Allen endures as creative filmmaker

It wasn't long ago, on the heels of his critically drubbed film, Scenes From a Mall, that the cape of American movie-making superhero Woody Allen was besmeared by child molestation charges and a messy, tabloid-chronicled split with longtime companion Mia Farrow.

Since those tumultuous days, Allen has directed two very good films (Husbands and Wives and Manhattan Murder Mystery) and one great one (Bullets Over Broadway). The latter garnered him Academy Award nominations for Best Director and Best Original Screenplay. Obviously, Allen's splintered social life hasn't hindered his ability as an artist. But its effect on his own perception of his art has been harder to gauge.

In the Oct. 12, 1994 issue of the Chicago Sun Times, film critic Roger Ebert posed to Allen a variation of a question tossed about by the fictitious artist-types in Bullets Over Broadway. Ebert asked, if you were forced to choose between saving the life of a drowning derelict and your own life's work, what would you do?

Allen's reply was this:

"Oh, I don't care about my life's work for a second. When I die, I don't care what they do with it. They can flush it down the toilet. There's a delusion that (death is) going to have some meaning to you, when, in fact, you'll be a nonexistent thing; there'll be not a trace of consciousness. So it becomes completely irrelevant, what happens after your death. Totally. It doesn't mean a thing."

Likewise, the play-writing protagonist in Bullets Over Broadway ultimately concludes -- with much the same hyperbole -- that life is more important than art. Of course, he isn't especially talented. Allen is.

John Cusack proved a capable Allen stand-in as that neurotic, fresh-faced playwright, and fellow cast members Jennifer Tilly, Chazz Palminteri, and Oscar-winning Dianne Wiest were delicious in supporting roles to help make Bullets Over Broadway a hit.

Ten years ago, Allen, instead of contentedly keeping his slender posterior seated in the director's chair and out of camera view, would have probably cast himself as Cusack's character in Bullets Over Broadway. But the famously spectacled face of New York City's best-known film amateur isn't so fresh anymore, and the part of a young playwright is certainly beyond his acting range.

The part of a middle-aged Jewish sportswriter, however, is not. And that's just who Allen portrays in his most recent film, Mighty Aphrodite, which starts a two-day run at the University Center Auditorium tonight.

Mighty Aphrodite, first released this past holiday season, is the story of the aforementioned Lenny (Allen), a likable fellow who becomes disenchanted with his artsy, socially over conscious wife (Helena Bonham Carter) and simultaneously infatuated with the trick-turning natural mother (Mira Sorvino) of his adopted child.

True to form, Allen delivers plenty of pleasantly witty "neuroticisms" as a self-fancied intellectual and first-time father. (Particularly memorable is Lenny's floor-pacing, temple-rubbing search for a suitable name to bestow upon his new son. After exhausting the monikers of several iconoclastic baseball heroes and jazz greats, Lenny settles on "Max.")

And as if his signature anxiety-soaked, stream-of-conscious rambling wasn't enough, Allen actually allows audience members passage into Lenny's mind by way of a hallucinatory Greek chorus.

The chorus, which is led by a psycho babbling F. Murray Abraham (sporting perhaps more make-up than he did as the elderly Salieri in Amadeus) and comes complete with a prognosticating Cassandra, provides philosophical and pragmatic counseling to Lenny in his ethically questionable quest for his son's birth mother. In doing so, it whimsically injects modern-day coffee-shop vernacular into its dramatic verse and performs a few absurd but jauntily choreographed ragtime sing-and-dance numbers. The antics of Allen's imaginary chorus merit more smirking and eye-rolling than laughs, but it ultimately comes across as a fun storytelling technique.

Speaking of fun, Sorvino shines in what she called "the greatest dumb blonde role written in the past 25 years, if not ever."

Sorvino plays Linda, the flighty, sexually unreserved call girl/porn actress who -- though she doesn't know it -- is the mother of insatiably inquisitive pal Lenny's adopted son. In spite of her bent for the tastelessly erotic, one can't help but enjoy watching Sorvino's character prance across the screen. Linda has a heart as big as her...well, you know, and Sorvino (a real-life Harvard grad) plays the character with appropriately unrestrained energy and childlike naivet.

Like Sorvino's Linda, the movie itself is fun, fresh and sporadically clever, but it will never be mentioned in the same breath as Annie Hall, Hannah and Her Sisters, or Crimes and Misdemeanors. Mighty Aphrodite is intentionally more lighthearted than those films, and, after ambling along jocularly for the first hour or so, the story crumbles disappointingly into clumps of hastily resolved -- and unresolved -- endings. Nonetheless, it is a movie worth seeing.

Perhaps more importantly, though, the film seems further evidence that Woody Allen still embraces his craft with tenacious affection. And as long as that's the case, even average efforts from Allen will reign superior to the best undertakings of most other filmmakers.