Review: Apropos of Nothing

Apropos of Nothing by Woody Allen
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I didn’t even know Woody Allen was writing a memoir until I read in the news a few months ago that Ronan Farrow had taken to Twitter to denounce the project and its alleged lack of factchecking, rekindling in the media for the umpteenth time the decades long bloodfeud between the eighty-five year old multi-hyphenate filmmaker and what could loosely be termed his family. Stating that he was unaware, while working on his much acclaimed nonfiction bestseller, Catch and Kill, that a relationship existed between the publishing house and his estranged father, Farrow decried Hachette’s “lack of ethics and compassion for victims of sexual abuse” in pursuing the project and cited this “breach of trust” as a factor in his decision to part ways with the publisher. I got the same uneasy feeling I always do when someone mentions Woody Allen in the media—a momentary lurch of excitement (he’s one of my favorite directors) followed by a chastened feeling that I shouldn’t be excited (he’s the center figure in a messy child abuse allegation that continues to play itself out in the media lo, these many years later, with no real resolution in sight). After an employee walk out in protest of l’affaire Allen, Hachette folded and announced that they were no longer publishing Apropos of Nothing, as it was titled, returning the rights back to the author. Well, hell, I thought. I wonder what was in the book. Days later, I found an article on DailyMail using some of the more salacious portions of the Allen autobiography as pull-quotes—wait, how did they get a hold of this? Turns out, Arcade Publishing picked up the title and quietly released it in print and a number of e-platforms two weeks after Hachette cancelled his contract. I dutifully plopped down my $9.99 for the Kindle edition and there it sat in my queue for a few days before I plucked up the initiative to read it. Would it be awful, justifying Ronan Farrow’s public criticism? Would it be wonderful, highlighting the injustice of trial by media? Which was worse?

In a way, Apropos of Nothing meets both of my very different projections. Allen tackles the subject of his life story with characteristically mordant humor, covering his childhood in Brooklyn and his miraculous ascent from wunderkind comedy writer to stand up comedian to acclaimed auteur filmmaker in you-were-there detail. The first two hundred pages or so are as immersive, interesting, and witty as anything in his motion picture catalog, peppered with Woody-isms (“I’m eighty-four, my life is almost half over” was a good one) and well-employed but performatively florid vocabulary (“cynosure” comes up twice in the text, if that gives you any idea of what I’m talking about, when “envy” would have been perfectly serviceable both times). There’s a page or two devoted to exposing ellipses or idiosyncrasies in his knowledge/taste as a moviegoer (the man has never seen Wuthering Heights or Now Voyager and “loved” Irene Dunne but only “enjoyed” Carole Lombard, which just blew my mind). He takes special care to describe his relationship with troubled actress and second wife Louise Lasser, and though he does mention at length his brief affair and lifelong friendship/working relationship with the fabulous Diane Keaton, it’s more guarded and less candid (not kiss-and-tell, just candid) than you’d hope for in a book about his life. I have no complaints for the entire first half of the book, or if I do, they’re very, very minor. I felt like I was listening to an old friend talking, and hung on every word. It’s when Allen gets into his association with and subsequent dealings surrounding Mia Farrow that things go off the rails.

As I said, I spent the first two hundred pages of the book going, “It’s a travesty this almost didn’t get published, this is one of the best books I’ve read about being a young comedian in New York in the fifties’ and sixties’. So fascinating! So forthcoming with the details!” When Mia Farrow enters the picture, the keen eye for storytelling goes right out the window, and what follows is a seemingly interminable rant about the miscarriage of justice that he insists occurred at the abrupt end of his personal involvement with Farrow and beginning of the notorious relationship that has seen him into his twilight years. You’re probably familiar with the story of Woody Allen leaving Mia Farrow for her twenty-two year old daughter, Soon-Yi, and subsequently facing a firestorm of press coverage over allegations that he sexually molested his adopted seven year old daughter, Dylan. This section of the book, though I knew it was coming, was difficult for me. Regardless of who did what, I struggled with the relentless vilification of Mia Farrow (and occasionally her children) that dragged on for pages, and pages, and pages, and pages. Mia has a troubled family history, including a brother in prison as a convicted pedophile. Mia was erratic, impulsive. Mia locked one of her kids with a disability in an outbuilding overnight as punishment for something trivial. Mia neglected her kids, ignoring some and favoring others depending on her whim. Mia was verbally abusive. Mia hit Soon-Yi with a phone (back when phones were big, heavy, landline affairs). Mia coached her kids to say things happened that didn’t to exercise control over and discipline them, an abusive behavior that Allen says culminated in her alleged coaching of Dylan to describe the molestation he maintains never happened in any way, shape, or form. Allen quotes extensively from a recent piece written by Moses Farrow, the only pro-Woody supporter among Mia’s children, and incorporates statements from the two (two!) child abuse investigations that took place in the early 90’s. Even if every single accusation Woody Allen makes about Mia Farrow was factual and not seemingly partially-true, partially the product of almost thirty years of being deadlocked with Farrow in this ugly deathmatch bent on personal annihilation, it still feels slimy to wade through this constant mudslinging. It gets tedious after, say, fifty pages of him circling the same subject (“didn’t do it, look how crazy Mia is, how on earth can people not see my innocence”, ad infinium). As in Mommy Dearest’s treatment of Joan Crawford, there’s no “person” there in his description of Mia Farrow, just a relentless bogeyman with no motivation other than the senseless destruction of her ex’s life. In rendering Farrow two-dimensionally evil, he weakens his own credibility, and in perseverating on the subject of his total blamelessness in this section, you feel like you don’t want to believe him as much as you would had he explained what happened and continued in the same even handed vein as the first section of his book. I feel like if the book had been properly edited and not come out under cloak-of-darkness as this notorious subject, a good editor would have made Allen either make his point about “his side of the story” and not keep getting licks in at the expense of his audience’s increasing discomfiture, or somehow shaped this section into something more revealing than an endless polemic on how wronged and innocent-above-all-things he is. I like him (in spite of myself) and came out liking him less for this giant hunk of the book being about settling scores more than telling the story of what happened to him during this explosively contentious period of his life.

The rest of the book is patchy and never regains the momentum of the first half—Allen describes people he knows or worked with in a disinterested string of adjectives and glides over his movie output with the shorthand of whether or not it was well-received, whether or not it made any money, whether or not it was a hassle to make. Anecdotes are weak at best. There are a few tidbits here and there (Michael Keaton was originally cast as the lead in one of my favorite Woody Allen movies, the magical-realism steeped Purple Rose of Cairo, but Woody found him “too contemporary” to fit the 1930s matinee idol part—he was replaced by Jeff Daniels), but for the most part, it’s almost like “well, I came and said what I had to say, let’s wrap this up”. Barely any mention of his two children in his marriage with Soon-Yi except that he has them and they’re in college. Soon-Yi is aggressively described as “bright and witty” but we get very little sense of her as a person so much as a cause throughout the book. Talk about a let-down. I didn’t need a tell-all, but I would have appreciated a “tell-some”. I felt like I was rewarded for having slogged through the middle part with this half-hearted, blasé denouement that left me very, very confused as to whether or not I could say I “liked” the book. Again, if you asked me two or three hours in, it would have been a RESOUNDING yes. After the Mia Farrow hit job and the wishy-washy final fifty pages, including these almost chidingly written passages about his recent public woes related to an Amazon deal gone south and several actors distancing themselves from him during the MeToo movement, I can’t say I overall recommend the book. If you can, read the first 200 pages and when you see things turning for the worse, go ahead and bail. I kind of wish I had. I can’t say the book diminished my esteem for him as a tireless creator of finely made, sensitively wrought movies, but as a writer and a person, he may have lost some points with me.


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