Anything Else Review

By Kate Brokaw
A&F Associate

For all the weight-obsessed whining that Christina Ricci does in Anything Else, she sure sinks the movie like a lead balloon. Not to say that she’s the only one at fault here– the thirty-third feature film of Woody Allen’s once-illustrious career is just another in his recent line of stinkers. There’s not even any subtle charm to Anything Else, or even a hint of the good-naturedness that managed to partially redeem his recent Small Time Crooks. With Allen finally losing his grasp on the fine line between neurotic and insufferably horrible, Anything Else is both unfunny and mind-numbingly tedious.

A sort of anesthetic, bastard child of Annie Hall, Anything Else purports to be a story of the bumbling romance between two young New Yorkers, Jerry (Jason Biggs), a struggling comedy writer, and Amanda (Ricci), a pill-popping, obsessive neurotic. Their relationship plays out through unorganized flashbacks, as Biggs takes refuge from insanity in his new friendship with David Dobel (Allen), the film’s intended purveyor of wisdom. Dobel is a schoolteacher-cum-comedy writer who loves to spout off advice to Jerry during endless walks in Central Park. Representing the increasingly nutty and embittered world view of recent Allen, Dobel is also a gun-happy lunatic, but he is right about Amanda. “Now she’s difficult,” he warns Jerry early on in the film. “Soon, she’ll be impossible.”

On the surface, Anything Else certainly maintains an appearance of charm and class, with Darius Khondji’s gorgeous New York cinematography and Allen’s usual crackling soundtrack of old jazz standards. But old-time music cannot create any sort of old-time charm in the lame relationship at the center of the film, as the glaring contrast between Jerry the well-meaning do-gooder and Amanda the nutcase is such that there is absolutely no drive to the film. Even as Amanda steps all over Jerry and refuses to have sex with him, we really could not care less about their relationship. We are meant to think that Amanda is incredibly desirable, but in spite of Ricci’s voluptuous curves, it seems completely unrealistic that anyone in their right mind would want to tolerate her for more than five minutes. And besides the occasional narrative digression with Amanda’s drama-queen mother (Stockard Channing) and Jerry’s equally over-the-top agent (Danny DeVito), the couple’s bickering takes up most of the film.

Clearly, Allen is trying to make a stab at recruiting a younger audience with this Ricci-Biggs starrer (the film’s advertisements were notably lacking in glimpses of Allen’s role), but Anything Else seems out-of-touch in nearly every conceivable sense. His young adults are obsessed with Edna St. Vincent Millay, go to Diana Krall concerts, and steadfastly refuse to leave the Upper East Side. Consequently, it feels as if Biggs and Ricci are merely playacting their way through a bad Woody Allen flick, going through the motions as they try to imitate the far more grownup performances that marked Allen’s previous oeuvre.

Admittedly, Biggs is working away with as much confused charm as he can muster, but he’s ultimately just bland and uninteresting, as well as too genial a counterpart for anyone else on screen. As for Ricci, it seems enough to say that she was far more believably sophisticated as Wednesday Addams. Allen has made a career out of his portrayals of these high-strung neurotic types, but whatever inexplicable charm may have been present in Amanda on the page is completely lost with Ricci, who plays the role as if a high-pitched whine and childish pout were going out of style. It’s a performance that’s painfully grating and nearly unbearable in parts, completely absent of any grounding realism– much like the film itself.

With Anything Else, Allen has managed to make a romantic comedy that is completely absent of either romance or a single good joke. The wry and witty discourses of Allen’s past work are but a distant memory when Jerry and Amanda meet cute over generic agreements that Humphrey Bogart is so “urban,” Billie Holliday is so “amazing,” and the jazz singer they’re watching is so “moving.” (“Yes! Yes! Moving! I agree! You’ve captured her!” Biggs is forced to reply with some glimmer of unexplainable excitement.) Jerry’s conversations with Dobel are endless circles of non-advice, peppered with paranoid Jew jokes. Haven’t we heard this all before? A messy, boring, and hackneyed version of anything Allen has ever done before, Anything Else takes nearly two hours to go absolutely nowhere.