HOLLYWOOD ENDING (2002)  *1/2

Reviewed 4/30/02

Woody Allen’s latest is a slow trudge through familiar themes (yeah, that can be said of a lot of his movies from the past 15 years).  What makes it worse though is that it just isn’t very funny.  Allen plays Val Waxman, a film director who once tried to be the great American filmmaker, but is now washed-up and doing humiliating television commercials.  He gets his chance at a come back when his ex-wife Ellie (Téa Leoni) and Galaxy studio head Hal (Treat Williams), who stole her from him, offers Val an opportunity to direct “The City That Never Sleeps,” tailor-made to his sensibilities.  Suddenly, Val comes down with psychosomatic blindness, but his agent Al (Mark Rydell) convinces him he can fake his way through lest his career end.

The movie just feels like Allen doesn’t care.  Val and Ellie’s relationship does not begin to show any spark of life until the movie is almost over, partly because Ellie disappears for a good middle portion of the movie.  A subplot about Val’s uncomfortable relationship with his punk musician son comes out of nowhere and pretty much goes nowhere.  Then Allen can’t even get jokes right.  He tries to pry humor from Val’s being unable to face the right direction in conversation, but even blind people know the direction from which other voices are coming.  It makes no sense and is just lazy.

Unlike most of the rest of the cast, Debra Messing shows some spunk, but her bit role as Val’s young girlfriend is truly thankless.  Tiffani (no longer “Amber”) Thiessen is apparently in the movie only so Allen can touch her breast.   Leone, Williams, and George Hamilton all seem to struggle with Allen’s brand of expository dialogue.  Allen himself stammers much more than usual to the point of annoyance.

Allen makes an obvious autobiographical allusion to working with Chinese director of photography, Zhao Fei (on Allen’s three previous films) as well as returning to usual and now tired subjects like hypochondria, bashing punk rock, and dating much younger women.  Allen’s recent surprise standup routine at the Oscars was funnier than this whole movie.  The one plus HOLLYWOOD ENDING has going for it is Wedigo von Schultzendorff’s cinematography, which just looks glowing.