Up until I saw and loved this year’s Midnight in Paris I always thought I had a mental block that kept me from loving Woody Allen as much as other people do. I figured there was something about the guy that people responded to that I would just never quite get. But then that film, and the charming spell that it put me under, left me thinking that perhaps I needed to give Woody yet another try. My new theory was that maybe I just didn’t like his classics. Maybe I would respond better to his deep cuts. Kind of like The Rolling Stones, where I can’t stand their stadium rock, but their honky tonk and blues stuff is some of my favorite music of all time. So I watched Shadows and Fog, a movie Woody did in ‘91 that isn’t often mentioned or praised, as far as I can tell. The film is gorgeous, shot in black and white and shrouded in the titular shadows and fog in an obvious homage to the noir films of the 40s and the German films of the 20s, so I thought that it would be just my type of weird going in. Not so much though.
Other than the gorgeous visuals of the film I didn’t find all that much to connect with. You’ve got Woody playing Woody, a role I ironically think Owen Wilson is much more suited for, Mia Farrow playing an uninteresting naif who goes through some crazy stuff over the course of the story but is never much fun to watch doing it, and a whole cavalcade of awesome actors (Kathy Bates, Jodie Foster, Lily Tomlin, William H. Macy, John Cusack, John Malkovich, John C. Reilly, etc...) who only show up for a few seconds and never get anything worthwhile to do. There’s something about a serial killer being in town, the circus gets involved, and we even spend some time in a whore house; but nothing interesting comes of any of it. I think I’m supposed to be much more charmed by the dialogue in these films than I ever am, and it just leaves me coming out of them luke warm. Shadows and Fog gets my typical Woody Allen rating of ***, and I find myself still left wondering why I liked Midnight in Paris so much more than anything else I’ve seen from the man. It can’t all just be my crushes on Owen Wilson and Marian Cotillard, can it?
