Rating: 5 out of 5
A certain percentage of Woody Allen's career is based on the idea of taking the same exaggerated, neurotic version of himself, placing him in different situations, and seeing what happens naturally. Sometimes it works out, and sometimes it doesn't. With his beautifully funny 1975 film Love and Death, it works better than ever.
Allen's screen persona is timid, frenetic, ultimately sweet, but naive in a way that only the wittiest person could write. There aren't many changes in his character from film to film because that would ruin the formula. Before this, he was everything from a bank robber to a robot. Have him in mind? Now imagine him in War and Peace.
Allen's sixth film is a lot like a Monty Python performance of a Dostoyevsky rewrite of The Luck of Barry Lyndon. He plays Boris Grushenko (not even attempting an accent, of course), a Russian pacifist/coward during the Napoleonic Era. When his vain cousin Sonja (Diane Keaton, another strong performance in the time between the Godfathers and Annie Hall), whom he loves, becomes engaged to a herring merchant, he joins the army. Despite numerous training mishaps, he is sent to fight the French, and inadvertently becomes a hero when he is fired out of a cannon is which he was hiding. He returns home and weds the reluctant, recently widowed Sonja, and they begin a marriage filled with philosophical debates and espionage.
Being his last film prior to Annie Hall, Love and Death is seen as a transition from Allen's earlier hectic comedies to his more serious, artistic ones. It strikes a middle ground between the styles, making it one of his broadest and best. The opening lines are rather exemplary of the film's overall tone: "How I got into this predicament, I'll never know. Absolutely incredible. To be executed for a crime I never committed. Of course, isn't all mankind in the same boat? Isn't all mankind ultimately executed for a crime it never committed? The difference is that all men go eventually, but I go six o'clock tomorrow morning. I was supposed to go at five o'clock, but I have a smart lawyer. Got leniency."
There's something magic in Woody Allen's brain that can take any setup and wade through all of the possible responses to find the absolute most clever thing to say. Before moving into his more sophisticated works, he makes sure that not one scene here is deprived of that talent, but he gives a structure to the plot that his previous films lacked. A masterful parody of 19th-century Russian epics, Love and Death becomes an indisputable triumph by juxtaposing pure Woody Allen silliness and deliberate anachronistic absurdities with philosophical satire and moments of Bergman-inspired artistry. Packed with familial relationship jokes, circular debates, bartering with the dead, fourth wall breaking, and a shot of Woody as a battlefield cheerleader, it is a rare masterpiece of comical art.
Mark Twain was called the great American humorist of his time. In the '70s and '80s, some might say it was Woody Allen.
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