DVD of the Week: Cassandra’s Dream

In the clip above, I discuss Woody Allen’s 2007 drama “Cassandra’s Dream,” which I described at the time of its release as “the best of his later films and one of his best films ever.” My enthusiasm for the film wasn’t shared by most critics, who saw Allen’s rapid pacing, indifference to the particulars of London social life, and forthrightly bleak world view as faults. In the Times, Manohla Dargis complained that it “feels too lightly polished and often rushed, as if he had directed it with a stopwatch.” Stephanie Zacharek, at Salon, claimed that “this isn’t filmmaking; it’s thesis defending.” Scott Foundas, in the Village Voice, said it “feels like one of Allen’s laziest pieces of writing and direction, leaden with heavy metaphor and characters who rarely make it beyond the archetype—marionettes in a miserabilist puppet theater.” In the Baltimore Sun, Chris Kaltenbach called it “perfunctorily staged and lazily written.” Woody Allen is still suffering from the nostalgia of critics who wish he’d go back to making ’em like he used to. He was, in his younger years, an urban folklorist, a mainstay of a milieu he mined for its comic potential (and, given that the milieu was New York’s media world, its significance radiated far beyond its links of personal relations). Now he goes straight to the heart of ideas and emotions, concentrating on matters of morality and leaving the study of mores to those who lead busier social lives. Where the auteur theory let us know that movie directors were artists as fully and identifiably as are writers, its latter-day decadent phase gives critics rope with which to tie filmmakers to their earlier work and reproach them for giving it the slip—as Allen has done. His artistry has, in some ways, thinned out (he works in a way that is indeed less like oil painting and more like sketches). It has, in other ways, deepened; certainly, he has changed his life, and his work has changed with it. His famously settled habits are, clearly, far less ingrained and far more malleable than are those of many of the critics who watch his films.