SEPTEMBER

LOOK, I’M WOODY. HOWDY, HOWDY, HOWDY.

Starring Mia Farrow and Dianne Wiest

Trailer

Y

Plays aren’t films,

They’re all slow,

I’ve never seen Othello,

And I’d love to continue with my song about this but,

I can’t rhyme ‘extortionate’.

  Good job, popular children’s rhyme; plays aren’t films, and films aren’t plays neither. Measured, quiet, contained and ridiculously expensive, the world of the theatre generally relies on intimacy and immediacy to get its kicks, unless you’re Andrew Lloyd Webber and the entire West End looks like a gigantic set of udders poking into the sky above London. In a career littered with failure it’s nice to see the Woods succeed where so many others have burned, namely by cramming the directness and claustrophobia of a great stage play into a film and not having you bored dead by where the interval should sit. Like its main character September is a quiet one, focusing on a central mother-daughter relationship that’s simultaneously both nuanced and lumbered with a ludicrous twist, whilst the other visitors to its isolated country house are all deliciously fucked up in various other ways. There’s the Allen staples of a failed writer and loveable gangster, as well as Denholm Elliot playing an elderly version of Charlie Brown’s unrequited love. All are sweet as a wollipop, but the best of the bunch is Dianne Wiest, turning in her best performance for Allen as a conflicted friend sick of the burden of a difficult soulmate. There’s an overbearing sense of time and weariness to the proceedings; everyone here is trapped in an endless weekend of last chances and attempts to recapture lost youth, which may seem an odd treatise for a man barely into his forties. Unlike a lot of his work the piece thrives on the restraints of setting, with each actor given a chance to Oscar-grope and the director allowed to linger around the corners of the house. By the end you feel like you’re trapped in the larder, watching these people’s lives break down as you silently steal their good cheese like a culturally indulgent mouse with a borderline sociopathic interest in other people’s suffering. Perfectly paced, brilliantly acted and sometimes unbearably sad, it flicks past Allen’s sometimes distanced approach to reveal him as a human being, with sweat and tears and emptiness.