Hollywood Ending

It's a dangerous thing for a movie reviewer to second-guess how a film was made, as opposed to simply telling you fine people whether the movie was good or bad. It's a doubly dangerous thing when the man you're second-guessing is Woody Allen, who has made more films that garnered Academy Award nominations for Best Director (6) and Best Original Screenplay (13) than most writers and directors will ever make, period.

But in Allen's newest cinematic outing, "Hollywood Ending," there are so many funny moments that could have been funnier, so many comments that could have been more deliciously nasty, so many pratfalls that could have fallen harder that you almost don't notice the laughs you're enjoying. You come out of the movie thinking not "Gee, that was funny?" but "What if...?"

The plot itself makes one rear back expecting the chuckles. Val Waxman, the character Allen wrote for himself to play under his own direction, is a two-time Oscar winner whose career and marriage both washed up under a tide of hypochondria (including an unfortunate bout of hoof-and-mouth disease), nervous breakdowns and unsatisfiable whims. Producer Ellie Waxman (Téa Leoni) was the escapee from the wrecked marriage, but she still holds Val in high enough esteem to know that he's the perfect director for her new picture. This picture, unluckily, is being headed by her new fiancé Hal (Treat Williams), the man Ellie turned to when Val turned insufferable.

Miraculously, Val gets the job, and, apart from a few bitter explosions at Ellie that he quickly disavows in the name of professionalism, all seems to be going well right up until the start of the shoot. Then he goes stone-cold blind, a blindness no less severe for the fact that it is psychosomatic. Val would quit, but he'd be throwing away his career forever. He decides instead to bumble through, gradually acquiring a circle of complicity but never expanding it wide enough to avert some severe embarrassments.

But these embarrassments are not nearly severe enough. We are going to neatly sidestep the issue of how autobiographical this film may or not be as completely irrelevant to its enjoyability, but the fact remains that Allen spares the character he plays the last degree of comedic humiliation a few too many times. Scenes that should involve fantastic networks of ludicrous lies, or, at the very least, lots of hilarious falling down, pass by with just a few feeble flails from Val and pats on the back from oddly credulous studio executives. (The studio execs come in for more abuse than Val, although this abuse is delivered in lingo-ridden asides that very few who don't work in the motion-picture industry will understand.) The main character would have to be incredibly likable to get lotsa laffs out of such easygoing humorous trials; Val has a good heart, but he's also a neurotic mess who deserves to get poked a bit, and the film doesn't do it.

As romantic comedies go, "Hollywood Ending" doesn't have a whole lot of romance. The verbal sparring between Ellie and Val is one-sided, as Val gets TKOs with his flustered self-deprecation and wounded pride every time out and Ellie proceeds to the obvious conclusion. (What's the title of this movie again?) Of course, like in the rest of his movies, the character played by Allen proves irresistible to attractive women, not all of whom are Téa Leoni. This yields more unintentional laughter than anything else, although a scene featuring the blinded Allen and a sexually voracious Tiffani Thiessen (yes, from "Saved by the Bell") pushes the sightless-schlub conceit as hard and as hilariously as it gets pushed in "Hollywood Ending."

That scene stands as a welcome reminder that "Hollywood Ending" is pretty funny, in and of itself. Allen still can craft throwaway laugh lines that most humans can only envy (Val says his favorite part of masturbation is "the cuddling afterwards"), and he shows he still has plenty of physical-comedy chops when he demands capering from himself.

Leoni's flat voice and motionless face, both reeking of boredom and/or exasperation, make her a natural in the put-up-with-Val role, while Williams is authentically oily as the Californian menace. And Allen has learned some kind of trick by which he gets all the actors in his films to talk like real people, rather than actors, which makes the numerous verbal fisticuffs that much more engaging.

No one who enjoys Allen's characteristic mix of cerebral humor and slapstick will sit completely stone-faced through "Hollywood Ending." But very few people who aren't already completely in its thrall will find as many laughs in it as they would like. One hopes Woody Allen has another Oscar-worthy comedy in him, but "Hollywood Ending" definitely isn't that. Yet one can't escape the feeling that, with just a bit more zeal in its execution, it might well have been.

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