EVERYONE SAYS I LOVE YOU 1996

This essay is part of The Barrymore Trilogy Blogathon hosted by The Good Old Days of Classic Hollywood. 

This post is dedicated to Drew, but for more Barrymore, visit the site!

At one time or another, everyone has had the experience of feeling as though some real-life event or activity were taking place in a movie. For example (and speaking from embarrassingly personal experience): owning a convertible in Los Angeles in the early 80s made it a certainty that when Blondie’s Call Me played on the car radio, that infectiously percussive, synth-pop ditty instantly became my background music. Even a routine Slurpee run to the nearby 7-Eleven was transformed into the slick opening credits sequence of my very own 80s erotic thriller.

The desire for reality to more resemble the idealized fantasy world of the movies is, perhaps, a film fan's wish as old as cinema itself. And while there's no telling the countless headaches, heartaches, and dashed illusions to be spared were one were outfitted with some kind of built-in immunity to the seductive sway of Hollywood's Technicolor fairy tales; were such a thing even possible, I'm more than certain that a reality stripped of the belief in the possibility of the impossible would hardly qualify as anybody's idea of living, anyway.

The eternal paradox of movies has always been its ability to render the real as slightly dreamlike, while capturing the essence of the ethereal with canny verisimilitude. No other sphere of emotion seems to inspire this quality in movies as evocatively as the contemporary notion of romantic love. Especially love of the transcendent, dizzying, sweep-one-off-one's-feet variety favored by musicals. And when it comes to romance and the eloquent expression of love, can any movie genre compare with the Hollywood musical?

Woody Allen as Joe Berlin

Goldie Hawn as Steffi Dandridge

Alan Alda as Bob Dandridge

Drew Barrymore as Skylar Dandridge

Edward Norton as Holden Spence

Julia Roberts as Von Siddell

Everyone Says I Love You is Woody Allen’s first - and to date, only - musical. Chronicling a year in the life of an affluent (what else?) extended family residing in New York’s Upper East Side, Allen uses the changing seasons to metaphorically underscore this nervous musical comedy about the variable nature of romance. As characters with I-wish-I-could-believe-he’s-being-satirical names like Skylar, Djuna, and Holden navigate the choppy waters of love in picturesque Venice and Paris; Woody Allen’s familiar universe (where every city looks and feels exactly like New York) reveals itself to be a wonderland of  magic realism.  

The fantastic has always figured in Woody Allen’s particular take on reality: Humphrey Bogart was his life coach in Play it Again Sam, Marshall McLuhan materialized from behind a movie poster to silence an intellectual boor in Annie Hall, etc. But the world depicted in Everyone Says I Love You is a world swept up and in concert with the giddy elation of love and spring fever. Ordinary folk break into spontaneous song and dance; store mannequins come to life; the injured and infirm leap and turn cartwheels in a hospital; the dead cavort amongst the living; and, in my absolute favorite Woody Allen moment of all time, romance grants lovers the ability to defy the laws of gravity.

Just You, Just Me
Store mannequins put on a show for engaged couple, Holden (Norton) and Skylar (Barrymore)  

But don’t be fooled; for all its song, dance, humor, appealing performances, beautiful locations, game cast, and moments of genuine charm; Everyone Says I Love You is still, never, ever anything more than your typical Woody Allen film. Which is both its boon (I like that Allen doesn’t bend his style to fit the conventions of the genre, he literally makes them dance to his tune), and its bane (if you already don’t like Woody Allen, this film isn’t likely to turn you into a convert).   

Perhaps due to the challenge presented by shooting a full-scale musical on location with a score of some 16-plus classic songs -lushly arranged, at least four choreographed production numbers, and a cast of largely non-singers who (according to production notes) only discovered they’d signed on for a musical after having already committed to the project; Allen gave himself more latitude than usual in recycling so many of his familiar tropes:

The eccentric, broadly-drawn extended family - Radio Days, Hanna & Her Sisters

The refined character attracted to a coarser individual - Love & Death, Interiors, Crimes & Misdemeanors, Hannah & Her Sisters

The heart wants what it wants - Manhattan, A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy

Two women attracted to the same man- September, Hanna & Her Sisters

Spying on an individual’s therapy session - Another Woman
Allen’s old coot/young woman fetish - Manhattan,  Husbands & Wives

Allen’s bougie lifestyle fetish - Too many films to list

Cuddle up A Little Closer 
Playing the daughter of Woody Allen and Goldie Hawn, actress Natasha Lyonne is Djuna, the film's narrator and central romantic flibbertigibbet. Here she's serenaded by love-at-first-sight beau, Ken (Billy Crudup) who's joined in song by cabbie Robert Khakh, who sings the 1908 ditty in Hindi

When you add to the mix the fact that Allen also indulges his other catalog of obsessions: The Marx Brothers, jazz, pseudo-intellectual pretensions, and people who actually consider "poet" to be a career path; Everyone Says I Love You winds up representing a kind of  Woody Allen "best of" collection set to music. Happily for me, it manages to be the best of his lighter, funnier films.

Looking at You
Happily married couple Steffi (Hawn) and Bob (Alda) head a household overrun with five children, a grandfather, a tyrannical maid, and Steffi's romantically luckless ex-husband, Joe (Allen)

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

Woody Allen, a man who strikes me in interviews as someone incapable of understanding even the most elemental aspects of human behavior, does seem to understand movie musicals. Indeed, a great deal more than many directors like Rob Marshall (Nine) or Susan Stroman (The Producers), who have their roots in musical theater.

There’s something intriguingly off about the idea of a Woody Allen musical. At first glance, it seems as if the director’s trademark neurotic, over-cerebral style is an ill fit for a genre characterized by breezy lightheartedness and fantasy. But upon reflection, one realizes that Allen’s films have long taken place within a fantasy bubble. What is his hermetically sealed vision of Manhattan, populated with characters bearing little to no resemblance to actual human beings, but an update of those impossibly rich penthouse dwellers who spent all their time in tuxedos and evening gowns in those Warner Bros. musicals from the 30s?

The already built-in artificiality of Woody Allen’s world, one he’s cultivated in film after film, is a Cinderella-shoe fit for a musical, simply because one of the chief hurdles of contemporary musicals has been the increasing audience resistance to the conceit of average people spontaneously bursting into song in natural surroundings.
Woody Allen's version of Manhattan has always been a New York of his own state of mind, so there's no authentic "reality" to be shattered. With Everyone Says I Love You, Woody's artificial New York feels tailor-made for the genre-mandated artifice of the movie musical!

My Baby Just Cares for Me
 A trip to Harry Winston for an engagement ring erupts into an amusing production number

By the 1990s, the movie musical had almost become extinct due to director's inability to make the genre work. Modern audiences (who had no problem with animated characters) just found real people singing onscreen to be either comical or corny.The genius of Everyone Says I Love You is that Allen, rather than trying to ignore that fact, distract audiences from it, or try to think of clever ways to sidestep that particular hurdle; structures the entire film around exploiting it. He embraces the corniness, shares in the camps, and by doing so, celebrates the naivete of old musicals.

Jumping in with both feet, Allen instantly addresses the issue of audience discomfort by having the very first words of the film sung by a character. He even plays with the genre by citing the characters' self-awareness ("We're not the typical kind of family you'd find in a musical comedy") and consciousness of their vocalizing ("What are you singing about? You're not in love with Holden!")

But best of all, Woody finds a way to keep his fantasy on human scale. Ordinary people DO break into spontaneous song, but only in appropriately ordinary voices. Choreographed production numbers erupt around them, but the characters fail to be instantly imbued with terpsichorean gifts. Instead, they move with the ungainly grace of those overcome by emotion.

And therein lies the source of Everyone Says I Love You’s ultimate triumph of charm over Allen’s sometimes problematic world view: all the singing is just an extension of the character's emotions.

If I Had You
Skylar finds herself falling for the ill-bred charms of ex-convict Charles Ferry (Tim Roth) 

I loved musicals long before I became a dancer, but I think movie musicals dug their own grave by their over-reliance on cold spectacle and technical polish. I much prefer the wavering, unsure voices in Everyone Says I Love You, to the kind of rigid vocal perfection of a Marnie Nixon (West Side Story My Fair Lady). Likewise, the dancing here is sometimes a little ragged, but it touches my heart more than any of the impenetrably cold, gut-busting numbers in Hello, Dolly!. When it comes to musicals, I still prefer being made to feel something about the characters than merely being asked to ooh and aah over empty spectacle and technical polish.

Makin' Whoopee
Patients, orderlies, and doctors alike weigh in on the consequences of marriage

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

When it comes to the creative expression of emotion, I’ve always felt there to be a kind of unofficial hierarchy of intensity. If it can be verbalized, you say it; if it’s a feeling difficult to put into words, write it. Feelings too strong for the spoken and written word cry out to be sung, and that which transcends verbalization, can only be danced.

That’s why musicals are the ideal genre for depicting love and romance. It’s a natural thing for people to want to express happiness. When you’re a kid, you skip, maybe as an adult you’ll whistle or hum…but for the adult, the sex act is the only outlet we’ve afforded ourselves for unrestrained expression of amorous joy. An act so personal and subjective that the more literal its depiction, the less joyous any of it seems. 

More than any other genre, musicals are able to externally depict the internal sensations of love. 

In Everyone Says I Love You, Woody Allen takes the usual hyper emotionalism of his stock characters to the next logical step. They sing of their joy, their longing, and their anxiety. True to the Woody Allen universe, the film’s main musical theme is the 1931 pop standard, I’m Thru With Love; not a song about the rhapsodic elation of love found, but of the wistful resolve of love lost and never to be.

I'm Thru With Love
The elegant pas de deux Goldie Hawn & Woody Allen perform along the Left Bank of the Seine is beyond sublime  

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

I enjoy Everyone Says I Love You a great deal, some parts I even love (the Halloween sequence is delightful, and Drew Barrymore and Edward Norton make an adorable couple). But I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t a bit of a chore slogging through yet another one of Allen’s peculiar takes on morality and ethics. (Everyone Says I Love You was released some four years after this messy breakup with Mia Farrow, but just one month before the publication of Farrows tell-all memoir, What Falls Away.)

One of the things I’ve always hated about those sex comedies of the 60s was the degree to which lying and deception was depicted as a cute, harmless path to love. In this film, the heinously invasive subterfuge Allen’s character engages in to snag Julia Roberts (a stomach-churning pairing suggesting necrophilia more than a May/December romance) feels downright sociopathic.

However, the overall appeal of the cast, and the goodwill extended by the film’s sprightly tone and lovely score of old standards, goes a long way toward mitigating my general impatience with Allen’s self-serving moral code.

Hooray For Captain Spaulding
A Marx Brothers-themed Christmas Eve costume ball

Everyone Says I Love You was released at a time when it was widely believed only animated films could succeed as musicals. Allen's film, a more traditional musical, was released in December 1996, the same month as Alan Parker's Evita - a musical that seemed to go out of its way to try to make audiences forget it was a musical.

Enjoy Yourself (It's Later Than You Think)
Recent guests at a NY funeral home refuse to let death spoil their fun

PERFORMANCES
Since a tribute to the illustrious Barrymore family occasioned this particular post, I'll reserve the focus of this section exclusively to then 20-year-old Drew Barrymore (granddaughter of John) as Skylar Dandridge. Unique in this instance not only for being the sole member of the cast to be dubbed (crippled by fear, she claimed her voice was too abysmal even for a film populated with untrained singers), but having the distinction of later conquering her fear and singing in her own voice in two (!) later films: Music & Lyrics and Lucky You, both released in 2007.

A star at the age of six with her appearance in E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982), Drew survived a Lindsay Lohan-ish adolescent to become a popular star, director, and producer. While a likeable and winning personality on talk shows, I confess I've always credited (blamed?)  Barrymore (along with Sarah Jessica Parker, Catherine Heigl, and Matthew McConaughey) for killing the romantic comedy.

Barrymore is well within her rom-com comfort zone in Everyone Says I Love You, but in small doses her familiar giggle and demur routine comes off rather well. Her close association with Adam Sandler has made her strictly persona non grata with me, but her performance here and in the exceptional Grey Gardens (2009) reminds me that she is indeed a very talented actress. Albeit one to whom the lyric from the song, My Baby Just Cares For Me applies: "There's sometimes a doubt about her choices!" 


BONUS MATERIAL
The "Everyone Says I Love You" number from the Marx Brothers film, Horse Feathers (1932) 

Copyright © Ken Anderson

CLOSER 2004

If the amoral bed-hoppers that make up the bulk of daytime tabloid talk shows were articulate, intelligent, impossibly attractive, and rich; their lives might be something like the lives of the four spiritually damaged protagonists of Closer, Mike Nichols' searing look at the pain people cause one another in the name of love.

Julia Roberts as Anna

Jude Law as Dan

Natalie Portman as Alice

Clive Owen as Larry

The tony trappings of upscale London fail to mask the rather ugly games of sexual one-upmanship that characterize the entwining relationships of the film's four lead characters. Based on a play by Patrick Marber (who wrote the equally perceptive and acidic Notes on a Scandal - 2006), Closer is a sexual roundelay that skewers romantic myth and lays waste those who narcissistically pursue love as though it were part of a self-improvement program. Here, the believers of love at first sight; those souls whose religion is passion, chemistry, and the heart wanting what it wants - are revealed to also be the ones most likely to grant themselves license to lie, deceive, and inflict pain. Provided it's all done in the name of love.

 

 

 

Changing Partners

Having explored the ins and outs of caustic relationships in both Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966) and Carnal Knowledge (1971),  Mike Nichols is cinema's unofficial frontline correspondent in the war between the sexes. With wit and candor, he goes to places of rare honesty in human relations and somehow finds ways of making us see parts of ourselves in some of the most odious characters. He has a gift for shining a compassionate but cold light on some of the worst aspects of human interaction and, in the process, reinforces the notion that sometimes, even at our most monstrous, most of us are rarely ever less than just human.

"Hello, Stranger"

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM:

The language. Though biting and brutal, the dialog in Closer is too clever to be real:

Portman: “I don’t eat fish.”
Law: “Why not?”
Portman: “Fish piss in the sea.”
Law: “So do children.”
Portman: “I don’t eat children, either."

- but direct and to the point in revealing character and the small ways we use words to protect ourselves, wound others, and ultimately conceal. The film is as much a treat for the ears as it is for the eyes.

The Truth: 

“Lying is the most fun a girl can have without taking her clothes off. But it’s better if you do.”

PERFORMANCES

Years before Black Swan Natalie Portman proved that she was more than just a sci-fi geek pinup. Though outrageously beautiful and possessing a natural star quality, Portman is refreshingly low on self-consciousness and unafraid to go to the uglier places a character might take her. Cast cannily as the kind of male fantasy dream girl she's been marketed as since her career began, Portman reveals levels of intelligence and will that are not often associated with waifish objects-of-affection. She is never less than compelling throughout and, for me at least, virtually wipes the rest of the accomplished cast off the screen.

 The Lie

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

At one point in the film, Portman's character describes rival Julia Roberts's photographic artwork as 

"A bunch of sad strangers photographed beautifully.” She might just as well have been talking about the film she's appearing in.

Closer is indeed a film about unpleasant people acting unpleasantly, but everyone is shot so lovingly they're practically incandescent. As a fan of vintage movies, my heart has a special place for that time in history (pre-late-50s realism) when movies were populated exclusively by those humanoid gods and goddesses we called movie stars. They didn't look like anyone we'd ever seen, and the world they inhabited onscreen didn't even remotely look like the one we inhabited. It was a hyper-reality that created a dreamscape to build fantasies on.

Closer, with its gleaming sets and uniformly gorgeous cast, uses old-time glamour to present a merciless look at the dark side of romantic desire. It's so effective in creating a kind of visual/emotional paradox that I can't help thinking it's a conscious creative choice on Nichols' part.  

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

The one scene I never tire of watching is a sequence that takes place in a private room of a strip club where Natalie Portman and Clive Owen verbally spar about love, lust, and longing.

It is amazing on so many levels. From a purely technical standpoint, the astounding virtuosity of the camera angles alone makes for a unitary lesson in filmmaking.

It's funny, tense, sexy as hell, and oddly moving as these two enact a mating dance of the lonely.

It certainly doesn't hurt that Natalie Portman sets the screen aflame, either.

WOW!

WHAT FUELED MY DREAMS

From everything I've written thus far, I've made it sound as though Closer were an anti-romantic comedy (black comedy) and basically down on love. The truth is, like that other favorite of mine, Two for the Road, Closer is at its core a deeply romantic film. Chiefly because it dares to show the bare bones of relationships and dramatizes the hard work and self-sacrifice necessary to achieve true intimacy with another. The four protagonists in Closer all fumble about blindly seeking love without knowing how to return it, demanding love without earning it, and giving love without committing to it.

Love Gets Ugly 

It deflates the popular romantic ideal (one favored by movie love stories) of the instant attraction, the animal connection that sparks all great romances. Closer dares to posit that those who indulge this conceit are fantasists in love with the idea of love and are unprepared (or lack the maturity) to do the hard work required if one hopes to grow "closer" to another individual.
To my way of thinking, a film like Closer gives love the respect it deserves.

Not everybody has the stomach for movies like this. Indeed, the public stayed well away from this film when it was released. But the relationships I grew up around (and I dare say a good many of the relationships I see today) look more like the ones depicted here than the inherently dishonest, wish-fulfillment fantasies of The Bridges of Madison County or Under the Tuscan Sun. That may be my curse or blessing; I don't know. But what I do know is that I've seen more tears shed and people hurt over the pursuit of false ideals than I ever have over people coming to terms with the fact that love takes courage, selflessness, and a willingness to be vulnerable.

Law: “Deception is brutal. I’m not pretending otherwise”

Closer is an adult story about the responsibilities of real love. That it tells its story with wit, intelligence, and style only serves to make it one of my fave-rave films of all time. A modern realist classic.

Natalie Portman - Stopping Traffic

Copyright © Ken Anderson    2009 - 2011