Nick
Catalano is a TV writer/producer and Professor of Literature
and Music at Pace University. He reviews books and music for
several journals and is the author of Clifford
Brown: The Life and Art of the Legendary Jazz Trumpeter,
New York
Nights: Performing, Producing and Writing in Gotham
and A
New Yorker at Sea. Nick’s reviews are available
at www.nickcatalano.net
In
all of the world’s creative literature, music, painting,
film and drama there is certainly no subject more explored than
romantic love. It is a paramount human activity and artists
everywhere have bravely encountered its myriad pitfalls and
complexities while struggling to decipher its essences. Yet
perhaps its highest expression – that of festive romance,
emotional apotheosis, and amorous fantasy – has been met
with fierce hostility from critics everywhere.
Woody
Allen’s new film, Magic in the Moonlight, is
the latest creation to receive critical downplay of romantic
love. A deeply cynical huckster-magician Stanley Crawford, played
by Colin Firth, encounters medium Sophie Baker, played by Emma
Stone, in an effort to prove her a fraud. His renowned reputation
is based on the bedrock assumption that all magician’s
tricks can be discovered and explained and there is absolutely
no way that Sophie’s clairvoyance (she earns a living
conducting séances) is genuine spiritual power. They
spend time together in the delicious French countryside and
despite his repeated expression of misanthropy and skepticism,
they fall in love. The theme of this story is that “the
world is not without magic.”
In
previous films, Allen has grudgingly acknowledged the substantial
incursions that romance makes on human consciousness. “The
heart wants what it wants” from Hannah and her Sisters
and “. . . yeah, but we need the eggs” concluding
Annie Hall are his reluctant admissions of human need
for romance. Indeed, most of his films struggle with the problems
of amorous relationships. But this is the first time that the
filmmaker has celebrated the ‘magic’ of romance.
As such, it has received foreseeable antipathy from critics.
“Painfully artificial,” an “amusing diversion,”
“destined to become a footnote in [Allen’s] career,”
are some of the unsurprising critical comments. There are sprinkling
of positive responses having to do with cinematography, setting,
acting and such but the theme of magic love has few takers.
Critical rejection of Allen’s theme illustrating the power
of love to subdue reason and all matters of practicality has
been around for a long time. Some famous rebuffs include one
given to Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet –
the archetypical story of intense romantic love. No less an
esteemed member of English literati than Samuel Pepys in his
famous Diary declared “it is a play of itself
the worst that ever I heard in my life. The Bard’s Othello
and its principal character’s intense emotional adoration
of Desdemona is dismissed outright by George Bernard Shaw. He
says this is “pure melodrama . . . There is not a touch
of characterization that goes below the skin.”
Often
in the litany of critical commentary, deep emotive passion is
ridiculed as something unnatural and illusory. One pivotal instance
of such an attack occurs in a review of Shelley’s haunting
poem “The Indian Serenade” which begins:
Anyone
acquainted with Shelley’s poetry readily understands his
frequent themes of passion and intense psycho-emotional involvement.
Many have lauded his lyrics as the most successful at expressing
feelings that defy analysis.
But
the proliferation of exclamation marks and onomatopoetic language
is too much for some notable critics. In one of the most prestigious
critical tomes in American letters – Understanding
Poetry (first published in 1938) - Cleanth Brooks and Robert
Penn Warren attack the credibility of Shelley’s theme.
The situation he describes, they maintain, is unreal. To ascribe
such feelings to anyone is “sentimental.” And they
define sentimentality as “the display of more emotion
than the situation warrants.” Thus the surrender of reason
to romantic magic to the degree that Shelley states is actually
absurd.
In
a paper I wrote as a graduate student many years ago, I contested
the pronouncements of these writers. Essentially what I said
was that many mortals have indeed experienced the irrational
depths of romantic love. And I suggested that Brooks and Warren
had attacked Shelley so confidently because they had probably
never come close to experiencing such emotions themselves.
What
has become for many the icon of romantic love movies is An
Affair to Remember, the 1957 film starring Cary Grant and
Deborah Kerr. This story so intrigued its director Leo McCarey
that he made it twice – the first time as Love Affair
starring Charles Boyer and Irene Dunne in 1939. And the power
and importance of the theme so concerned writer/director Nora
Ephron that she referenced it in her own successful romance
Sleepless in Seattle.
Predictably,
McCarey’s 1957 remake received insidious negative criticism
from no less a pundit than Bosley Crowther in the New York
Times. “The attraction of this fable,” he wrote,
“is in the velvety way in which two apparently blasé
people treat the experience of actually finding themselves in
love. This is an immature emotion . . . “ Crowther, like
Brooks and Warren, employs the word “sentiment”
and he obviously has the word’s pejorative connotation
in mind. He says the story communicates “romantic illusion.”
What
is perhaps most intriguing about Woody Allen’s film is
that, in contradistinction to all of the somber examples we
have cited, Magic in the Moonlight conveys its romantic
theme of ‘illusion’ and ‘magic’ in the
genre of romantic comedy. Thus the challenge of communicating
the mystery and seriousness of romantic love is perhaps greater
than our other examples. But like Shakespeare he prepares us
with carefully wrought character development. Romeo in Act 1
firmly protests his ‘love’ for Rosaline and at the
outset Stanley declares his relationship with Olivia to be a
“match made in heaven.” These romances are referenced
so that the graduation of these men to the level of ‘illusory’
and ‘magical’ love becomes dramatically probable.
The
two writers share foreshadowing technique. Allen has Sophie
express her romantic feelings for Stanley early on in the observatory
scene and this begins to dent his armor. Similarly Romeo’s
early awareness of Juliet’s amorousness deepens his intensity
quickly – “Did my heart love till now? Forswear
it, sight! For I ne’er saw true beauty till this night.”
In
clever dramatic irony, Allen buttresses the theme of illusion
vs. reason with several references to Nietzsche. Stanley and
Sophie continually spar over his recalcitrant adherence to logic
and reason. He bullies her with his knowledge of philosophers
and writers who have advocated the primacy of reason in human
affairs. But the name Nietzsche comes up and in a delightful
twist he finds himself quoting this philosopher’s insistence
on the importance of illusion. Nietzsche’s actual quote
is “if you destroy [people’s] illusions, they will
not be able to live at all . . . ”
There
are, of course, many other artists besides Shakespeare and Shelley
who have championed the significance of romance, fantasy and
illusion in human life. Most of the time, their themes are constructed
in grave genres with painful, emotional turns. Woody Allen has
often admitted that he is a prisoner of the comic muses and
cannot help but deliver themes without tongue steadfastly in
cheek. It is our good fortune that his art is so crafted.
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