniac Lee everything she knows, but we are not shown any of this; we don’t see what brought and holds the two together. We do, however, hear him say to Lee, as she comes home late from love-making with her new man, that she missed a very dull TV show about Auschwitz, and that everyone is always asking the wrong question: How could it have happened? “Given that people are what they are, the question is why doesn’t it happen more often?”
How are we to interpret this? The rock star who wants to buy paintings according to size and color is indeed a nouveau riche boor, so we sympathize with Frederick for refusing to sell to him. But what about the Auschwitz remark? Is it funny? (Many in the audience laughed.) Wise? Monstrously misanthropic? There isn’t a clue in the film to help the actor—or viewer—decide. We get that typical Allen ambiguity that is really a way of shirking responsibility. You can read his characters as sage or silly; his films as tributes or satires. Creative ambiguity multiplies meanings so as to extend or deepen significance; Woody’s antithetical meanings cancel each other out. But they are a way of hedging his bets.
Comments