Review of Woody Allen’s latest

“Rifkin’s Festival” is being released today on Amazon Prime Video.

Woody Allen is 86. Any movie now could be his last. This one alludes to so many themes that he’s touched on over the years that it might be viewed as his ultimate assessment of the human condition.

Pathetic.

Modernist assessments tend to be derisive. The “great” modernist commentators all seem to have a dire and pessimistic view of humanity. Only very recently has the idea occurred that what’s being assessed is human lifeways within a particular context; in fact, an aberrant context.

Once you recognize that there have been two overall distinctive human lifeways, you realize that an assessment of the aboriginal is one thing and an assessment of the civilizational is another thing. I’ve lost interest in reading or viewing the latter. Unsurprisingly, it goes dark. I couldn’t finish Philip Roth’s “great” American Pastoral (won the Pulitzer Prize in 1998, was included in Time’s List of the 100 Best Novels). Torture us with darkness. The same goes for Woody Allen’s well-received recent “Wonder Wheel.”

I’ve had enough of the pathos that lacks context.

Since becoming “serious” post-Annie Hall, Woody Allen has oscillated between a dark kind of cynicism in some of his movies and a spoofier, lighter kind in others. At least with “Rifkin’s Festival” we get the latter. In an opening scene at a film festival a producer says to a prototypical buxom blond babe that he can’t wait to cast her as Hannah Arendt in his next movie (about the Eichmann trial). After that it’s all a keep-it-light variety of pathos as we watch everybody expressing dissatisfaction and going off-track.

But at least there is an interesting revelation. Not only is Woody Allen doing a maybe-final assessment of what he considers (wrongly) to be the human condition . . . I think he’s also assessing (rightly) the inner truth of his own psyche throughout life . . . and offering it up as the typical male experience. He gets Wallace Shawn to play the Ultimate Dork.

I think that’s a source of anxiety for just about every guy. I think Woody Allen is saying, “That’s the truth of how I felt all my life.” It’s another kind of pathos. The former kind is not universal, but the latter kind might be.