WILD MAN BLUES

Directed by Barbara Kopple

featuring Woody Allen, Soon-Yi Previn

At the Brattle

This Weekend

In March 1996, Mira Sorvino '89 was onstage in Los Angeles accepting her Best Supporting Actress Oscar for Mighty Aphrodite. That film's writer-director, nominated the same evening for his screenplay, was named earlier that month as the Directors Guild of America's Lifetime Achievement Award recipient. And where during all these festivities was the illustrious filmmaker himself?

Testing out a new mouthpiece for his clarinet. In Milan.

Woody Allen is not someone generally considered predictable, but this scene in Barbara Kopple's rollicking documentary Wild Man Blues reveals a supreme irony. While missing the Academy Awards to go woodwind-shopping might seem eccentric to us, that decision seems supremely predictable to Allen himself. He'll always pick his music over his stardom--it's just that no one in America cares (or even knows) that he plays.

Wild Man Blues follows Woody Allen and his seven-member jazz band along their 1996 springtime tour of Europe. If that synopsis sounds like material for a three-minute "Entertainment Tonight" profile, then kudos go out immediately to Kopple, who knows that Allen's career as a jazzman is not a fluff-level footnote to his more obvious engagement in the cinema. Her feature-length documentary has already been faulted by some viewers at Sundance for downplaying Woody-as-Filmmaker, a criticism that misses Wild Man Blues's whole point: Woody Allen considers himself a developing musician who's lucky to have steady day-job making moves.

"I think it's seen just as a hobby of mine," Allen tells his sister Letty early in the movie, when the band and entourage are flying across the Atlantic to begin the tour. Any nervousness about the presence of Kopple's camera is small potatoes next to his genuine stagefright at the prospect in front of him: weeks of one-night-only stops in Paris, Madrid, Turin, and other Old World cities, playing to audiences who know little about primitivist New Orleans jazz (which the band renders with real zest) but who know a great deal about the man on the marquee.

Unfortunately, that might be the wrong reason to attend. "I'm not a sufficient enough musician to hold their attention," Allen frets, but his travelling companions, apparently used to his anxieties, gently console him. These initial scenes of conversation not only introduce us to the various members of the caravan, including then-fiancee Soon-Yi Previn, they also establish the level of access we get to Woody throughout Wild Man Blues.He talks comfortably, even conversationally before the camera, and he is as happy to discuss perceptions of him as he is presenting his own thoughts.

How strictly honest Allen is in presenting himself, or to what degree he is "performing," is a question the film simultaneously raises and dismisses. On the hand, his barbed humor--which the movie captures more ecstatically than any of Allen's own recent work--can easily be read as deflective, resistant to any penetrating insight into how he really operates, what he really thinks.

At the same time, might Allen's "honest self" actually exist in the permanence with which he "performs"? A man who tours Europe in a band, who has made one movie a year for two decades, and whose most private relationships are themselves so inherently sensational is hardly giving a false image of himself by putting on a show. The Woody Allen of Wild Man Blues may or not be "the real Woody Allen," whatever that means, but his jokes, confessions, and worries all ring true when held against one another.

Nor, however, do Kopple or cinematographer Tom Hurwitz use their camera merely to point and shoot. A staggering, insidious myth of documentary filmmaking is that craft is somehow absent, that the lack of actors and scripts translates to films that make themselves. Moreover, because of the twice-Oscared Kopple's towering reputation, Wild Man Blues bears the brand of a "vacation film"; as with Scorsese's Cape Fear or Coppola and Altman's recent Grisham adaptations, the idea of Kopple filming a celebrity bio sounds on paper like a hard-working master taking a crowd-pleasing breather.

All of these allegations are unfair of almost any film project, and certainly fail to acknowledge what Kopple has accomplished in Wild Man Blues Nothing here will make anyone forget Harlan County USA, the landmark documentary she made about union strikes among Kentucky coalminers, but craftsmanship and wit are as present here as in her more socially-minded, dramatic work.

Consider the sequence in which Kopple and Hurwitz leave the camera directly on Woody during a flailing, ten-minute performance when his lips have failed and his clarinet reed won't vibrate properly. Though the same scene played just as gruelingly and effectively in 1995's dramatic film Georgia, the sequence brilliantly captures the audience's experience of watching a doomed performance, as well as Allen's own furious determination to literally breathe the life back into his music.

Further evidence of Kopple's sagacity appears in the dialogues she has chosen to include in her film. Any movie ultimately rides on what is or is not cut, and Kopple and editor Lawrence Silk have chosen impressively candid, crystalline moments through which Allen and his companions represent themselves. His assertion that "I just don't want to be where I am at any given moment" speaks as informatively about his personal-life problems as it does about his approach to touring.

Which brings us to the Soon-Yi question.Without a doubt, one of Wild Man Blues'sbig selling points is its unprecedented accessinto the Woody/Soon-Yi relationship, which provesto be both nervily discomfiting and prosaicallynormal. Soon-Yi herself, whose first line in thefilm is "Yeah," comes across as a profoundlyhesitant and unformed personality, with littlefaith in her own convictions or conversation.Nevertheless, she earnestly tries to support andencourage Woody, and to prevent his anxieties fromcompromising his friendships, as when she stressesthe importance of praising his bandmates.

Have I mentioned, though, how uproarious thiswhole thing is? Allen arrives in London, theband's final stop, with the prediction that thistime "they'll hate me in my own language." Betweenconcerts, as American tourists in ritzy localesflash his photo with starstruck squeals, hewonders why people who will fly overseas to takehis picture "won't pay ten cents to see one of mymovies."

The kicker sequence is the last, when Woody andSoon-Yi return to New York and have lunch with hisparents. His father is 96 and has never seen oneof his films. His mother looks just like Woody andasserts that, throughout his growing up, "You did alot of good things but you never pursuedthem"--this while three of his Oscars sit atop thebureau over her shoulder, and a filmmaking crewsits in her dining room following his movements.You can't impress everyone all the time, I guess.

Wild Man Blues is a lively, belly-laughcomedy that neither cheapens its subjects forlaughs nor reveres him too much to make fun ofhim. Of the non-documentary films released so farthis year, only Love and Death on LongIsland maintains such jubilant gigglesalongside real psychological acuity and with realdramatic flair. Woody Allen himself is filming ascript called Celebrity to be released thisfall. He will be well-challenged to study andvitalize the phenomenon of fame as sharply andengagingly as Kopple does here