arts & entertainment Woody Allen Deconstructing Woody and filmmaker Robert Weide (Up To A Point) Woody Allen documentary holds interest while skimming the surface. Michael Fox Special to the Jewish News I bet that its bemused subject won- ders, even if PBS doesn't, who'll have the curiosity and stamina to stick around for all 31/2 hours of Woody Allen: A Documentary. There must be a dozen times in this two-part entry in the venerable American Masters series when the Jewish gag writer, stand-up comic, screenwriter, playwright, filmmaker, New Yorker humorist and clari- netist expresses self-deprecation, typically with a wry smile or a deflecting one-liner. All of this time on camera, primarily in the form of recent interviews the staunchly private artist acceded to, represents a coup for director Robert Weide. But let's tell it like it is (to borrow a phrase from Bananas sportscaster Howard Cosell): Access, as much as the merits of Allen's ambitious and impressive body of work, is the raison d'etre for this epic-length piece. Unfortunately, the insights gleaned are largely familiar and superficial. Woody Allen: A Documentary is reason- ably interesting and (for baby boomers) nostalgia inducing, but it fails to examine the prolific director's importance and influ- ence in American culture. Weide applies no critical dimension and therefore lends no gravitas to the artist's work, resulting in a program that is per- fectly watchable and largely forgettable. Allen tells us very little that we didn't already know about his childhood, his cre- ative process and his self-doubts. The good news is his unvarnished run- ning commentary — devoid of the mock humble, self-congratulatory, self-mytholo- gizing patter of many movie folks — works to save the film from the endless fawning of actors (including Louise Lasser, Diane Keaton, Tony Roberts and Larry David), critics (EX. Feeney, Leonard Maltin and Richard Schickel) and various other talking heads (Dick Cavett, Chris Rock). Weide is best known for producing and directing HBO's Curb Your Enthusiasm and prior portraits of the Marx Brothers, W.C. Fields and Lenny Bruce. His background is comedy and television, not movies, and he's clearly more interested in diverting his audience than challenging them with a probing analysis of Allen's work. So we get a soup-to-nuts chronology of Allen's career, beginning with plenty of clips of him on Dick Cavett's, Steve Allen's, Jack Paar's and Ed Sullivan's TV shows. These early stand-up bits are quite funny, and we readily accept that the guy was a comedy prodigy who got his start in high school placing one-liners in Walter Winchell's and Earl Wilson's New York newspaper columns. Allen quickly got gigs writing for comedi- ans, radio programs and a TV show starring Sid Caesar. He then penned the screenplay for What's New Pussycat? (1965), including a part for himself, but was appalled by the way the studio turned his thinking-person's sex comedy into slapstick farce. He vowed to direct his own scripts from then on, and the success of Take the Money and Run (1969) and Bananas (1971) won him total control on all his films ever since. This is ancient and familiar history for Allen's loyal fans, who will revel in the sunny sound bites and clips from Sleeper, Love and Death, Annie Hall and Manhattan. But ifs unlikely that viewers under 30 will be inspired to check out the movies, for the documentary makes no effort to establish a broader social or historical context for the work. Allen and Robert Altman were the U.S. filmmakers who spoke most directly and consistently to a new generation of post- collegiate Americans. But there's no discus- sion here of the shift in social mores of the '60s and '70s and why Allen's dialogue- based Jewish humor (or New York humor, if you prefer) resonated with moviegoers all over the country. Do you think Mel Brooks, a peer and friendly competitor, might have something interesting — even if critical — to say about Allen's style and success? Don't hold your breath waiting for Brooks to show up, or Jerry Seinfeld, Ben Stiller or Sarah Silverman, who wouldn't have careers if Allen hadn't mainstreamed Jewish identity. Mainstreamed and sexualized it, I might add, for sex was as central to Allen's appeal and worldview as literature, mortality and morality. None of which, incidentally, are addressed in any depth. If you do watch the entire 31/2 hours, you'll at least be rewarded near the end with the most provocative comment of the entire documentary. "I don't have the concentration, or the dedication, that you need to be a great art- ist," Allen says with utter seriousness. The sheer number of films — and many exceptional ones — that he's made belies his frank self-assessment. Too bad Woody Allen: A Documentary doesn't grapple more with the question of its subject's greatness. Bride is no longer assumed to be Jewish, nor necessarily a bride. By current scholarly consensus, there is exactly one identifiable Jew in Rembrandt's art, the Sephardic doc- tor Ephraim Bueno. Two other Rembrandt paintings, both young men in skullcaps, are also thought to be Jews. One hangs in the Kimbell Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, and the other in the Staatliche in Berlin. The distinctive features of these men — broad face, heavy eyelids, round lips — sup- port his case, DeWitt argues, because they resemble images of Jesus that Rembrandt began making in the late 1640s, among them the studies at the heart of this show. In the show's catalog, various scholars note that these works came at a point in Rembrandt's career when he was moving from the highly dramatic, divinely inspired images of Jesus that were the norm in Western painting to a more introspective figure that inspired meditation and rever- ence, a quality that characterized master- works like The Hundred Guilder Print and The Supper at Emmaus. The latter work includes another direct allusion to Christ's Jewish heritage, write art historians Larry Silver and Shelley Perlove in that catalog: The bread he breaks with the disciples is a braided challah. Yet most of the catalog's contributors are more circumspect than DeWitt in assert- ing that this serene, inward-looking Jesus is modeled on an actual Jew. Silver, for one, believes the jury is still out on whether Rembrandt needed to have a Jewish model in front of him to make a Jewish-looking Jesus. "Rembrandt's faces look so lifelike you're immediately impelled to say that's a portrait:' he said in a phone interview. "If someone asked you to paint a picture of any fantasy figure, you could probably draw Snow White. You can have an image in your head without having an actual model." In any case, Rembrandt's Jewish Jesus, if that's who he was, was in a sense ahead of his time — the Semitic Jesus didn't catch on right away, or much at all. Centuries later, however, he reappeared in the work of some of the first prominent Jewish art- ists to step onto the international stage, figures such as Maurycy Gottlieb and Max Liebermann. In the new book Jewish Art: A Modern History (Reaktion Books], Silver and co- author Samantha Baskind chronicle how these artists, along with other Jews assimi- lating into the mainstream art world in the late 19th century, emulated the Rembrandt they perceived as a Jewish role model. Ephraim Moses Lilien drew from his Old Testament scenes; Hermann Struck painted heads of old Jews who resemble Rembrandt's prophets; and the scruffy fig- ures in the paintings of Jozef Israels seem lifted, like Rembrandt's, from the Jewish quarter of Amsterdam. These descendants of the "Jewish" Rembrandt hardly help us determine just what about him was crypto-Jewish, of course. But they do confirm that modern Jewish art is crypto-Rembrandt. Woody Allen: A Documentary airs 9-11 p.m. Sunday, Nov. 20, and 9-10:30 p.m. Monday, Nov. 21, on Detroit Public Television-Channel. 56. Semitic from page 53 Some of these efforts highlight Rembrandt's special relationship with the Jews in newly tolerant, newly multicultural Amsterdam, a haven for refugees from the Inquisition and Eastern European pogroms alike. Others — most famously "The `Jewish' Rembrandt," a contrarian show at Amsterdam's Jewish Historical Museum — contend that there's no evidence of a special relationship whatsoever between Rembrandt and the Jews, and that the long- time image of the mentshlich Old Master is just a romantic myth. Today, most art historians do agree on some things: that Rembrandt was not a secret Jew, not especially philo-Semitic and not particularly a mentsh. Instead, we know it was his reputation for having those quali- ties that led generations of curators to mis- label certain types of paintings (especially of soulful, bearded men) as his portraits of Jews (especially rabbis). De-Judaized By now, most of Rembrandt's "Jewish" oeu- vre has been de-Judaized. Even The Jewish 56 November 17 0 2011 Robin Cembalest is executive editor of ARTnews. She blogs at letmypeopleshow.com . This was reprinted from Tabletmag.com , a new read on Jewish life.