November 27, 2024
by Titus Techera
After a Halloween consideration of Tim Burton’s vision of all-American freaks, I’d like to offer you a similarly strange tribute to Woody Allen’s Thanksgiving. The juxtaposition may seem strange, yet Burton and Allen are outsiders who became famous artists. They succeeded largely because they understand that it is funny, and not a little flattering, for the audience to look at ourselves from the outside. Both filmmakers are considered a bit odd, with immediately recognizable styles. But they still focus on, well, us.
Allen peaked with Manhattan (1979), which was celebrated, and Stardust Memories (1980), which is even better though not as celebrated, partly because it’s openly imitative of Fellini. Allen could have shocked the critics by claiming to have improved on Fellini. Overpowering beauty is quite something, but comedy gets the last laugh, he could say.
Even if his work didn’t reach the same heights, Allen had a very good decade in the 80s. Success may have gone to his head or maybe he got soft. Either way, he started making Thanksgiving movies like Broadway Danny Rose, now reaching its 40th anniversary. Allen plays Danny Rose, a talent agent who is comically untalented, but has a good heart. Danny is very dedicated to his clients, who are themselves unimpressive as artists. Why does he care then?
It’s because show-business is about making dreams come true. Danny can’t stand to see people’s dreams crushed—their hopes remind him of his own. He’s pitiful, but laughable. The stories, the jokes, the examples of entertainers, and their faces, too—well, they might make you think nature is cruel in giving such ambitions to people so unsuited to realize them.
Suddenly, Danny seems to get lucky when a singer he manages, Lou Canova (there’s a comic name!), gets his comeback. Danny throws himself into making Lou succeed, or at least not fall apart before he has his big night. Suddenly, he’s not managing losers, but the vices of a potential winner—the drinking, the histrionics, and, of course, the mistress, Tina Vitale (again, the names!), played by Mia Farrow. A few misunderstandings later, Danny and Tina are running from the mafia while debating their outlook on life.
So we get a view of Jews and Italians, the comic and tragic talent in our entertainment for most of the 20th century. From Sinatra to Coppola’s Godfather to Scorsese and all the way to Tony Soprano, Italians were the protagonists of our dramas—operatic, passionate characters caricatured in Broadway Danny Rose. The Jewish artists were the comics, all the way to Seinfeld. Tina is accordingly in bed with the mafia and she’s softening a little now that she’s getting Lou to abandon his family for her while advising him to betray Danny for better management. Life’s short, she says, you have to grab with both hands if you’re going to get anything out of it.
This is where things get interesting. Danny likes Tina, maybe loves her, but is also horrified at her outlook more than he is scared by the mobsters who act it out, since he could never love them. So what can comedy do facing such cruel beauty? He talks to her about guilt! Allen’s joke is that Danny can’t believe in God, but he at least feels guilty about it. People without guilt would do terrible things, as we see in the beautiful people who live at the expense of people like Danny.
Like much of Allen’s comedy, Broadway Danny Rose is a return to the Broadway and Hollywood of the 1930s and ‘40s, the golden age Allen usually imitates. Cast out of paradise, Allen’s protagonists live in a rather unhappy world. We all know Danny is never going to make it. He knows it, too, and it’s encouraging his existential despair. Come Thanksgiving, he can hardly summon the spirit of the holiday, yet he does, and we see him finally with clarity.
He’s a man in search of a family to love. Things aren’t working out for him because he’s in the wrong business. More loyal clients or a lucky break would be nice, but they wouldn’t give him what he needs. Danny’s problem is not showbiz—it’s something more like orphanhood.
Thanksgiving, the family holiday, is primarily about giving thanks for having a family, as close to unconditional love as it gets. The run-around in the story, people chasing after romance and success, is comical because these characters, in their self-importance, miss the point. What they’re looking for is more boring, but in a way more unattainable than glamour. It might be easier to achieve success; family somehow happens, but it’s even less in your control than the applause of the audience.
Broadway Danny Rose ends with Thanksgiving and a reminder of the family love so many abandon in the pursuit of success. That’s where Hannah and Her Sisters (1986) opens, with a Thanksgiving party among a family of artists, one of whom is about to fall apart. Shifting from the earlier film to the later one, we go from the failures to the successes of our society, the class for whom art and therapy have replaced religion. We also get a star-studded ensemble cast—the kind of people Danny Rose would never get to work with.
While an old man plays Rogers and Hart’s Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered–again, Woody Allen and Broadway—Elliot (Michael Caine) fantasizes about Lee (Barbara Hershey), who turns out to be his wife Hannah’s (Mia Farrow) sister. That’s some kind of joke, but it’s a joke about a new America, defined by divorce more than marriage. Elliot and Lee start an affair.
Lee is a recovering drunkard who fell for an older painter, Frederick (Max von Sydow), stern, demanding, full of aspiration, who wants to teach her to be the kind of person who could be worthy of his approval. A few years in, even with all her daddy issues, Lee tires of him. She’s bored and miserable. But at least she gives up drinking and loses weight!
The sisters’ mother Norma (as in, Desmond, played by star of the older generation Maureen O'Sullivan, Farrow’s real mother) throws tantrums and gets drunk because she’s getting old. Her husband Evan (Lloyd Nolan, also a star in the ‘30s) is the piano player at the Thanksgiving party. It seems that glamour isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. One of Allen’s jokes is that both Hannah and her mother played Nora in Ibsen’s Doll House. Sentimental art attacking the bourgeois version of the patriarchy doesn’t really lead to the higher life.
This brings us to Hannah’s first husband Mickey (Allen), who’s suffering from—what else?—existential dread in the form of hypochondria. Their marriage failed because they couldn’t have kids—the doctor told him he’s infertile. They had kids by modern means and then divorced. Mickey is a successful writer for comic shows whose partner dumped him for Hollywood; he’s thinking he needs religion instead.
Hannah and Her Sisters features more impressive characters than Broadway Danny Rose. They are comparatively unsophisticated as well as unpretentious, but live by the same measure tawdrier lives. They have families, but they also have alternatives. They matter more, because they are the tip of the spear, so to speak, the most modern part of modern America. But they are more miserable. Thanksgiving is in a way even harder for them to understand, because they’re trying to transform it along with every aspect of life to fit the demand of self-realization.
The two movies correspond to different demands for entertainment and authenticity, for something beautiful to see and something it would be beautiful to be. Both point to how difficult it is to have knowledge of what it means to be human and that the acquisition of sophistication is even less likely than the acquisition of glamour to replace family.
In Hannah and Her Sisters, the focus on art suggests that the more modern we become, the more we suspect that everyone’s playing a role, trying on an identity, in short, everyone’s an impostor. The unspoken love of family with all its heartbreak, gathering for Thanksgiving after Thanksgiving and remembering their life together, is an alternative to that elaborate construction of identity. Family is not about what you can make people believe you are, but what you cannot escape being.
Both movies are quite funny, but they also have a moral subtlety. Comedy is about self-importance and both Broadway Danny Rose and Hannah and Her Sisters present warnings about the way things we admire can undermine the little we understand about ourselves. They’re also ugly movies in certain ways, and that comes with its own subtlety. Beauty can be deceptive. Willingness to accept that some things are ugly, but good for us, is the moral purpose comedy can serve. Allen wants to undermine the self-importance that makes people behave badly and even to encourage substituting forgiveness for being demanding. That’s his contribution to Thanksgiving.
Both movies opened in Cannes, got Allen Oscar nominations, and were met with good reviews. Hannah and Her Sisters was his big hit of the decade. Those were the days. Allen’s turning 89 this Thanksgiving weekend. He’s been banished from Hollywood—canceled—and has only made one film in France since 2020. Maybe it’s over for him, a sad fate a little reminiscent of his characters, but he deserves applause just as they do. He’s not the great American comedian, but he is the hardest working comedian, having made a movie a year for more than 40 years. Some of them were turkeys, just like the acts Danny Rose represented. But we can be thankful all the same.
Titus Techera is the Executive Director of the American Cinema Foundation and a culture critic for think tanks including Liberty Fund and the Acton Institute. He teaches in the Manhattan Institute Logos Fellowship and is a Visiting Fellow at the Mattias Corvinus Collegium in Budapest.