LOVE AND DEATH

LOOK, I’M WOODY. HOWDY, HOWDY, HOWDY.

Starring Woody Allen and Diane Keaton

Trailer

Y

  There’s a reason Love and Death is Woody Allen’s funniest film, and it’s not because of Russian literature. Ridiculous facial hair aside, Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy weren’t exactly known for shattering funny bones or running into things, so a film that sets out to show up their pomposity should be good for a laugh, at least for the eight people alive who still regularly read their books. So yeah – it’s a little limited in it’s lampooning, but the slapstick and general lunacy is as appealing as it ever was. Making paedo faces at a huge titted countess is immortal, as is repeatedly jamming your scabbard into an elderly opera goer. So are people who stink of fish, balls, and cheerleaders during the Napoleonic Wars. Love and Death is the funniest because it serves as a near perfect mixture of everything that concerns Allen and the ideas he does well; many different types of rib-tickling are seen here, from sight gags to riffing to shooting yourself in the shoulder. The philosophical undertones are both respected and exposed as nonsense in a series of increasingly meaningless discussions, whilst Diane Keaton throws up another expert performance in a parallel storyline all her own as she faces down elderly husbands, ugly violinists and a preoccupation with rented families, frequently stealing the film from under Woody’s nose and running off with it into through a field of gently wafting wheat. There’s the fearless sense of a man ripping the piss out of something he genuinely loves, whilst the scope and depth underneath make for perhaps the world’s first epic comedy, a baton that hadn’t even been touched until Evan Almighty grabbed it forty two years later before proceeding to cram it down its own throat. The throat of a film. It choked itself, it… alright, that’s not a good joke. It doesn’t make sense, it’s oblique, it’s stupid and pointless and poorly structured. All of which are the exact opposite of what Allen’s accomplished here, in one of the finest comedies of all time. And that’s why he’s still regarded as a genius nearly fifty years later whilst this review has limped to a disjointed and disappointing conclusion.