Woody Allen After the Fall: Literary Gold from Amoral Alchemy

Abstract

This essay argues that Woody Allen's break with Mia Farrow engendered a search for a new artistic direction and a new persona, signaled by the unsettling film Husbands and Wives (1992) and followed by two extraordinary views of the moral dilemmas and personal sacrifices of a life in art, Bullets over Broadway (1994) and Deconstructing Harry (1997). These three films, the best of Allen's work in the nineties, demonstrate a deeply reflective, and self-reflective, mood and mode as the director meditates on the modernist issues of the autonomy of the artist and the salvation of art. What may be hardest for his audience to accept about these films is that they embrace a vision of the artist/writer as a carnivorous creator of beauty and form, completely indifferent to offending the moral sensitivities or violating the personal sensibilities of those whose lives nurture and sustain his talent.