Search - Husbands and Wives on DVD

Exceptional Portrait of Relations between Men and Women. Buy

B. Marold | Bethlehem, PA United States | 12/10/2005

(4 out of 5 stars)

"`Husbands and Wives' is writer / director Woody Allen's last movie before his breakup with Mia Farrow, and, of course, the last in a long series of movies in which Farrow is his costar. As noted in more than one news article in 1992, when this movie was released, it is remarkably predictive of the Allen Farrow breakup and even on the issue over which they would split.

I saw this movie soon after it was released in 1992 and I have not looked forward to viewing it again in order to give a review of this DVD edition. The movie is probably not one of Allen's very best among his later comedies such as `Crimes and Misdemeanors', `Bullets over Broadway', and `Mighty Aphrodite', but it includes what may be some of his most disturbing scenes since `Interiors'. One scene in particular between costar Sydney Pollack and Lysette Anthony is about as emotionally disturbing as all the murder victim scenes from an entire season of CSI rolled into one. This scene really shows off Allen's writing talent. A physically brief scuffle between a middle-aged intellectual and his intellectually lightweight young paramour, becomes a viscerally painful image of a breakdown of relations between two people. Allen's talent is even plainer when we see the girl trapped in the situation where she must stay with the man until he deigns to take her home from a party probably in the darkest Hamptons, far from home base in Manhattan.

Allen has never been the most polished technician with his filmmaking, but he almost always has a major talent behind the camera. In this case, it is Carlo Di Palma. In spite of this, the coordination between the actors business and the camera's point of view is remarkably like a series of `Candid Camera' shots. I almost looked for a credit for the person responsible for being sure there was a lampshade obscuring part of the camera's view in all interior shots. The editing was also explicitly done in a somewhat choppy manner, giving some sense of a documentary style. It was quite clearly not done as a `Documentary' in the same style as `Zelig', but all the technical aspects of editing and cinematography were distinctly raw. Since I have seen enough Allen movies to know this must have been intentional and not due to a lack of skill, I have mixed feelings over whether this choppyness contributes anything to the experience of the story. I am quite certain that unlike the documentary feel of some parts of `Bananas', it does nothing to add any humor to the story. If anything, it heightens the feeling of awkwardness surrounding the principal characters' actions.

As usual, I find myself disagreeing with Peter Travers' blurb from his review in `Rolling Stone' where he uses the phrase `Fiercely funny' in describing the film. In fact, I did not once break out into a laugh as I watched this movie, although the fact that I was watching it alone may have had a lot to do with that fact. But, I have been known to giggle or laugh at least four or five times in the course of an average `The West Wing' episode, even those I may have seen two or three times. (And who said politics isn't funny.)

In more ways than one, this film seems to hark back to the days when Allen split his time between film making and writing short stories for `The New Yorker'. Allen's character is a professor of writing and literature at Columbia, and is credited with having several short stories published in that very same `New Yorker' magazine. Allen's character is also biographical in many other ways, not the least of which was the quip that he probably could not survive for more than 48 hours off the island of Manhattan. (I did crack a smile at this line.)

As usual, Manhattan street scenes and apartments are the primary venues for almost all the shots in the movie. There is a short detour to a middle class home in Brooklyn, but most scenes are in what are probably very expensive apartments on the Upper East Side.

This film is definitely not as interesting or as funny as, for example, `Crimes and Misdemeanors', and yet it is possibly even more powerful emotionally, in spite of the fact that the other movie had a homicide and this film only has bruised emotions. This is even less a comedy than the intentionally seriocomic `Melinda and Melinda'.

I would not recommend this movie to a non-Woody Allen fan, but for people who like and respect his work, this may be one of his most important films.
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