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WILD MAN BLUES Send This Review to a Friend
Get ready for a unique treat. The private Woody Allen has never before been seen in a movie close-up with the intimacy achieved in WILD MAN BLUES, the enormously entertaining and illuminating new movie that expert documentary filmmaker Barbara Kopple has made. Here's a film likely to be watched for many years to come, given Allen's importance in the world of cinema and Kopple's savvy as a filmmaker who knows what to do when she's given carte blanche by an icon like Allen, usually bent on guarding his privacy. Kopple freely followed Allen, Soon-Yi, and Allen's New Orleans-style jazz band on a European tour.
The result is terrific. It affords the opportunity to observe the relationship between Allen and Soon-Yi for the first time on film, and the public will get a fresh image of them. Soon-Yi appears here to be a take-charge kind of woman. We see her telling Allen how to behave with his musicians and foreign dignitaries, and she is very protective of him. She also doesn't seem in awe of him. Soon-Yi reveals that she has never seen "Annie Hall" and asserts that she has never read anything Allen has written. Yet they appear to have a warm, affectionate relationship.
It's funny to watch them wandering through huge suites in luxury hotels and gliding in gondolas in Venice. We see Woody with all of his traveling foibles intact ("Wherever I am I'd rather be somewhere else") and we see the seriousness and enthusiasm with which he approaches his music. The concert tour itself, which draws huge crowds, provides the film with excellent jazz by Allen and the group, but on occasion Kopple wittily resorts to additional music, such as the accompaniment of Nino Rota excerpts from Fellini films as Allen tours Italy.
"Wild Man Blues," consistently entertaining, is topped by a priceless scene with Allen's parents. I don't want to spoil it for you by quoting his mother, who has a thing or two to tell him in ultimate Jewish mother tradition. The film is a must for Woody Allen fans the world over, and it may revise opinions of those less enthralled with his life off-screen. A Fine Line Features release.
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