Biting the Woody 'Bullets'

In "What's New Pussycat," the movie that introduced a very young Woody Allen to the world, Victor (Allen's character) asks Romy Schneider if she could love a red-haired, very attractive short man. He is referring of course, to himself, and Schneider looks slightly bemused and ignores the question. Allen hasn't really been able to help asking it again and again throughout his career.

Perhaps no one has told him that the answer is "yes" for multitudes in movie land, or, more likely. Allen's personality is such a strong one (and one that may never have been matched in being so nakedly displayed for the general public's discussion) that he can't help its ubiquitous and dominating presence in every film he makes. Consequently, whether you like Woody Allen is a question hard to get around in any film he's connected with.

This is particularly evident in the movies Mr. Allen writes and directs but in which he does not appear. His sense of life and his worries about it have been so well chronicled that they are by now unmistakable. So much so that in his new release, "Bullets Over Broadway," there are times when John Cusack looks as if he is doing a bad impression of his director.

"Bullets Over Broadway," is, however, generally a success, and Cusack is generally quite good. He plays David Shayne, an aspiring playwright in 1920's New York, whose second play will be staged on Broadway, thanks to a deal made by a respected producer (Jack Warden) with the gangster Nick Valente (Joe Viterelli). The deal is this: Nick will bankroll the play in return for a role for his girlfriend, Olive (Jennifer Tilly).

Olive is talentless and threatens to ruin what Shayne considers his very own pure piece of art. The rest of the play's cast, however, is superb, including the fabulous (albeit aging and gargantuanly self-obsessed) Broadway superstar Helen Sinclair (Dianne Wiest), as well as Warner Purcell (Jim Broadbent, of "Enchanted April") and Eden Brent (Tracey Ullman). Moreover, this is a chance to direct his own play on Broadway, and Shayne accepts the compromise.

Allen (whose own first Broadway play, "Don't Drink the Water," was produced in 1966) is clearly enjoying himself here. Almost all the characters are heavily, heavily drawn, so much so that the film has the feeling of a farce. Shayne declares passionately that he's an artist, that he won't change to pander to the commercial--his goal is "transform men's souls"--and promptly gives away every ideal he's histrionically declared as fast as anyone will take them. Diane Wiest is hilarious as the ridiculous Sinclair, speaking and moving as if she were an alcoholic Lady Macbeth who'd be king herself rather than any dopey husband. Late to the first rehearsal, she intones, with terrible drama: "My pedicurist had a stroke!" (as he was doing her left foot, she thunders, "the pain was terrible"). She overacts so gorgeously that when she apostrophizes Shayne ("O pungent, seething artist!") the ludicrousness of the line is not too much for her to carry off. Even Rob Reiner (as the crusty, unsuccessful playwright Sheldon Flender) manages to tell Shayne, who is cheating on his wife (Mary-Louise Parker), that the artist "creates his own moral universe" with a straight face.

In a sea of scripted overacting, Chazz Palminteri, as Cheech (Olive's bodyguard), seems subtle and slick. Cheech appears at first as the quintessential Italian mafia strong man, tough and curt and not overly smart, but quickly becomes the most interesting character in the film (largely due to Palmenteri's fabulous performance), a moody genius with a big gun. The intelligence of the script is particularly apparent here: rather than trying to transform Cheech from a hood to an artist, Allen is content to make him an artistic hood, which Palminteri plays to the hilt.

"Bullets Over Broadway" is an entertaining picture and a light one, as was "Manhattan Murder Mystery," and probably the best sort of film Allen can make at this point in his career. Gone, at least for now, is the free rein we gave him to try weightier things, lost in a flurry of well-publicized scandal. Watching "Husbands and Wives" was alternately painful for those of us who were unable to forget how miserable he seemed going to court or defending himself publicly, or infuriating for others who saw him as a creep who had gone too far. The spectacle of his life's woes on network news took away his carte blanche to detail them in 35mm film. By turning to a style whose emphasis is on the comic, rather than emphasizing something through the comic, Allen succeeds, at times, in making us forget about his life and simply laugh at his jokes.

Lightly comic and pleasantly distracting as it is, however, "Bullets Over Broadway" cannot escape the mark of Allen's touch. If his philosophical bent is subdued, his style is not: Cusack bumbles about for much of the picture looking as if he is the slightly stilted son of Fielding Mellish. And, like "Manhattan Murder Mystery," "Bullets Over Broadway" ultimately can't help submitting to Allen's hopeful vision that love can work, that love should work. This vision, of course, must be Woody Allen's; it must be Woody Allen's plea.