SHADOWS AND FOG
A film review by Frank Maloney
Copyright 1992 Frank Maloney
SHADOWS AND FOG is a film written and directed by Woody Allen. It stars Woody Allen, Mia Farrow, John Malkovich, and John Cusak, with Lily Tomlin, Jodie Foster, Madonna, Julie Kavner, Wallace Shawn, Kathy Bates, Kate Nelligan, Donald Pleasance, Fred Gwynne, and Kenneth Mars. Production design is by Santo Loquasto and cinematography by Carlo DiPalma. Rated PG-13 for sexual situations.
SHADOWS AND FOG is minor Woody Allen, but for the true believer (such as your humble correspondent) second-rate Woody Allen is better than just about anything else that is likely to be booked into town on a given weekend. I have to admit that the chameleonic nature of Allen's films can be a little frustrating at times. He's done his hommages (and I'm sure he'd use the French word) to almost every important school of film making and the greatest film makers. SHADOWS AND FOG is an homage to Kafka and to the German expressionist film school. It has its charms, but they will be most obvious to those of us who are predisposed to find them.
The film is in black and white and fog. The action is limited to one endless night is a city that resembles the Prague we saw in Stephen Soderburgh's KAFKA (a mostly black-and-white film) but more claustrophobic, more artificial, more suggestive of a sound stage. And of course, it is a little strange that this does seem to be the Year of the Kafkas with Soderburgh, the reissue of the Argentine movie THE LOVES OF KAFKA, and now this. Whereas Soderburgh studiously strove to avoid the Kafkaesque (he fined crew and cast for using the word on the set), Allen is a-wash in it. Nothing makes sense, nor is it meant to. A strangler, a mob at war with itself, a doctor looking the physical origin of evil, the hatemongers, the corrupt police and clergy, the circus that no goes to, the student, the whores, the source of the lights under wagons and behind fences, the magician, the ending.
Of course, it's all a metaphor for the way Life is, and it's a good, if not terribly original, way of talking about art, movie-making, and all that esthetics stuff that we popcorn eaters usually try to avoid. We don't know why life or art starts, why it ends, what happens during, before, or afterward. We are all stumbling around in Shadows and Fog. It's all there, but it is a trifle obvious. The best parts are some of the cameos, especially Julie Kavner's ("Get out there, Kleinman, and get killed."), Donald Pleasance as the ghoulish medico, Madonna -- surprisingly -- ("I'm not fussy. I'll eat whatever you put in front of me."), Wally Shawn who is in contention for the cameo king of American movies, and Lily Tomlin as a hard-bitten whore. In a movie that is studiously plotfree, the presence of so many guest stars is much more tolerable than in many movies, where the cameos are often a form of Hollywood cronyism (PETER PAN springs to mind here), gamesmanship, and otherwise irrelevant to the movie. The cameos in SHADOWS AND FOG may possibly contribute to the meaning of the movie (you never show whom you're going to run into in the fog, life is arbitrary and surprising) and provide little islands of clarity in all the swirling murk. For example, the Kavner scene fills us in on a bit of Kleinman's past and his personality.
Four of the roles rise above guest shots: Allen, Mia Farrow as Irmy the swordswallower, John Cusak as the student whose studies of the human condition take him to brothels and bars, and John Malkovich as the clown too caught in being an artist to be a Mensch. Allen was Allen; we fans would never permit him to be otherwise. The harmless little man caught up in things beyond his powers to understand or to articulate, he can only stutter and rub his hands endlessly. The everyman who survives with oneliners and sidesteps and who finds his redemption is the world of illusion (beginning to sound a little autobiographical, ain't it?).
Mia Farrow as Irmy continues to be Woody's understudy, and maybe heir apparent. As I remarked when I reviewed ALICE, she's taken on his mannerisms, if not quite his persona, to an almost disturbing degree. Is she the new Zelig? Her performance is probably the most interesting, certainly her character is, a circus swordswallower with biological clock and a price. Look out for her scene in the brothel; it is the best this movie has to offer.
John Malkovich is a very mannered actor, whose ability to communicate intellectualized selfishness is nonpareil but does not quite work as the clown. Of course, it's amusing to all of us other clowns to have him in full makeup going on about his life as an Artist, about how his head is constantly full of wonderful new things, but I kept seeing Valmont from DANGEROUS LIAISONS. Malkovich, funny though he could be, never seemed to fully connect with the essential absurdity of his character and took his too earnestly.
On the other hand, John Cusak was perfect as the student. One could believe that this was the stand-in for Kafka himself. Trying hard to keep his materialism and world-weariness intact, asking about God and suicide, and yet with the underlying romanticism that kept nagging him not to dismiss everything that every happened to him.
Overall, I have to admit that is one of the master's least successful efforts. It is almost all style, little substances, surfaces and no depths. The existential questions are like the usual suspects; Woody's rounded them up again, but it's not too any great purpose. It will be of interest only to the true believer. The rest of you may safely pass it by. True believers are cautioned to pay matinee prices.
There is a rather wonderful last line, maybe that is worth the price of the matinee ticket.
-- Frank Richard Aloysius Jude Maloney .
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