Hollywood Ending (2002)

A film diretor is hired by indication of his ex-wife, who is now engaged to the studio boss. He develops psychosomatic blindness and his agent convinces him to conceal it from the others and direct the film anyway.

The flow of jokes is steady, and there is no real pain in watching it. For the analytically inclined, there are curious aspects about it, especially as it relates to Allen's filmography. The first really odd thing that came to my attention, and apparently no one else's, is how this relates to Crimes and Misdemeanors. We have here characters or situations that appear to be derived from that movie's. Williams' character closely resembles Alda's character in that movie, Leoni's resembles Farrow's, and Allen's resembles Allen's. Adding to these parallels, both films have characters who go blind (Allen's here and Waterston's there). Both films are about the need to conceal something dangerous -- blindness in one case and graft in the other. Beyond these mysterious analogies, however, there is a more fundamental connection with Allen's entire oeuvre. There are multiple blindnesses on display in Hollywood Ending, besides the central character's. The need to conceal his predicament is itself another inducement of blindness; in other words, this is a ploy to make people blind to his blindness. But there is more. The film is a complicated scheme to divert the viewer's attention from its most glaring aspect: Allen is old and ugly. If you add to that his character's panoply of quirks, you would find it hard to accept that Leoni would ever have been drawn to him in the first place; the ostensive drama around her betrayal of him for a more attractive man only seems to try to conceal that fact. The same goes for his new girlfriend: she is a second impossible event which obfuscates the impossibility of the first one. Thus it seems that a recurrent subtheme of his other films has come to the foreground here: the embarrassment of being of no real attractiveness to the opposite sex. In this sense, what seems to be the film's conspicuous flaw, namely the miscasting of over-aged Allen in the main role, is actually the key to its decipherment. If the film's theme is blindness, how better to convey it than to induce blindness in the audience?

Rating: 55