Woody Allen’s Apropos of Nothing Is a Humble and Crabby Confessional

For Allen, his new memoir is a form of retreat-as-attack, or perhaps vice versa.

Apropos of NothingIn his memoir Apropos of Nothing, Woody Allen goes out of his way to portray himself as an average Joe who got lucky, resisting his reputation as a brilliant artist and intellectual even as he recounts one triumph and extraordinary encounter after another. As one might expect, the book is rich in name-dropping, such as Allen being complimented by Tennessee Williams and Federico Fellini, arguing movies with Pauline Kael, and hanging between jazz sets with Cary Grant. These events, and many others, are described by the 84-year-old legend in a curt, matter-of-fact, somewhat amusing understatement, as if to say, “That’s life.” There’s a witty sentiment on nearly every page of this book, but Allen’s chilly approach to his own story feels alternately humble and crabby.

This slim memoir offers a general once-over of the Woody Allen narrative, starting with his childhood in Brooklyn. Allen’s father was a hustler who indulged his children and spent more than he could make, while Allen’s mother sacrificed likeability for the sake of maintaining domestic order, a dichotomy that leads to one of the book’s most poignant observations: “Sadly, even though my mother was a much better parent, much more responsible, and more mature than my not-so-moral, philandering father, I loved him more. Everybody did.” Apropos of Nothing has several such startling lines, revealing the occasional emotional benefits of Allen’s direct, plain-stated prose. Such writing underscores the book’s pervading and often unexplored sadness, suggesting the fuller autobiography that might’ve been.

It is, however, refreshing when a memoir or a biography skips yards of obliging genealogy so as to get to the material that motivated one to buy it in the first place. Allen has a sense of what you want from him, in terms of the glories and the terrifying still hotly contested nadirs of his life. After a childhood of bickering parents, baseball, magic tricks, and dreaming of life as a Manhattan playboy like a character out of a vintage Hollywood romance or noir (a dream that he would realize on his own terms), Allan Konigsberg began writing one-liners for city columns, eventually christening himself Woody Allen and rising rapidly through the ranks as a comedy writer. Allen would ride into the city, knock out 50 jokes a day for a publicity firm, who would attribute the lines to various celebrities, and for this task he was out-earning his parents combined. Soon he was writing for TV, working for legends like Sid Caesar with up-and-comers such as Mel Brooks. Not long afterward, new manager Jack Rollins was helping Allen refine a stand-up routine. This is one of the better portions of the memoir, as Allen bothers to communicate the work of honing a personality via one performance after another.

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Throughout Apropos of Nothing, it’s difficult to distinguish Allen’s intended tongue-in-cheekiness from his callousness, especially when the neuroses of his second wife, actress Louise Lasser, are anchored primarily from the scrim of how they affected him. Allen’s descriptions of women are generally dated and tasteless, probably to willfully spite the Woke Police, and one of the worst is directed at Lasser: “Then, a few days later the madness subsides and she’s pound for pound the best female in the world.”

As Allen checks off his various dalliances and relationships—his rendering of Diane Keaton is reverential, though he’s characteristically murky on the actual textures of their collaboration—he also works his way through his dozens of films in passages that alternate from the sublime to fortune-cookie thin. Allen pushes back hard against the notion of himself as an auteur, noting the many ways that everyone on a production has shaped his voice, while demythologizing himself with tales of his aesthetic as a result of accidents. His propensity for his long master shots springs from his allergy to rehearsing, while chapter headings in his films have sometimes served to bridge gaps that couldn’t be solved by editing.

Allen also recounts the many times that films have drastically changed shape, from the abandoned two-narrative structure of Sleeper to the entirely re-shot September to the dramatically re-cut and re-shot Annie Hall. His openness to admitting these setbacks refutes the image of the auteur as an all-mighty god and dreamer, and these stories are refreshing and encouraging to hear from an artist of Allen’s magnitude. (On September: “A drama that asks the question: Can a group of tortured souls come to terms with their sad lives when directed by a guy who should still be writing mother-in-law jokes for Broadway columnists?”)

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Yet even the passages devoted to Allen’s films are vague; he has little interest in discussing his process apart from a few anecdotes, and many of the actors he worked with are written off with a pat adjective, usually “terrific.” This affected indifference is part of Allen’s average-Joe routine, his apparent conviction that, though he’s writing a memoir, little of this material is worth mining at length—hence the book’s all-too-appropriate title. But this naïf routine is a charade, as evinced by Eric Lax’s Conversations with Woody Allen: His Films, the Movies, and Moviemaking. In that indispensable interview book, Allen goes into plenty of detail on his craft. For instance, he discusses his collaboration with Keaton thusly: “That’s why Diane Keaton always came out funnier in the movies I played with her, because I’d write all the jokes for myself—and I can do jokes nicely and get my laughs—but she was always funny in the scene because her stuff was always character. I’m going through a movie like Annie Hall glib and facile as a comic, but she’s going through as a character.” Such specificity, such an admittance to the gods of process, is only fleetingly present in Apropos of Nothing.

This cool, reductive voice of Allen’s is revealed to serve a purpose. Far from a definitive account of Allen’s working life, Apropos of Nothing is a response to the elephant of Allen’s legacy: his cheating on Mia Farrow with her 21-year-old adopted daughter, Soon-Yi Previn, and Farrow’s subsequent accusations that Allen molested her seven-year-old daughter, Dylan, whom Allen had adopted, in 1992. This material composes a third of Allen’s book, and his fury serves as a counterpoint to the plaintive prose, lending his accusations an authority and credibility that might be lacking if his style were more heated. Allen portrays Farrow as a monster, who bore and adopted children out of vanity, collecting them like expensive pocketbooks, only to abuse them physically and psychologically. He alleges that Farrow plucked Soon-Yi from a Korean nunnery at the age of five, berating her when she didn’t learn English quickly, terming her “retarded.” Another child was locked in a shed, others were put to work as servants, and implications of mental health crises were ignored. (Smugly, spitefully, Allen says that it’s no wonder one of Farrow’s children committed suicide.)

Allen alleges that Farrow said to him that she would get revenge for his affair with Soon-Yi, cooking up the allegations concerning Dylan. There are many stories here of Farrow “brainwashing” Dylan, drilling into the child’s head a story with shifting details. These episodes are of an extravagant awfulness, giving Apropos of Nothing a shocking, lurid power. Many of Allen’s allegations against Farrow have been echoed by Soon-Yi as well as another of Farrow’s children, Moses. Allen finds it ironic that his son Satchel, now the acclaimed journalist Ronan Farrow, would castigate NBC’s downplaying of the Harvey Weinstein scandal while himself seeking to minimize Soon-Yi’s version of events in New York magazine. However, Allen makes many unsubstantiated accusations himself, implying that Farrow was sleeping with a judge and a clerk of the court during their trial.

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Of all the hearsay on both sides, there’s an intrinsically important fact: After two elaborate investigations, Allen has been found guilty of nothing by no court except that of public opinion—an opinion that generally thinks Soon-Yi, to whom he’s now been married for over 20 years, is his adopted daughter. Allen worked unimpeded for decades after the Farrow accusations only to be blacklisted again recently in the wake of Me Too, a necessary movement which has nevertheless led to notions of guilty-until-proven-innocent and of all indiscretions as career-ending. The younger stars who’ve said they’ve regretted working with Allen—Greta Gerwig, Timothée Chalamet, among others—certainly knew of the accusations when they signed on to work with him, but they couldn’t have known that those accusations would matter again, especially to their own careers. Given this context, Allen’s bitterness is more than understandable, but it has curdled his empathy. These episodes aren’t so much dramatized as rattled off in Apropos of Nothing, and the book would be far more powerful if Allen had been able to rouse himself, as an artist, to identify with Farrow’s rage at his affair with Soon-Yi. (He says merely that Farrow’s initial reaction to the affair was “correct.”)

Even Allen’s anger at Farrow, and modern society’s hypocrisy, isn’t mined as fully as it might’ve been; he essentially shrugs it all off, ending his book with a sigh of “fuck it.” Imagine what Norman Mailer, another acquaintance of Allen’s, might’ve done with this material’s vast intersection of politics, sex, evolving mores, pop culture, and demons, including those of this filmmaker. Allen is a great artist, but he’s so close to this material that he seems to have felt the defensive need to pull back from it. Apropos of Nothing, itself more or less banned from this country, is a form of retreat-as-attack, or perhaps vice versa.

Apropos of Nothing is now available from Arcade.

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Chuck Bowen

Chuck Bowen's writing has appeared in The Guardian, The Atlantic, The AV Club, Style Weekly, and other publications.

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