Country: United States
Genre: Art/ Comedy
Director: Woody Allen
Year: 1992
Rating: 
TRASH CINEMA HIGHLY RECOMMENDED MOVIE
Let’s start with the obvious. Husbands and Wives is an art flick — the readership of TrashCinemaClub.com isn’t the core audience. But remember, TrashCinemaClub.com has become a general purpose film criticism site with a focus on trash cinema, so I’ll be reviewing films like this from time to time.
Husbands and Wives deals with the Woodman’s usual obsessions: Manhattan intelligentsia, the intellectual bankruptcy of the wider culture, etc., but with an almost unseemly vitriol. This is Woody Allen’s harshest movie, and that even extends to the camera work. Cinematographer Carlo Di Palma uses a lot of jerky, handheld shots to mirror the mental dislocation of the characters.
This change of tone seems to have inspired Allen - Husbands and Wives is his best film of the nineties. Woody’s writing is incisive, ferocious and very funny. Every once in a while, you can hear his authorial voice or some of his lines will be blatantly phony, especially when he has an aerobics instructor prattle on about astrology, but when he sticks to what he knows, the ability of intellectuals to endlessly justify their own horrifying behavior, he’s as accurate as an atomic clock.
Professor Gabe Roth (Woody Allen), his wife Judy (Mia Farrow), and their best friends Sally (Judy Davis) and Jack (Sydney Pollack) are getting ready to go out to dinner when Sally and Jack drop the bomb — they’re separating. Gabe and Judy are stunned — they thought Sally and Jack had the perfect marriage.
The film follows these four main characters as they have affairs and consistently try to make themselves the hero of their own stories.
Sydney Pollack, better known as a director, is a revelation as an actor here. He has tremendous comic timing, and yet you couldn’t ask for a more naturalistic, reality based performance. As Sally, Judy Davis is brittle and bitchy, and is completely unaware of how monstrously selfish she is. Mia Farrow turns her normally sweet personality completely inside out, portraying a passive aggressive bitch of the worst sort. Liam Neeson is touching as Michael Gates, a man so essentially decent that he second guesses his completely accurate assessment of Judy and ends up apologizing to her. Lysette Anthony sparkles as the aerobics instructor I mentioned earlier. She does her best with some terrible dialog Woody sticks in her mouth — it’s a tribute to her skills as an actor that she still registers as a real person in spite of this handicap. Woody Allen uses Juliette Lewis’ natural self confidence, which borders on self love, to skew his standard portrayal of an innocent into something more curdled. Allen himself is fine as long as he’s kvetching, but there’s something sickening about his romantic fantasies about Juliette Lewis’ character. He comes off as a perv, and I’m not just saying that because of his real life adventures with his stepdaughter. Allen’s character is intended as the conscience of the movie, but it doesn’t really play that way. It’s just Allen sanctimoniously patting himself on the back. (Prematurely, as it turned out.)
At it’s heart, Husbands and Wives portrays people as animals. They’re driven by the basest needs and desires, but they lie to themselves and each other with fancy intellectual equivocations. Their intellectualism is simply the skin over the skull of tooth and claw survival.
I know I’ve made Husbands and Wives sound as amusing as a trip to the dentist, but it’s actually very funny, although it’s the kind of humor that will make you wince as often as not.
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