Nola Rice (Scarlett Johannson) and Chris Wilton
(Jonathan Rhys Meyers) begin an illicit affair in Match Point.
Comeback Kid from page 39
Males, an important and orienting force
for nascent American "shiksas" every-
where. He has celebrated a kind of perpet-
ual adolescence. He is the New York of wit,
banteiTbookstores, infidelity, hardwood
floors; moldings and area rugs, cocktail
piano, live television studios, gray skies,
sell-by-date romances, movie lines and
movie-line references, fallible best friends
and fragrant dinner parties, young and
naïve beautiful women, older and smarter
quirky men. His milieu is his memory, his
persona not him, he says, but a construc-
tion: Alvy, Isaac, Gabe, Harry. Fielding
Mellish.
Then, black clouds, etc. Mia culpa.
The past decade has been another era:
Soon-Yi, children, Europe, some empty art
houses, Small Time Crooks, Anything Else,
a cruel crack in the jaw from his old safe
port, the New York Times the paper
whose late, great film critic Vincent Canby
saw Renoir and Bergman in Woody Allen.
Then, a stunningly successful stand-up
at the Oscars after Sept. 11, a couple of
more stinkers, and, out of the mists of
Variety, a cry: "Woody's back!"
It was for Match Point, a somber, vio-
lent, stirring film, shot far away from New
York in dank, posh London, starring
Scarlett Johansson and Jonathan Rhys:-
Meyers. The hype returned, but calmly,
without the strain of wishful desperation.
—
Serious Films
Still, the question isn't why audiences left •
him — even Mickey Mouse, who didn't
have personal problems, and Chaplin, who
did, lost theirs — but why his audiences
felt so desperate for him to return. To
them, he's ageless, and physically familiar:
They want him to look like that, 40, bald-
ing so as to suggest age; libidinous, to sug-
gest youth; always the same, to suggest
permanence.
A Time cover once blared, "Woody Allen
Comes of Age" — 25 years ago. Woody
42 January 19 • 2006
Allen and age never seemed to meet com-
fortably.
"The difference is, when you're younger,
you know that you can die at any moment
—something goes wrong, you're going to:'
he said. "But when you're older, you know
that even if things go right, you're going
to."
Allen says that he has accepted that he
won't be another Bergman. But he wants
to make serious films from now on. "Now
that I'm older, I don't know how much
time I have to make movies for the rest of
my life he said, after noting that his next
film, Scoop, is a light, light comedy.
He said that Scoop might be his last
comedy. "I should try and not indulge
myself in little comic caprices, but try and
do something more meat-and-potatoes. I
find that it might be a good thing for me
to not be in my movies so much —
because when I'm in the movie, it forces it
to be a comedy.
"I'm not believable in any other way. I
can do much more interesting things if I
don't have to think, 'Well, I'm going to be
on the screen and I have to make people
laugh."
And the interesting things weighing on
him these days are the usual preoccupa-
tions: "the meaninglessness of life, the
unreliability of humanity — nothing
good, nothing commercial. Nothing that
cant be turned against me."
He laughed at that and seemed unfazed,
the confidence of a man who's been
through much worse already, whether he's
pessimistic about what the future holds or
not.
Clean Living
His screening room is tucked into a classic
Park Avenue building, in the back, behind
the foyer, as if a clever and reclusive ani-
mal had burrowed its way back there and
no one cared much as it settled in. The
entire room — floors, ceilings, furniture
— is soft and comforting and huhed.
Woody Allen looks good — or the same.
His skin is clean, more velvety than wrin-
kled or hardened.
"I think probably the best I've had it in
my life is when I met Soon-Yi," he said.
"It's been the best relationship I've had in
my life. You know, it lasts, it keeps strong
all the time, it remains intense and posi-
tive, and I have kids that I'm raising —
but you can only think the worst is yet to
come!"
He laughed. "If I could keep it this way
all the time, that would be great. The
question is, I'm much older than her; and
I have to take care of myself to be able to
keep in good shape he said. "The first
thing you need is luck — I have had luck
— because there's longevity in my family.
"My father lived to over a hundred, and
my mother lived to about 95. And then I
live cleanly — I go to sleep early and wake
up early .I was never much of a drinker. I
used to drink wine a lot, but I drink beer
mostly. I do like beer" — he drinks Beck's,
in case you're interested:
"I exercise just about every day, and I
eat well; I don't eat a lot of junk. To the
mild degree that you can help yourself, I
help myself."
Unreal Life
Allen grew up in the Midwood section of
Brooklyn, the son of lower:middle-class
parents, a mother who worked in a flower
shop and a father given to menial jobs —
driving a cab, waiting tables, bartending,
making books. Woody Allen was athletic,
loved baseball and the movies.
"There's a portion of it that was grim,"
he said. "I don't mean a specific portion
— I mean, a portion of everyone's life is
grim, or there were a cluster of grim reali-
ties that I had to face as a child. I hated
school, and there were many crises that
came up that maybe weren't crises, but I
experienced them as such as a child. Life
was very lower middle class, prosaic, rela-
tively uninteresting, non-glamorous for all
of us at the time.
- "So when you went to the movies, this
was a different world entirely:' he said.
"When you lived in a ratty little apartment
and it was a hundred degrees out in the
summer, and suddenly you go into an air-
conditioned movie and buy a lot of candy
and popcorn and sit down in this cool
atmosphere, and on the screen suddenly
Manhattan would materialize in front of
you — it was a different life entirely.
"Then you'd walk back out, and it was a
hundred degrees out and your mother
made pot roast or something; and it was-
n't that thrilling."
So he perpetuated the dream in his own
films, ones he can temporarily live in him-
self. "Miconception of Manhattan was
based strictly on Hollywood movies, and
the Manhattan I grew up loving was a .
.
Manhattan that appeared only.on the sil-
ver screen: the grand nightclubs, the pent-
houses, the people dressing for dinner in
tuxedoes in their own home at night, the
champagne corks popping, the people
wandering through Central Park romanti-
cally at 2 o'clock in the morning.
"All of this was from Hollywood movies.
So the New York and Manhattan that I've
given the world through my movies has
been my Manhattan conceived from films,
rather than actual apartments and neigh-
borhoods.
"I grew up in the era of double fea-
tures," he said. "So in the space of three
hours, you would be transported to some
penthouse on Fifth Avenue and, moments
later, on a pirate ship from Casablanca to
the Alamo. It was just astonishing, the
overwhelming magic. And I believe that
people who grew up in the era I grew up
in — many of them never recovered from
movies.
"Many of the men and women never
could adjust to the fact that love and rela-