I love you and I'm not an artist

Bullets Over Broadway

When I wrote about Annie Hall recently,

Secret Squirrel

replied to me:

hmm I’ve never met somebody who prefers Manhattan Murder Mystery and Bullets Over Broadway to Annie Hall! I guess I like Annie Hall better because (i) Allen is domesticating a bunch of avant-garde Euro film techniques but it is still visually inventive and unpredictable, and (ii) Keaton becomes a sort of independent center of gravity, not just vs. Allen the actor but even vs. Allen the director. This doesn’t happen in the Mia Farrow movies.

I personally like Radio Days, Purple Rose of Cairo and Zelig best. Maybe this is cowardly and political, but in those films the Allen sensibility flies free of Woody Allen, the person playing himself.

So I re-watched Bullets Over Broadway…

Bullets Over Broadway is not a very “Woody Allen” Woody Allen film. The protagonist, (a pretentious, untalented playwright), is less like the typical, jumpy, neurotic Allen lead, and more like the recurrent antagonists, the stuck-up philistines who parade themselves as unbearable know-it-alls. Judgement is often meted out to these antagonists (in Annie Hall this happens when he has Marshall McLuhan comes on-screen and tell one of these blowhards “you know nothing of my work.”) Not here: instead, Allen makes the antagonist his hero.

The plot moves David Shayne away from his artistic pretense to a normal, happy life. All the hopeless ambitions that make him morally flawed are resolved when he realises what a crock of lies his life has become. He ends by walking away from his (fake) artistic success, away from the money, glamour, and fame, and going back to him long-time girlfriend, who he finally marries. There are two things, he tells her, that he is certain of: “I love you and I’m not an artist.”

While it uses many familiar Allen modes—parody, period, jazz, high and low art, pretension, affairs, romance, comedy, zingers, the satiric conflict of the elites and the regulars, neat plot twists—Bullets comes off as something distinct. Which other of his movies can we place it with? It is beautifully shot, bringing an artistic intensity of framing and lighting to scenes where playwrights hiss at mobsters backstage. There is a tradition including The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and The Lady from Shanghai which Allen is developing on here.

Bullets is funny: it makes witty play with tropes about the mob and artistic ability, but it is funny about food and sex and little dogs and big appetites. Orson Welles didn’t have an obese Jim Broadbent walking determinedly on-stage calling out “I’ve been in the garden tending roses” while a freshly shot mobster lies bleeding on the fly loft. This is hallmark Allen: hectic, surprisingly inevitable, comic-poetic justice. (By the way, Rob Reiner, who earlier¹ directed When Harry Met Sally, plays a character in Bullets called Sheldon—and he’s great in bed.)

Bullets may not be as singularly accomplished as Annie Hall, but Hall’s singularity is narrow and not as well developed as Manhattan. Bullets is a different sort of film, and, in its own manner, more accomplished, not least because “the Allen sensibility flies free of Woody Allen, the person playing himself” and allows the loser to become the sentimental hero.

1. I first said later and was helpfully corrected in the comments!