Wishing Woody had shot the narrator or, better yet, not shot Vicky Cristina Barcelona

Shoot your narrator, kids.  You're making a movie.  Movies are stories told with pictures.  If you've got a voice telling your story for you, odds are you don't need it or you're not doing the job of telling your story with pictures and you need to stop and re-think.

Not a hard and fast rule, and it's a rule that's been broken beautifully in many movies.  Vicky Cristina Barcelona is not one of those movies.

The narrator of Woody Allen's latest is annoying on multiple levels, the main one being that he insists on telling us what we can see for ourselves is happening.

"Antonio rushed out into the night," he says as we watch Javier Bardem as Antonio rush out into the night.

"Christina stayed up late, drinking coffee and working on her poetry," he says as we see Scarlett Johansson as Cristina sitting at a table in the kitchen late at night, scribbling on a pad of paper with a steaming mug of coffee at her elbow.

In this scene the narrator at least refrains from pointing out that the bowl of fruit on the counter the camera lingers over at it makes its way towards Christina reminds her of those incredible apples and pears by Cezanne, sparing us another self-referential moment on Woody's part.

By the way, this is one of those stories in which a character's "working on her poetry" is a significant event without any comedy or irony.

Another way the narrator is annoying is that he doesn't talk to us.  He reads to us, from the William Shawn era New Yorker style-story the movie seems to have been adapted from.  His prose is self-consciously "good" minimalist prose in which stating the blandly obvious in simple declarative sentences is meant to pass as poetic and full of implied feeling and meaning.  Allen doesn't seem to have been trying to parody this style.

The effect of having the narrator read to us as the characters act out the story he's reading is, predictably, like trying to read a story while watching a movie based on that story.  It divides your attention, takes you out of both the story and the film, and makes you think about the choices the filmmaker made in adapting the story.  In this case what I kept thinking was, God, I wish the filmmaker hadn't been so slavishly faithful to his source.

Of course Vicky Christina Barcelona isn't an adaptation.  The "story" is Allen's not the narrator's.   And so the other effect of having the movie we're watching "read" to us as we're watching us is to make us wonder why Woody Allen didn't do through dialog and action here what he's done through dialog and action in all his other movies, develop characters, shape scenes, move his plot along. Why did he feel the need to tell and not show?

The only answers I can come up with is that he was too tired to try to pull it off or too bored by his own characters to bother.

The final way the narrator is annoying is that his voice is just plain grating.  Christopher Evan Welch is an actor so I'm guessing he has at least heard of the idea that an actor's voice is his instrument.  If so, he plays his like an oboe with a cracked reed and half the stops plugged and the keys bent so that it will only produce three notes in the middle register.  And he doesn't vary the tempo or the volume.  I wouldn't say he speaks in a monotone, but he does sound as though he's reading to a very tightly wound migraine sufferer he's afraid of over-stimulating.

As for what happens when the narrator isn't annoying us, there's not much to say.  Barcelona looks like a nice place to spend a vacation if you have a lot of money and time.  Javier Bardem has the hardest looking chin in motion picture history, you could break rocks on that chin.  There's not a single likable character in the whole movie but none of them are at all interesting in their dislikableness, especially not Penelope Cruz who plays a cliche in the most cliched way possible.  When the narrator isn't speaking for them, they have nothing much to say for themselves except that they saw or read or bought something beautiful recently.  When they do open up they engage in the kind of pseudo-intellectual conversations Allen parodied in Love and Death.  Vicky and Cristina are meant to be best friends but there's no earthly reason for us to believe it.  As Vicky, Rebecca Hall seems to be imitating somebody but I can't put my finger on who it is which makes me think that the imitation is bad or totally irrelevant and so the reference is lost or that Hall is not a good actress and she's imitating herself acting.  And with Scarlett Johansson Allen has pulled off what I would have thought impossible---he's made her completely unwatchable.  I cringed every time she came on screen.

A final note regarding Soon-Yi Allen.  Vicky Cristina Barcelona doesn't have much of a plot, but it does have a theme.  "The heart has its own reasons."  Soon-Yi might want to be on her guard.  The last movie Allen made with that theme, Husbands and Wives, was, if you recall, the movie he made just before he dumped Mia Farrow for Soon-Yi.

Please help support this blog by buying stuff:  Vicky Cristina Barcelona and all Woody Allen's movies on DVD are available to buy through my aStore.

Comments

[Nancy Nall]

It was Christopher Hitchens, I believe, who picked up on Allen's "the heart wants what it wants" line and noted that every expression that uses the word "heart" is more accurate if you substitute the word "dick." My favorite: "The dick is a lonely hunter."

Anyway, as far as narrators: Sunset Boulevard. Can't argue with that one.

[Arun]

Well, if he didn't tell us she was working on her poetry, how would we know what she was writing? Allen narrates this "without comedy or irony"- is there something inherently mockable about a young person writing poetry? I haven't seen VCB yet, so I don't know- unless her character is supposed to be ridiculous, i had assumed she was probably playing one of Allen's dream girls, to him writing poetry would be a very appealing attribute.

I agree that narration is often a crutch, and I like the Shawn reference when it comes to Allen's style. But what would "Radio Days" be without the narration? I suppose it's one of the exceptions. Allen does use narration a lot, he's very much a verbal, "let me tell you a story about this guy" sort of filmmaker, it's a constant. I see your point about needless exposition, though.

[Lance Mannion]

Arun, you're right about Allen and his use of narration. Not just Radio Days. Love and Death, Annie Hall, Take the Money and Run, Sweet and Low Down, Zelig (the last two use multiple narrators, iirc), all need their narrators.

[Gary Farber]

I really liked the movie, and found it funny and interesting, and I liked the performances. Opinions vary.

[Frank C.]

I think Woody Allen is an on-the-nose and heavy handed writer and director with an adolescent understanding of human emotion. I think he's one of the most overrated artists in the form. (Aside from his wacky comedies, which I love.)

[SweetSue]

My favorite:Dickburn.