Word: persona
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Khomeini did not create U.S. television's imbalance between self-restraint and rant, but he has profited from it. Once he seemed bent on expelling all foreign correspondents, but now more than 200 of them are "persona grata" in a land where American diplomats are not. Journalists walk the streets of Tehran encountering little hostility, despite Iran radio's constant and strident anti-American propaganda. In their on-the-air questioning of the student militants, however, they too seem inhibited by the fear of jeopardizing the hostages. When Khomeini gives televised interviews, he chooses which submitted questions...
...what we get is the Allen persona of all his films, at least up to Annie Hall--ingratiatingly awkward and insecure, morbid, conscientious; intellectual and only saved from pseudo-intellectualism because his sidekicks are transparently far more pompous and shallow. Above all, he's acutely aware of all these things about himself, and, therefore, by an easy step, somehow above all his failings because he knows about them, After all he wrote the film--A Woody Allen Film...
...distance between the director and the screen persona is exactly the same as the distance it flatteringly allows the viewer to place between his real and everyday persons. It licenses us to believe that our everyday behavior doesn't truly reflect our character, which is altogether deeper, more astute, suffering and sensitive. The procedure is increasingly cosy and conspiratorial-we go to a Woody Allen film knowing exactly what to expect, and sure enough there it is, a flabby shapeless dish, occasionally spicy, but altogether sagging and apologetic...
...sufferers through the unspeakable Interiors will know. In Manhattan, though, he winningly has his ex-wife write about his obsessive narcissism, and the end of that film seems to me truer than anything he's done yet. Exactly because it's about the limitations of the Woody Allen persona, and the possibility that Mariel Hemingway stands for something different and better, that he ought to move himself to see her. He's always had an inviolable thin honesty, and it suggests that what he may go on to do (which is well worth doing), is to expose the sorry evasive...
...garish light of a hospital room, is a feat. She's a forceful character, who makes her son's childlike infatuation with her fairly credible. Henny falters where the script does. She's got too many lines and knows it, so she gropes for a way to enrich her persona. The result is a character who's too self-consciously spunky, reminiscent, at times, of Granny on the Beverly Hillbillies. And when it comes time for that last dramatic soliloquoy, her part collapses altogether...