Anything Else

Woody Allen movies tend to have inexplicably varying effects on audiences. This rather ordinary effort was critically much better received in the US than his immediately previous efforts, Hollywood Ending (2002), Curse Of The Jade Scorpion (2001) and Small Time Crooks (2000) but for no substantial reason. To my knowledge it did not get a theatrical release in Australia and it’s not difficult to see why.

For a start it's about the relationship between two New York twenty-somethings, Jerry and Amanda, an age group that has never been front and centre of an Allen film before (the Edward Norton/Drew Barrymore pairing in 1996's Everyone Says I Love You was embedded in a larger tableau of characters) and particularly with the director giving himself a background role as Jerry's mentor, a comedy writer with anger management issues and a red Porsche convertible, feels decidedly out-of-balance. Too young for Allen’s usual demographic, too neurotic to attract a younger audience it feels like a retread of some earlier Allen film dusted off and thrown into the marketplace. The casting of Jason Biggs and Christina Ricci in the leads does not alleviate this impression as they add nothing to Allen's script.

Biggs is a bland presence and Ricci, although a good deal less plump than she used to be, simply does not have the sexual allure to play a romantic lead and certainly not when saddled with the neuroses that Allen has written for her. The screenplay in fact comes across as a rather mechanical redistribution of Allen's familiar ideas and if he, as always, manages to come up with new one liners there’s really nothing here that you haven’t seen and heard in one of his films before and more appealingly so. But like I said, it all seems to depend on how you feel on the night.

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