The Stammer Is the Joke: A Film Critic Endures Fifty Years of Woody Allen

I have now seen every Woody Allen film. There are roughly fifty of them, released at a pace of one per year by a man who has spent half a century confusing productivity with having something new to say. I watched them in order, in a cardigan, with a glass of Sancerre I did not enjoy, which I am told is the correct way.

Allow me to report my findings before the therapist I now require returns my call.

The Credits Have Already Told You Everything

Every film opens identically. White Windsor type on a black screen. A clarinet recorded sometime around 1927. A cast list of serious actors who accepted a fraction of their usual fee for the privilege of saying “I, uh, I mean, I, you know” on camera. By the third credit I can predict the plot: a man will fear death, a woman will be described as “very bright, very sexy,” and somebody will mention Kierkegaard to a waiter.

The Stammer Is Doing All the Work

Remove the hesitation from a typical Allen line and look at what remains. “I’m, I’m, I’m, you know, I have a lot of, uh, anxiety about, about the universe.” Without the stammering, that sentence reads “I have anxiety about the universe,” which is the caption under a thousand dorm room posters. The delivery is the joke. Take away the delivery and you are holding a fortune cookie.

The Woody Impressions

When Allen aged out of playing the romantic lead (a moment he noticed roughly fifteen years after the audience did), he did not retire the character. He handed it to other actors and asked them to do him. Kenneth Branagh stammered through Celebrity. Larry David grumbled through Whatever Works. Owen Wilson brought a Texas drawl to Midnight in Paris and somehow still sounded like a man from Flatbush. Jesse Eisenberg did it twice. Timothée Chalamet did it in A Rainy Day in New York, and I have not fully recovered.

In every one of these performances you can see the actor blinking out a message to the audience: “He told me to say ‘uh’ here. I am a classically trained performer. Please send help.”

Death, Followed by a Movie

Every Allen hero is terrified of dying, and every Allen film solves the problem the same way. In Hannah and Her Sisters, Mickey contemplates the void, tries Catholicism, briefly considers the Hare Krishnas, nearly shoots himself, and is then cured by a screening of Duck Soup. I respect the Marx Brothers as much as any educated person, but if Groucho is the answer to mortality, the question was poorly posed.

Ingmar Bergman also worried about death. Bergman, however, gave Death a cloak and a chess board. Allen gives it a pastrami sandwich and a pun, then asks to be considered Bergman’s heir.

The Least Believable Element Is the Apartment

As a New York publication, we feel a duty to address the most fantastical aspect of the Allen canon. I am prepared to accept that Owen Wilson can travel to 1920s Paris by climbing into a vintage Peugeot at midnight. I am not prepared to accept that a writer between projects lives on the Upper East Side with built-in bookshelves, a doorman, and a view of the park. In Manhattan, Isaac quits his television job on principle and suffers the great indignity of moving to a slightly smaller apartment, one that would cost a hedge fund bonus today. The film presents this as hardship. New Yorkers watching it at home in a fourth-floor walk-up present it as science fiction.

The Romance Department

The Allen love story has exactly one template. A rumpled, middle-aged intellectual who cannot park without hitting three cars or eat dinner without mentioning his analyst is pursued by a radiant woman roughly half his age who finds all of this irresistible. In Manhattan, Isaac is 42 and his girlfriend Tracy is 17, a detail the film frames in soft black and white with Gershwin swelling underneath. Gershwin deserved better. So did Tracy.

Fifteen Years on the Couch

Alvy Singer in Annie Hall has been in psychoanalysis for fifteen years and announces he will give it one more year before trying Lourdes. This is a good joke. It was a good joke in 1977. It became a slightly worse joke every time a later Allen character lay on a couch and described his mother, because after enough repetitions a running gag stops being a gag and becomes a lifestyle.

Magic, Again

For reasons only an analyst could untangle, Allen keeps returning to stage magicians. There is a magician who makes a mother vanish in Oedipus Wrecks, a hypnotist in The Curse of the Jade Scorpion, Allen himself as a magician in Scoop, and an entire film, Magic in the Moonlight, about a magician debunking a psychic. One magic trick is charming. Four suggests a man who received a kit for his tenth birthday and never put it away.

The Tourism Years

Late in his career, Allen discovered Europe, and Europe discovered that he would make a film about any city willing to look lovely in the background. Vicky Cristina Barcelona, Midnight in Paris, and To Rome with Love contain more landmarks than jokes. Characters stroll past cathedrals, mention Hemingway or Gaudí, fall into bed with one another in an order a travel agent would approve, and leave the audience with a strong desire to book a flight and a weak desire to see the next film.

In Fairness, Since I Am Nothing If Not Fair

A critic of my refinement must concede the obvious. Annie Hall earned its Best Picture Oscar. Crimes and Misdemeanors is a serious film about guilt that still stings. Hannah and Her Sisters contains an Oscar-winning Michael Caine performance so good that I forgave the Duck Soup ending, temporarily. When Allen was sharp, he was very sharp. The trouble is that he then made the same film forty more times, changing only the city and the clarinet player.

The Verdict

Woody Allen’s humor rests on four pillars: the stammer, the fear of death, the therapist, and the much younger girlfriend. Remove any one of them and the structure wobbles. Remove all four and you are left with white Windsor type on a black screen and a clarinet, which, I will admit, remains the best part.

Two stars. One for Annie Hall. One for the font.