Movie Reviews : Beyond the Gossip, Now the Movie

“What is this thing called love?” Cole Porter’s wistful lyric asks at the start of Woody Allen’s “Husbands and Wives.” “Who can solve this mystery, why should it make a fool of me?” Fair questions, and hardly unfamiliar ones for Allen, but never has an audience been so curious about his answers and never have those replies cut so close to the bone.

Though all films arrive with a certain amount of baggage attached, “Husbands and Wives,” reaching theaters just after its creator’s very public break with his longtime companion and co-star Mia Farrow, not to mention his professed love for her 21-year-old adopted daughter, is freighted with enough emotional detritus to overload one of those old-time 20-mule-team caravans.

And no matter how often Allen insists that his work has nothing, do you hear, nothing, to do with his private life, “Husbands and Wives” (citywide) has unmistakable parallels to the Allen-Farrow imbroglio, but, surprisingly, not really in the way anyone has anticipated.

Despite the presence of a college-aged siren that Allen’s married, fiftysomething character becomes intoxicated with, this assured, penetrating film is no sentimental homage to May-December infatuations. Rather, “Husbands and Wives” is a lacerating comedy about love turned sour, a painful, deeply pessimistic yet somehow funny look at how caring relationships wind up as destructive emotional dead-ends.

Successfully combining Allen’s edgy humor with his continuing preoccupation with suffering and pain (no mean feat in itself), “Husbands and Wives” is not only Allen’s best work since “Hannah and Her Sisters” (and one of his most accomplished ever), it almost acts as a reverse mirror-image to that film.

Both movies deal with couples coming apart and regrouping, with otherwise sensible Manhattanites looking for love in all the wrong places. But while in “Hannah” everything falls sweetly and providentially into place, “Husbands” is determinedly anti-romantic, filled with doomed characters who fool themselves into relationships that are fated to either illusory success or agonizing failure. Not only is Woody Allen the only filmmaker capable of finding laughs in all this free-floating misery, he’s also probably the only one who would even think of trying.

What Allen didn’t count on when he was making “Husbands,” however, was that his closely guarded personal life would become so public that watching parts of this film--for instance, hearing Farrow’s character plaintively ask Allen’s, “Do you ever hide things from me?” and “Are you still attracted to me?”--feels uncomfortably like eavesdropping on very private conversations. Yet it is a measure of the strength of “Husbands and Wives” that these vivid parallels with reality begin to fade as the film’s characters come into sharper focus.

Allen and Farrow play Gabe and Judy, a.k.a. the Roths, comfortably married for 10 years. She works for an art magazine while he is a sometime novelist who teaches creative writing at Barnard to students who hand in short stories with titles like “Oral Sex in the Age of Deconstruction.”

Their best friends and reliable companions for Chinese food are Jack and Sally (Sydney Pollack and Judy Davis). But as the film begins, Jack and Sally have something more disturbing than sweet and sour pork on their minds. After 15 years of marriage, they announce they are splitting up. “Don’t turn this into a tragedy, this is a positive step for both of us,” Jack insists, but no one else is quite so sure.

From here on in, “Husbands and Wives” follows a series of different but constantly intersecting paths. For not only do Jack and Sally quickly link up with new partners but their breakup brings papered-over dissatisfactions between Gabe and Judy into the open.

Jack takes up with Sam (Lysette Anthony), a bubbly aerobics instructor/nutritionist who is not as intellectually demanding as Sally was, while the tightly wound Sally finds herself interested in the handsome, sweet-natured Michael (Liam Neeson), a colleague of Judy’s. And Gabe, an admirer of “kamikaze women” who are not only self-destructive but wanting to “crash their planes into you,” finds himself attracted to Rain (Juliette Lewis), a fetching writing student who smiles and sweetly tells him “your approbation means more to me than anything.”

Allen, who has worked this strata of middle-class New York life often enough to have become a kind of Jane Austen of the Upper West Side, knows his characters intimately. They can have no secrets from him, and he refuses to allow them to have any secrets from us, parceling out piercing lines like this one of Judy to Gabe: “You use sex to express every emotion except love.”

He also has cast “Husbands and Wives” (rated R for language and a scene of sexuality) with special grace. While his choices in small roles can be successfully eccentric (writer Bruce Jay Friedman plays a pandering colleague of Jack’s, and former Yale president Benno Schmidt is Judy’s first husband), he has been especially fortunate with the pivotal Jack and Sally.

Director Sydney Pollack, who has done memorable cameos in everything from his own “Tootsie” to the recent “Death Becomes Her,” was a risky choice for such a major role, but he acquits himself faultlessly, especially in some grueling emotional scenes. And Judy Davis, clearly one of the best actresses working today, adds yet another exquisite performance as a natural contrarian and chronic overanalyzer who always seems on the verge of a well-deserved nervous breakdown.

As if determined to underscore the authenticity of these performances, Allen has tried to infuse a greater sense of intimacy and reality into this film than he’s ever wanted before. The camera work (by Carlo Di Palma) often has a jittery, almost hand-held look, which, supplemented by the occasional jump cut in the editing, gives the story a consciously semi-documentary feel. And Allen has also made use of an off-screen interviewer/narrator (read by his longtime costumer Jeffrey Kurland) to quiz the protagonists and expose, through multiple points of view, the flimsiness of their emotional facades.

Though his film is (no surprise here) hardest on Farrow’s Judy, Allen does not particularly spare his own character’s self-image either. Gabe’s face is the first and last one we see, and if it is a sad one, we know he has only himself to blame. “My heart does not know from logic,” Gabe says at one point, clearly a most truthful statement in a remarkably self-revealing film.

‘Husbands and Wives’

Woody Allen: Gabe Roth

Mia Farrow: Judy Roth

Judy Davis: Sally

Sydney Pollack: Jack

Juliette Lewis: Rain

Liam Neeson; Michael

Blythe Danner: Rain’s Mother

Released by TriStar Pictures. Director Woody Allen. Producers Helen Rubin, Joseph Hartwick. Executive producers Jack Rollins, Charles H. Joffe. Screenplay Woody Allen. Cinematographer Carlo Di Palma. Editor Susan E. Morse. Costumes Jeffrey Kurland. Music . Production design Santo Loquasto. Art director Speed Hopkins. Set decorator Susan Bode. Running time: 1 hour, 47 minutes.

MPAA-rated R (language and a scene of sexuality).