EVERYBODY SAYS I LOVE YOU
Written and directed by Woody Allen, starring Alan Alda, Woody Allen, Drew Barrymore, Lukas Haas, Goldie Hawn, Gaby Hoffman, Natasha Lyonne, Edward Norton, Natalie Portman, Julia Roberts, Tim Roth, David Ogden Stiers.
Trap:
I’m not sure that a Woody Allen musical is exactly what the world is crying out for, but at any rate, now we’ve got one. EVERYBODY SAYS I LOVE YOU attempts a gloss on the classic Hollywood musical of the thirties or forties by recasting it with the usual crew of upper-middle class neurotics we’ve come to expect from Allen’s films. Such plot as there is centers around the romantic troubles of an extended Park Avenue family – lawyer Alan Alda and his wife Goldie Hawn, and their various children by various marriages – including one daughter (Barrymore) whose commitment to her engagement to a junior associate (Norton) from her father’s firm keeps running into difficulty, and another (Lyonne) who’s trying to jump-start her biological father’s (Allen) love life by setting him up with art historian Julia Roberts during a vacation in Venice. Throughout all of this the characters periodically break into the sort of big band standards that Allen usually wallpapers his films with. Now, I know those old Astaire/Rogers musicals, or films like THE GANG’S ALL HERE weren’t exactly plot-heavy, but this film practically evaporates off the screen as you’re watching it – I’m tempted to guess that the only reason it has musical numbers in it at all is to pad a handful of loosely-connected scenes (too slight to really be called a story) out to feature length.
Bluesy:
Gee, Trap, I guess that means you didn’t like it.
Trap:
No.
Bluesy:
Well, I have to disagree with you. I didn’t feel at all the way you did about the musical numbers, or the film as a whole. I thought it was really funny. In fact, I was impressed with the way Woody Allen pulled this "big joke" off. In my eyes, Allen was making fun of the whole musical genre, camping it up on purpose… I mean, how can you take scenes like the one at the hospital, with doctors and nurses bursting into song about the size of the diamond ring lodged in Drew Barrymore’s stomach indicating how much her fiancee loves her, as anything but parody? Or even the opening of the film, almost coming straight out of "Oliver!," except in this number you’ve got elderly park avenue ladies clutching onto their nurses for dear life, singing about love; or my favorite, a street bum asking for hand-outs as he croons about the joys of amour. Come on, Trap, where’s your sense of humor?
Trap:
I have to admit that seeing quintessential New Yorker Allen walking along the banks of the Seine with a baguette under his arm by way of establishing his character as an expatriate novelist is one of the better sight gags I’ve seen lately, but by and large, the film just didn’t work for me. After all, he’s not really satirizing anything because there’s nothing really there – the farce isn’t really grounded in anything. For me, it just plays as though he thought it might be fun to make an old-fashioned musical, but couldn’t think of anything other than the same bunch of characters and situations he’s been recycling for years now and randomly plugged song and dance numbers into it. And even that might still have worked, but for the leaden sameness of the numbers – each one features crowds of extras rushing frantically about for no good reason. Between the wispy plot and the aggressively bad musical numbers my sense of humor was pretty much pummeled into unconsciousness.
Bluesy:
Maybe you just need to get out more. I thought there was certainly enough going on in this movie in terms of plot that was original and pretty damned funny. Between the situations of a guy wooing a woman via notes given by his daughter’s snooping on her therapy sessions through a peephole; a society girl dumping Mr. Right for a breast fondling criminal who’s last claim to romantic fame was some no-neck prison inmate named Vinnie the Thumb; and other assorted maladies all resulting from saying "I Love You" to the wrong someone… it’s a musical about infatuation, it had to be silly to deal with a silly situation seriously. Well, it didn’t have to, but it did and I think Woody really pulled it off. The only misgiving I had in the film, was that it ran a bit long for me. Still, I had an awful lot of fun watching these people embarrass themselves, so it’s not really a big deal in the grand scheme of things. I just really liked it.
Trap:
I dunno – maybe you’re the one who needs to get out more. Just try not to burst into song in front of complete strangers, okay?
Bluesy:
I live in NY. Who’d notice?
