May 3, 2002 | Early in Hollywood Ending, the most satisfying Woody Allen comedy since 1998’s criminally under-rated and corrosively funny Celebrity, there’s a party scene in which someone mentions Alfred Hitchcock, and someone else notes that the Master of Suspense maintained a successful balance of art and commerce throughout his illustrious career.
Maybe we’re meant to read the scene as Allen’s none-too-subtle expression of his own ideal of achieving popular success without selling out. (It’s probably not a coincidence that, in real life, the normally reclusive filmmaker is making a full-court, multi-media press to publicize this particular film.) Or maybe Allen simply is acknowledging that, much like director Val Waxman, the Oscar-winning has-been he portrays here, he’s torn between a desperate desire to manufacture an audience-pleasing hit and a steadfast insistence on complete, Hitchcockian-style artistic control.
And then again, maybe Allen is having a little fun at the expense of his relatively small but fiercely loyal audience by making us think that he’s thinking about such things.
Here and elsewhere in Hollywood Ending, Allen repeatedly tweaks us with impish suggestions that we shouldn’t always be so quick to interpret his art as autobiography, despite his teasing tendency to blur the lines between his private self and his on-screen characters. In his latest film, he has cast himself as a notorious perfectionist who hasn’t directed a big moneymaker for several years, a neurotic hypochondriac whose reputation has been undercut by eccentric behavior and romantic misadventures. But he’s playing Val Waxman, not Woody Allen. Really. No kidding.
And if you want to think otherwise, well, he and you can have a few good laughs.
First glimpsed on the snowbound set of a TV commercial in Canada’s frigid climes, Waxman is at a fallen-from-grace point where he’s practically unemployable. (The first of many in-jokes: He’s up for a job directing a TV-movie, but loses the gig to Peter Bogdanovich.) Fortunately, there’s a new script, a gritty New York story titled The City That Never Sleeps, that’s perfectly suited to his talents. Unfortunately, that script is owned by Hal (Treat Williams), the smooth-moving studio chief who wooed away Val’s former wife. Even more unfortunately, the project is being produced by Ellie (Tea Leoni), the ex-wife in question.
(OK, let’s pause for a moment to allow for grumblings by readers who are chronically enraged by Allen’s habit of appearing opposite much-younger leading ladies. Got that out your system, folks? Fine, let’s continue.)
As it turns out, Ellie is too much of a professional – and, perhaps, too troubled by guilt over their break-up – to not hire Val. So the born-again auteur begins pre-production, hiring a trendy Chinese-born cinematographer (who needs a translator) and a flamboyant production designer (who needs a restrainer). Val even manages to secure a small supporting role for his latest live-in sweetie, Lori, a dim cupcake played by Debra Messing. (Yeah, I know: She’s even younger than Leoni. Just deal with it.)
And then, on the evening before shooting is set to start, Val goes blind.
The malady is psychosomatic, and likely transient, but it would be more than enough under normal circumstances to get Val replaced on the picture. But these are not normal circumstances – it’s a Woody Allen movie, remember? – so Val contrives, with help from his oleaginous manager (Mark Rydell) and the meekly befuddled translator (Barney Cheung), to hide his sightless condition from everyone else involved with The City That Never Sleeps.
Shooting proceeds apace, though not always smoothly, and the audience is left to consider whether some real-life movies (Lara Croft: Tomb Raider comes to mind) have been made by directors with similar handicaps.
You don’t have to know a lot about Hollywood in general, or Woody Allen in particular, to laugh at some of the funny business here. In fact, the most hilarious scene is an easily accessible bit involving Val’s efforts to control his long-simmering jealous rage while trying to have a strictly-business meeting with Ellie.
The supporting players – most notably, Leoni, Williams and a well-cast George Hamilton as a slick Hollywood insider – are at the top of their games. And while the subplot that “explains” Val’s blindness is introduced too late and developed too sketchily, much of the snappy, sarcastic dialogue is laugh-out-loud clever. “I would kill for this job,” Val muses. “But the people I’d want to kill are offering me the job.”
On the other hand, the inside jokes and self-referential gags that percolate throughout Hollywood Ending are what really make the movie something special for movie buffs and Allen aficionados. Take note of a final plot twist that pivots on responses to The City That Never Sleeps. The French film critics simply adore Val Waxman. Almost as much as they love Woody Allen.
