Everyone Says I Love You – Review

Everyone Says I Love You

with Woody Allen, Julia Roberts, Goldie Hawn, Drew Barrymore, Alan Alda and Tim Roth
Written and Directed by Woody Allen
by Kerry Joyce

As writer, director, and bumbling leading man, and with a theme unambiguously drawn from his own painfully unprivate personal life, Woody Allen seemingly leaves himself nowhere to hide. He is our most public of public figures and probably not even he knows to what extent he is leveling with us and what is merely spin control. Still, like the best of mad men, what he lacks in truthfulness he more than makes up for in heartfelt sincerity. Allen is the perfect companion for an enjoyable and stimulating, but brief, interlude, and in this film he serves up just that.

Everyone Says I Love You probably makes few of the die hards’ short list of most important Allen films, yet it cheerfully celebrates the divine irrationality of love as well as those intrepid souls who with selfish selflessness give up the fullest measure of their devotion as cannon fodder on love’s blood-soaked battlefield.

But hey, it’s only a movie, a comedy in fact, so nobody really gets hurt. There’s plenty of cash for alimony and child support and the wife never has to get a full time job to keep the electricity on. Hearts break, but they also mend here, much like in real life.

The cluttered field of stars has about as much depth as your average electron; combining blindly, then breaking off again, usually with a trans-Atlantic flight, for another go ’round on the whirligig of romance.

Oh, and it’s a musical too, but most every number is pregnant with slapstick or irony, we wheezing moderns no longer capable of taking a heady whiff of pure sentimentality, any longer. Like high grade heroin, it as to be cut. In this case, with a joke.

The story begins as Allen shows up at the door of his ex-wife and her current husband, now dear old friends, to lick his wounds after another in a string of failed relationships.

Then, a not so miraculous recovery occurs. He quickly sets about winning over Julia Roberts with a little (make that a lot of help) from his daughter who has been sitting in on Roberts’ sessions with a therapist through a peep hole at a friend’s house.

When Socrates first observed that the truly wise man knows that he knows nothing, he probably at that instant was contemplating the enigma that is woman. Allen wins Roberts’ heart by convincing her that he is the very vision of her articulated dreams. But quickly she leaves him. “I have seen my dream come true, and my fantasy no longer tortures me. I can deal with it,” she says by way of explanation. The movie ends as it began, with Allen getting dumped.

As a sort of epilogue, Allen ends up with his ex-wife Goldie Hawn at the water’s edge where they had stayed up all night one time years ago. They kiss briefly in the pre-dawn darkness but part only as friends once again. Hawn back to her children and husband, Allen to the longing search that has become an end in itself.

Like a Love Boat episode, there are interesting side stories going on, the best being the seduction and subsequent break up of the engaged to be married Drew Barrymore by an ex-con played by Tim Roth.

Compared with most filmmakers, Allen’s movies generally depend heavily on the script, but this is a more visually dominant film than people normally associate with Woody Allen. I did get the sneaking suspicion at times that I was missing out on some cinematic in-jokes, known only to those who spend too much of their lives dissecting scenes, and too little keeping the neighbors up creating their own.

This is a good video for curling up with your best gal some Saturday night. It will leave her both yearning and a little cynical. You may have to woo her all over again.