WHAT IS IT WITH WOODY ALLEN...

... and me?  I went with friends to see Blue Jasmine, his new movie, this past weekend, and everyone loved it except me.  Granted, Cate Blanchett did an outstanding job with her lead character, as did Alec Baldwin as her faithless husband, and the rest of the cast.  Blanchett makes the story of her downfall entirely believable, from wealthy East Side wife of a Bernie Madoff-scale Wall Street cheat to the abject, pathetic, poverty-struck woman cadging from her working-class sister and her rowdy boyfriend in San Francisco.  The downfall, though ably assisted by a sleazy husband, is of her own creation.  With her distorted view of reality and her desperate lies, she brings about her own ruin--and would seem to be as tragic a character as the one I was praising just yesterday.

Why then do I find myself reacting in this negative way--as I do, admittedly, to most of Woody Allen's work?  I think it has to do with Allen as "auteur."  His characters are his puppets, and he seems to enjoy watching them destroy themselves.  I was writing yesterday about the element of necessity in classical tragedy, how tragic characters are caught in the web of a kind of inevitability: the wheels of some force greater than, and outside themselves grind them mercilessly to destruction.  With Allen's characters, that force--it seems to me--is the writer-director himself; it's he that's merciless, the Oz behind the curtain, manipulating the play to satisfy... I don't know, some sadistic, misanthropic streak in his own personality.  I feel more intellectual enjoyment in their plight than true compassion for the fate of his characters.

And of course I recognize that this may be more about myself than Woody Allen, a projection of some deeply buried misanthropic streak in my own character, a cynicism that lurks behind the benign exterior I offer to the world.  If so, I need to look much deeper than I have thus far--and to thank Woody for his kindness in making me aware of it.  Hmmm....