The Objectively Subjective Woody Allen

YOU PROBABLY started laughing at the loser in grade school gym class--you know, the kid who could never do a somersault without slipping on his shoelaces on the uptake. He had banana peel appeal. By the time he hit high school he'd mastered the art of the somersault and maybe even a cartwheel but when it came to girls he'd usually slip off his social shoelaces just often enough to give the cool kids a yuk or two. Well, losers grow up and when they start making their first twenty or thirty thousand, people stop laughing at them. Unless, of course they can capitalize on their embarrassment and go professional. Since Charlie Chaplin turned the loser into a comic classic, some of the most successful comedians hit the bigtime on verbal slapstick. You laugh at Rodney Dangerfield (if you do) because he "don't get no respect." And you chuckle at Woody Allen because he's a Jewish dip.

Actually, Woddy Allen's formula is more sophisticated than just that. He generally takes some basic slapstick and Marx Brothers stuff, slathers it with the savoir-faire of the horny ethnic loser, and hurls the whole concoction into an unlikely context, usually the heroic fantasy world of the shlemeil. What he does is magnify the possibilities of the social banana peel. A Jewish herd blowing a date in the Bronx is one thing, but a Jewish herd posing as a Cuban dictator in bed with a sultry revolutionary who tells him he looks a lot like a Jewish herd she used to know is quite another.

In Love and Death, Allen takes his fantasy setting to its logical extreme--a-lavish Tolstoy Russia. It works, but not as an unseemly setting for a slapstick stooge. There's no question that Allen's stock formula has hit home to a lot of losers and tickled a lot of losers-watchers, but when you get right down to it, it's a pretty thin joke. There are only so many laughs to the 98-pound weakling dilemma, whether it's set at muscle beach or Martinique. And it is where Allen scrapes the dregs of slapstick gags that he is at his weakest. When Boris Grushenko, "the young coward all St. Pete is talking about," fumbles through basic training like a moldy replay of Modern Times, and bearing a suspicious resemblance to certain scenes of Bananas, the audience barely stifles a few bored groans.

WHAT THE CZAR'S panorama does offer Allen is the chance to outgrow silliness and really explore absurdity. As the title suggests. Love and Death is Allen's stab at intellectual pretension. He teases love and death, duels and Dostoevsky, wars and warmongers. The movie opens with Boris in prison awaiting execution ("I go at 6 o'clock tomorrow morning. I was supposed to go at 5 but I have a smart lawyer.") The plot itself is only quaintly wacky. A series of mishaps culminates in an assasination attempt on Napoleon's life, a tiresome case of mistaken identities is thrown in, and Boris finally trails off behind the Angel of Death in a flap-happy parody of The Seventh Seal. Where Allen shines is not in slapstick situations but in soliloquies and banter duets. He and Sonia (Diane Keaton), an intellectual Russian nymph, often find themselves grappling with the big Why:

Allen: What if there is no God?

Keaton: If there is no God, life has no meaning.

Why not just commit suicide?

Allen: Well, let's not get hysterical about this. I may be wrong.

Allen isn't really the loser here; you're not laughing at his embarrassment. He didn't just swallow half a bottle of cologne to impress his date. The loser is philosophy--Allen caught the big Why with its pants down. It's this switch-around, from laughing at the man to laughing at the phenomenon that elevates Allen's humor to absurdist satire.

And czarist Russia makes a great backdrop for absurd humor because the ghost of Dostoevsky and his philosophic pals allows Allen to capitalize on the incongruity of ancient questions and modern options ("Moses was right. The good man shall dwell in the House of the Lord for six months with an option to buy.")

As ALLEN'S comic accomplice, Diane Keaton is a lot closer to earning her cinematic stripes than Peter Bogdanovich's sidekick. Cybill Shepherd, but Keaton's performance also suffers because she's fashioned in her director's image. When she turns obsessively to the camera to suggest, "May be we could have a family. Maybe not our own; we could rent one," you'd swear she could be Allen with a wig and a nose job. But she lacks the timing of a really good comedian. When she's warned on her first husband's deathbed to remember that "Life goes on," she barely breathes between the moan, "I guess you're right!" and the quip. "Where do we eat?" Keaton pounces on that line like a hungry cat on a tin of smelly mackerel and in this case the bad timing is the joke.

Love and Death certainly isn't Allen's first crack at absurd humor. Everything You Wanted To Know About Sex was obviously less a parody of Allen than it was of sex. But there was something really unsophisticated, sort of junior-high-bathrooms-giggly about the idea of a humorous breast monster stalking the streets. While Allen is still chasing voluptuous young things--("Do you want some wine to put you in the mood?": "I've been in the mood since 1700")--his latest movie lacks that looking-for-the-dirty-part snickering. Rather, Love and Death finds him more a Renaissance man with a mature comic balance. Woody Allen is growing up.