Word: allen
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Wild Man Blues follows Woody Allen and his seven-member jazz band along their 1996 springtime tour of Europe. If that synopsis sounds like material for a three-minute "Entertainment Tonight" profile, then kudos go out immediately to Kopple, who knows that Allen's career as a jazzman is not a fluff-level footnote to his more obvious engagement in the cinema. Her feature-length documentary has already been faulted by some viewers at Sundance for downplaying Woody-as-Filmmaker, a criticism that misses Wild Man Blues's whole point: Woody Allen considers himself a developing musician who's lucky...
...think it's seen just as a hobby of mine," Allen tells his sister Letty early in the movie, when the band and entourage are flying across the Atlantic to begin the tour. Any nervousness about the presence of Kopple's camera is small potatoes next to his genuine stagefright at the prospect in front of him: weeks of one-night-only stops in Paris, Madrid, Turin, and other Old World cities, playing to audiences who know little about primitivist New Orleans jazz (which the band renders with real zest) but who know a great deal about...
Unfortunately, that might be the wrong reason to attend. "I'm not a sufficient enough musician to hold their attention," Allen frets, but his travelling companions, apparently used to his anxieties, gently console him. These initial scenes of conversation not only introduce us to the various members of the caravan, including then-fiancee Soon-Yi Previn, they also establish the level of access we get to Woody throughout Wild Man Blues.He talks comfortably, even conversationally before the camera, and he is as happy to discuss perceptions of him as he is presenting his own thoughts...
...strictly honest Allen is in presenting himself, or to what degree he is "performing," is a question the film simultaneously raises and dismisses. On the hand, his barbed humor--which the movie captures more ecstatically than any of Allen's own recent work--can easily be read as deflective, resistant to any penetrating insight into how he really operates, what he really thinks...
...same time, might Allen's "honest self" actually exist in the permanence with which he "performs"? A man who tours Europe in a band, who has made one movie a year for two decades, and whose most private relationships are themselves so inherently sensational is hardly giving a false image of himself by putting on a show. The Woody Allen of Wild Man Blues may or not be "the real Woody Allen," whatever that means, but his jokes, confessions, and worries all ring true when held against one another...