Anything Else
In Woody Allen's "Anything Else," Jason Biggs and Christina Ricci play Jerry and Amanda, an on-again-off-again New York couple whose bond is sealed by a mutual interest in older culture -- the classics, if you will: Billie Holiday and Edna St. Vincent Millay. They pay a visit to the Village Vanguard to see Diana Krall, whose plaintive jazz singing moves Amanda to say that she's been, well, moved. Jerry, a neurotic comedy writer, is in analysis, and Amanda still uses a diaphragm.
They're only about 23, but they're antiques, and "Anything Else" is a consignment shop of a movie. Allen has always been a crafty cynic. Lately, he's a desperate one. This movie is wretched, condescending, and sad, like watching an elderly man spend more than 100 minutes tapping his arm for the youth vein -- which he never finds.
Allen refuses to look out from his window on Manhattan's Upper East Side and see young America as it is. He doesn't even throw us a bone of credibility, just more neurotic navel gazers whose idea of multiculturalism is a side of couscous. There are no Dave Eggers, or Beyonce, or flash mobs for these kids. It's all Dostoevski all the time.
Allen's movies have always drawn a big, terrified line between classical and popular culture. Holliday seems used here not as haunting music but as a form of cultural harassment: This, kids, is music! It's as though Allen was handed a mandate from his financiers to go for young blood for his 35th feature and hated every minute of having to do so. Jimmy Fallon, for instance, appears as one of Amanda's old boyfriends, but appear is all he really does. He's just another dropped name.
Allen seems to have taken any old script about a fidgety couple and cast Ricci opposite the star of "American Pie." That explains why nothing Ricci's smugly insecure Amanda says sounds sincere. Hearing Dianne Wiest rhapsodize about Krall would be annoying in itself (great, more bluestocking-jazzbo trend spotters), but hearing it come from Ricci is sickening because you know she'd rather be in the Strokes' dressing room.
Amanda suffers from an eating disorder, chain-smokes, and can't have sex with Jerry but can with other men. She's also wildly pretentious. When she tells Jerry that his fears are "so middle class," you want to chuck a copy of John Updike's "Couples" at her. Still, she's the sort of passive-aggressive nymphet Allen loves young actresses to play. So you could say Ricci is perfectly miscast.
Except for Jerry's being a love-struck fool trying to write a Great Novel, Biggs acquits himself well. He really takes the typical Allen fussbudget into early Philip Roth territory, where young Jewish sexual angst could be funny. Every good line in the picture goes to Biggs. Although addressing the camera is something no actor under 30 has mastered after Matthew Broderick's Ferris Bueller.
Biggs spends the movie taking advice from Allen, who plays a fellow joke writer. Allen tells Jerry to dump his dead-end manager (Danny DeVito, who's loud but very good) and dump his dead-end shrink and dump his dead-end girlfriend. Allen is in breakup mood lately. He's dumped his longtime producer, his old cast, his once peerless attention to wit, structure, character, irony, and cultural history. Why he hasn't dumped himself is beyond me.
Instead, he slums his way through another movie. And just so we're perfectly straight about what Allen's not giving us in "Anything Else," he tosses in a classy lady like Stockard Channing to really stoop to the material. At the halfway point, she blows through as Amanda's washed-up cabaret-singing mother and moves into their apartment. If you listen hard enough, you might hear the faint echo of a laugh track.
If Allen insists on slapped-together variations of his mild but still interesting mid-'80s work, why doesn't he try to get the old gang back together? I recommend giving Wiest, Judy Davis, Elaine Stritch, and Tony Roberts a call and leaving the Freddie Prinze Jr. movies to the experts.
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