The Purple Rose of Cairo (Mia Farrow, Jeff Daniels)
Woody Allen has an uncanny propensity towards making ordinary everyday conversation vibrant, important, and surprisingly realistic. The famous discussions in Annie Hall resonated so strongly that it won best picture in 1977 against such supposed shoo-ins as The Goodbye Girl and Star Wars. Allen had conquered Hollywood and he'd mastered the movie comedy, but sweeping romance as an homage to the old classics had yet to be attempted.
If The Purple Rose of Cairo doesn't rank as high on my lop-sided ratings system, it's only because Allen's comedies are in a league of their own. When reviewing Allen's latest picture The Curse of the Jade Scorpion this week, critic Richard Roeper pointed out that even a mediocre Allen picture is miles ahead of any other comedies playing today. He's right, but my three star rating is still apt because I'm rating it alongside Allen's other movies.
The material here absolutely shines. Mia Farrow is Cecilia, a sad and disillusioned waitress during the Depression. To avoid her abusive husband (Danny Aiello), she often escapes to the local movie house and immerses herself in the world of sweeping romance, sparkling champagne and fancy outfits. Farrow's expressions as she watches the pictures are sweet and laced with magic. One day, character Tom Baxter (Jeff Daniels) notices Cecilia has seen the movie several times, and decides to walk off the screen and profess his love to her. It's here that director Allen excels, allowing for lots of metaphysical and metatheatrical concepts to mesh. We are then introduced to Gil Shepherd (Daniels), the real actor who played the part of Tom. While this plot gimmick is quaint in the first few scenes, Allen's ending sloppily ties up several loose ends without really playing these witty paradoxes to their full potential.
Farrow anchors the picture nicely as a woman struggling to make sense of seemingly endless nonsense: "I just met a wonderful new man. He's fictional but you can't have everything," she professes. Also, Jeff Daniels finally puts in a decent performance; normally I find him one of the most boring actors around. Woody veteran Dianne Wiest has a fun scene with the naive Daniels as a brothel solicitor.
Of course, the sequences between the movie house employees and the characters stuck in the black and white movie are the most fun. The realization of the stock characters that they are sentient is a joy to watch, especially a scene when the Maitre D' decides he's always wanted to dance and does so with the band's help.
Allen's constant desire to remain fresh and creative highlights the best of his work. In the case of the Purple Rose of Cairo, it is the idea of the movie characters coming to life that is creative, but not the execution of the concept. Be that as it may, the characters (both "real" and "not real") are all struggling to find themselves, to find out who they are. Perhaps Daniels as Tom Baxter says it best: "I was thinking about life in general. The origin of everything we see about us. The finality of death; how almost magical it seems in the real world, as opposed to the world of celluloid and flickering shadows."
Regardless of the era we live in or the part we play in life's continuing movie reel, aren't we all pondering exactly the same thing?
