Woody Allen's followup to September: more of the same, but a bit better. It's true that Allen still isn't on screen in it. And his dialogue continues to be overly declarative and explanatory, so that characters' utterances sound more like psychological profiles and biographical backgrounds from the author's Preliminary Notes: "She's judgmental. She sort of stands above people and evaluates them," etc. And the addition of first-person narration ("The incident with Claire had left me edgy and uncomfortable") only exaggerates the cramped, deskbound, written quality of the piece. And Allen's visual style, with its simple, tidily composed frames and its double coat of honeyed glaze, does nothing to pump any life -- any pulsing, permeating, animating blood -- into the drama. Indeed it squeezes this out like a juicer. Still, the cast is more interesting and less "repertory" than Allen's usual (well, yes, there's Mia Farrow but there's also Gena Rowlands, Gene Hackman, Martha Plimpton, Blythe Danner, Ian Holm, John Houseman, and -- playing the Houseman character in flashback and doing an uncanny impression of his vocal cadences -- David Ogden Stiers). The highbrowed social circle that this cast represents is sharply and accurately drawn, with no concessions to the photogenic, much less the glamorous and the commercial. And yet the central dramatic concern -- the conscious concern with living a fulfilled life -- is not confined to people on a name-dropping basis with Rilke, Heidegger, Brecht, and Klimt. It is welcomingly universal. (1988) — Duncan Shepherd
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