"I think the next Woody Allen movie will be the last Woody Allen movie," the critic Mark Harris tweeted over the weekend. "Wonder Wheel and the next one were both greenlit under...
| |  | | | | Alyssa Rosenberg on culture and politics | | | | | | Director Woody Allen arrives for a screening of the film "Wonder Wheel" in New York on Nov. 14, 2017.(Brendan McDermid/Reuters) | For a long time, Allen’s continued ability to work with A-list Hollywood talent despite the allegation that he molested Dylan Farrow (and despite consternation about the origins of his relationship with Soon-Yi Previn, to whom he has been married since 1997) seemed like proof that a woman’s story couldn’t outweigh a man’s professional stature in Hollywood. But a shift appears to be underway. Greta Gerwig has said she wouldn’t work with Allen again. Rebecca Hall is donating her salary from the forthcoming “A Rainy Day in New York” to the Time’s Up initiative. And now Timothée Chalamet, who had a breakout year in “Call Me By Your Name” and “Lady Bird,” and who appears in “A Rainy Day in New York” with Hall, is following suit, splitting his salary between Time’s Up, the LGBT Community Center in New York, and the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network. | | If this is, in fact, how Allen’s career ends, I do wonder how we’ll ultimately come to feel about all the work that came before. | | | Obviously, if you don’t want to separate Allen’s art from his alleged offenses, that’s understandable, especially given how much of Allen’s work revolves around older men who are sexually obsessed with women who are much younger, sometimes to the point that they are not legally considered adults. But for me, I think Allen’s legacy will be the contradictions between his deepest, most damaging preoccupations and the way he never truly grew beyond them, and the moments in his work that are wider-ranging and more observant. “The Whore of Mensa,” Allen’s parody of hard-boiled detective fiction that is also a parody of New York intellectual culture, is incredibly funny and sharp on both counts. Movies such as “Bananas” and “Sleeper” were sharp about things such as impure political motivations and the extent to which human nature complicates the vision of futurists. | | For me, Allen’s legacy will be the knowledge that a person can be simultaneously dangerously narrow and piercingly observant. His talent sometimes engendered that same contradiction in the people who went to work for him. Maybe that time has ended. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |
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