Hollywood Ending

• Reversible Errors
• Stone Cold
• Jesse Stone: Night Passage
• Jesse Stone: Death in Paradise
• Celebrity (Widescreen)

Val Waxman est un réalisateur névrosé sur le déclin, condamné à tourner des pubs au Canada pour gagner sa vie. Quand son ex-femme, interprétée par une Téa Leoni assez crédible, lui propose de réaliser un long-métrage pour le compte de son nouvel amant, Val croit tenir la chance de sa vie, jusqu'à ce que la malchance cogne encore à sa porte.

Renouant avec le style burlesque de ses premiers films (Bananas), tout en continuant de se rire des angoisses créatrices, Woody Allen s'amuse à la fois du petit monde du cinéma et de la prétendue cinéphilie du public français (ce que beaucoup de critiques ne lui ont d'ailleurs pas pardonné) avec le sens du sarcasme qui lui est propre. On oubliera aisément les quelques longueurs et égarements du scénario, puisque de ce Hollywood Ending en forme de mise en abîme réflexive, on retiendra, encore une fois, tout le talent de M. Allen. --Helen Faradji

I am always suspicious when a story involves a young man wooing an older woman. Kate Capshaw makes me like Helen, the emotionally alienating/alienated female lead, more than I want. Tom Everett Scott makes Johnny's gangly romantic pursuits clumsy and earnest that is that much more romantic and sexy. Ellen DeGeneres knows where the funny is in simple things like book titles and condiments. Tom Selleck does it for me in this movie by being a vulnerable, funny, handsome fireman experiencing a rough patch but not afraid to go after his dreams later in life. The Louis Armstrong and tango music set the mood, with a short burst of Tosca to contrast it and scare a character or two into action. Personally, there is one poetic little moment where the Capshaw's voice is reading how the writer "burns" with love and the fireman is coming up the bookstore staircase seeming to give off smoke as an image continues to charm me. Peter Ho-Sun Chan directed a really fun film.

So, have a summer/chick film fest with this and a few other fun films on the subject of love like Branaugh's Much Ado About Nothing, 4 Weddings & a Funeral, Roxanne, or Philadelphia Story.

Woody plays a once-great filmmaker, Val Waxman. He's everything a Woody character should be: hypochondriac, paranoid, bitter and caustic. At the start of the film, he's up in Toronto filming a commercial that is very much beneath his stature. The film centers around a basic premise: Val's ex-wife, Ellie, (Téa Leoni) has decided that he is perfect to direct the screenplay she has just finished for her new boyfriend Hal Jaeger's studio. The conflicts are obvious and ripe for comedic exploitation that never really materializes. The tensions between Val and Hal (his new boss and the man who stole his wife) do not exist. Although there are many fine performances, there is little chemistry on screen. Téa Leoni is fabulous, but the screentime she shares with Woody has no fire. There is nothing between the two actors that suggests the supposedly tulmultuous past of the characters. Debra Messing is equally great as Val's latest flame, but she's stuck with an extremely limited role and isn't integral to the plot whatsoever.

Indeed, the plot meanders for quite a while and eventually devolves into a long, torturous episode involving Val's psychosomatic blindess and his attempts to hide it from everyone associated with the studio. Everything else is fitted into that basic premise. It allows for Val and Ellie to spend quite a bit of time together, although the pairing is nothing of note and comes off as rather superfluous to the story as a whole. The bottom line is that this film has no soul. It isn't worthy of Woody Allen at his best and wastes a talented cast.

Woody plays his usual character- insecure and self-absorbed. He is a failing filmmaker whose movies are bombing the US. His ex-wife had left him for the studio exec who is financing the picture he's now making. The stress of it all leads to psychosomatic blindness in Allen, who without anyone's knowledge of his condition, attempts to make a film while sightless.

Perhaps the greatest drawback to HE is the casting. Although I love Tea Leoni, she's really far too young to play sixty-ish Allen's ex. In the best of his films, Allen populates them with strong actors and characters that give them depth and complexity. The cast here is simply not as strong as in his other films and it suffers somewhat for it.

And while this isn't any near his Hannah or Manhattan standard, it's still an enjoyable and fulfilling "middle" Woody Allen film.

• Genres > Comedy

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