Despite "branching out" with Wild Things earlier, I still love going back to my favorite genres, and especially Woody Allen movies. He's easily my favorite director, and his films, though they vary in quality, are all comfortably in the same vein, without becoming too repetitive or predictable (for me, anyway). For me, a general Woody rule of thumb is: the more high-concept it is, the worse it is. His characters are best when they're just intelligent, neurotic New Yorkers allowed to exist and relate to one another, and when Woody himself gets to play a variation of the nervous, well-read Jew chasing smart and beautiful women. This is not to say that I dislike his attempts to experiment, to pay tribute to a certain time period (as in Radio Days) or to try comedy/murder mystery (Manhattan Murder Mystery), but my favorites of his are always the ones that deal with the emotional hangups and romantic relationships of a fairly small group of interconnected New Yorkers: Hannah and Her Sisters, Husbands and Wives, Crimes and Misdemeanors, and especially Annie Hall and Manhattan.
So Mighty Aphrodite is hard to evaluate. On the one hand, there's a story that's more or less classic Woody Allen: him as his usual character type, married to a more ambitious, less neurotic woman, and dealing with a typically meandering plot line, this one about his search for his adopted son's birth mother and then involvement in her life and attempt to make her happy without telling her that his son is her son. Taken alone, the story could have functioned nicely and added more supporting players, who often function as interesting foils in Woody Allen movies (Hannah and Her Sisters and Crimes and Misdemeanors are excellent examples of parallel stories). Instead, the story is kept relatively shallow but supported by a Greek chorus, masks and all, who we first see in intermittent shots in an amphitheater but who gradually begin to invade main character Lenny's life, counseling and warning him.
I think this is an example of a Woody Allen film where the concept overwhelms the interesting, funny dialogue and character work. Having a Greek chorus comment on a modern film is an interesting idea, and I kind of liked it at first because of having read and learned about Greek drama in high school English classes, where we read Oedipus Rex and Antigone. I liked Tiresias, the blind seer who shows up to predict gloom in every Greek tragedy, as an old panhandler, and I even liked the idea of the chorus members slowly intruding on Lenny's life. But despite all that, the two parts never really gibed--Cassandra's warnings never resulted in anything particularly catastrophic at all, so the chorus' involvement in Lenny's life wasn't exactly necessary or illuminating, and for some reason Allen had the chorus break out into grating Broadway song and dance at times. The chorus was also saddled with some pretty lame jokes, like crying out to Zeus only to hear the message, "Hi, you've reached Zeus. I'm not in right now. Please leave a message after the beep."
So I'm faced with something of a crisis: a Woody Allen movie I don't like. I know he's famous for having a long dry spell in the '90s, and for having many misses along with his hits, but until now I'd just seen the hits, I guess, and they were wonderful. Maybe I'll comfort myself later with Annie Hall.
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