"Anything Else"

In Woody Allen's incredible shrinking career, this mean "romantic" comedy with Jason Biggs and Christina Ricci is his tiniest movie yet.

By Stephanie Zacharek

Sept. 19, 2003 | Woody Allen has a relatively small role in his latest movie, "Anything Else." But figuratively speaking, he's all over it, a one-man marionette maestro rushing from scene to scene, pulling the strings of all the actors and putting his words into every one of their mouths, sometimes without even bothering to disguise his voice. That's not exactly new -- Allen has been doing it for years now, finding young male actors to mold into a suitable stand-in for himself, as well as hunting down scrumptious young actresses against whom he can bounce his knobby, arthritic intellectualism, and, increasingly, his apparent bitterness toward womankind.

But "Anything Else" feels nastier and more pinched than any of the other recent Allen pictures. "Hollywood Ending" may have been tired and forced and aimless, a picture with no reason to exist other than as an affirmation of Allen's existence. But its spirit wasn't as gnarled as that of "Anything Else." This is the sourest of romantic comedies, but it refuses to give in to its own surly nature. Allen keeps using those lovely, crackly jazz recordings as a backdrop -- there's lots of Billie Holiday and some Lester Young here -- as if he actually thinks (or, worse yet, simply wants us to believe) he's keeping true to their wistful romantic spirit. But he has only hijacked them: They have heart, whereas he has none. I know he professes to love this music, but the narrative he hooks it up to threatens to suck it dry.

The star-crossed sapsuckers at the center of this love story are Jerry Falk (Jason Biggs), an aspiring comedy writer, and his dizzily manipulative girlfriend, Amanda (Christina Ricci). Jerry and Amanda are presented to us as his-and-hers neurotics, but their obsessive patterns are very different. Jerry is a neutered puppy, bumbling and good-natured and eager to please. Amanda is the voluptuous, seemingly helpless coquette who's really a Kali of insecurity: It may seem that she's only melting and softening the world with the charm of her giant saucer eyes, but she's really frying it.

Amanda is the kind of woman who, after moving in with Jerry, completely loses interest in sleeping with him. He begs and pleads and cajoles, but no dice. He confides his problems to his new friend, David Dobel (Allen), a schoolteacher and sometime comedy writer -- as well as a gun-happy paranoid lunatic -- who gives him all kinds of allegedly helpful advice that's really just noodly strings of nonsense, usually involving cab drivers and Camus and topped off with a capper like, "You know, it's like anything else -- think about that."

The notion of Allen as this particular kind of kook is admittedly funny, and it suits him in a roundabout way. Some people grow to look kinder as they age; Allen, his eyes looking smaller than ever behind giant glasses, just looks meaner. I wanted to laugh when Dobel's temper boils over and he grabs a tire iron and goes at the car of a couple of boneheaded thugs who took his parking space. (He has to swing his scrawny arms three times just to bash a single headlight.)

But as much as I knew the scene should have been funny, I couldn't laugh -- maybe because, even though Allen has built a career out of being the charming, self-involved loser who wouldn't hurt a fly, his movies increasingly seem to be made by a man who really does hate the world and most of the people in it, including himself. In that light, the flip-out with the tire iron doesn't seem so funny.

Twenty years ago, I wouldn't have guessed that's where Allen was headed: His comedies may have had their sharp edges, but Allen's anger and frustration seemed to spring from genuine confusion. Now he's just a churlish wisenheimer, and he seems to think it's cute.

He's written Jerry as a dream version of his younger self -- I say dream version because in his movies the young Allen was never as guileless or as sweet as Jerry is. He was also a lot more interesting. Allen has given Jerry plenty of neuroses, but they're furry, cuddly, boring ones: He lies on his analyst's couch and wonders why the guy never responds to his heartfelt outpourings with anything other than a bland question. ("And how does that make you feel?") It's as if Allen wants to hog all the good neuroses for himself, clutching them to the bosom of his younger self: Even though he's written a character who's supposedly a stand-in for himself, he doesn't want that character to be more engaging or complex than he ever was.

Next page: Jason Biggs flounders, but Christina Ricci gets it even worse