Annie Hall (1977) marks the arrival of the mature Woody Allen in several ways. First, its popular and critical reception ushered Allen into the mainstream of serious American filmmakers. He could no longer be dismissed as a quirky New York Jewish comedian who makes entertaining but otherwise forgettable films as vehicles for his one-liners. In addition, its complex narrative structure and memorable characters demonstrated his development as a serious screenwriter and director. But most important of all, in this film Allen introduced his theme of the random universe, which underlies almost every film he has made since then. By any measurement, Allen’s preoccupation with a universe without structure has become more prominent, and more oppressive, as his work developed through the years. By the time he reaches his European cycle, Match Point (2005), Scoop (2006), Cassandra’s Dream (2007), and Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008), his vision of a pointless universe has darkened to its bleakest degree ever.

In the earlier films, his characters cherished moments of happiness as temporary respites from a grim, incomprehensible world. By the time he composes his European cycle, three decades after Annie Hall, he sees no escape from unrelieved pessimism. He regards life as utterly out of control; any quest for meaning must be exposed as a mere delusion. Even the most transitory moments of happiness are clearly doomed from the beginning. He offers much less of the verbal humor that made his earlier works accessible, as well as misinterpreted and undervalued. His vision has darkened. The material chaos provides an illuminating image for a chaotic moral order. Without coherence in the physical universe, the concepts of good and evil in human behavior become problematic. In a world with no reward or punishment, what would motivate one to make decisions based on a sense of justice, much less altruism? The interaction of human beings holds no more consequence than the clashing of brute elements in the cosmos. While one may chose to lead a moral life or love another human being in such a world, the reasons for making these moral decisions remain irrational. For many of Allen’s characters, these irrational decisions frequently arise from their acceptance of some magic element that Allen regards as simply self-delusion.

In Annie Hall, Allen introduces his theme of a meaningless universe in a comic scene that puts Alvy Singer as a child (Jonathan Munk) in a doctor’s office. Alvy explains why he stopped doing his homework: “The universe is expanding. . . . Well, the universe is everything, and if it’s expanding, someday it will break apart and that would be the end of everything” (Allen and Brickman 1983: 5). The script offers two responses to this childish concern. His mother comments: “What’s the universe got to do with it? You’re here in Brooklyn. Brooklyn is not expanding.”¹ The doctor, as a man of science, offers the more rational reaction: “It won’t be expanding for billions of years yet, Alvy. And we’ve gotta try to enjoy ourselves in the meantime – eh?” This advice echoes through Allen’s films like a musical motif that keeps recurring in different melodic contexts. The dialogue offers the usual Allen comic exchange, and visually Allen switches from the doctor’s office to the old family home, roosting under the Cyclone at Coney Island. The cars hurtle through space, supported only by a seemingly rickety wooden scaffold, just like the universe plunging through time into oblivion, while Alvy and his family cringe in their apartment, trying to create the illusion of stability amid the ominous rumbling of the rollercoaster. The comment on the human condition is grim, but the comic dialogue and amusement park setting rescue the scene from becoming lugubrious. In fact, it’s very funny. Allen articulates his philosophic conundrum through a precocious child and responds to it through the reactions of a protective Jewish mother and a sympathetic physician, who assumes the role of “man of science.” The film ends with Alvy’s recollections of the great times he had with Annie, and his resignation at losing her. Love passes, like the universe itself, but it brings pleasure while it lasts.

The “man of science” reappears regularly as Allen’s attempt to inject intelligibility into a chaotic universe that preoccupies the protagonist, routinely Allen himself or an Allen surrogate. Examples abound: he can be a psychiatrist (Zelig, Oedipus Wrecks) or a physician (Hannah and Her Sisters, Alice), or a moral philosopher (Crimes and Misdemeanors). The “man of science” not only fails to rescue the Allen character from his melancholy, but often reveals personal inadequacy under the veneer of rationality. Louis Levy (Martin Bregmann), the Holocaust survivor and philosopher in Crimes and Misdemeanors, inexplicably commits suicide after offering a plausible explanation of human existence to Allen’s character, Cliff Stern. The psychiatrist in Oedipus Wrecks (Marvin Chatinover) fails so badly in his attempt to help Sheldon Mills (Allen) that in desperation he turns his patient over to a psychic (Julie Kavner), who by her own admission is simply a quack, and Dr. Yang (Keye Luke) in Alice relies on magic potions which only embroil further the chaos in which human beings exist. Since, however, Alvy’s initial observation of the expanding universe relies on contemporary physics, the physicist seems a particularly pertinent “man of science” for present purposes. Unlikely as they are to appear in Allen’s Manhattan world of writers, artists and successful professionals, two play prominent roles in his exploration of a random universe. Significantly, the physicist changes dramatically as Allen’s view sours.

Lloyd (Jack Warden) in September (1987) visits the family country home as the latest husband of the boozy matriarch Diane (Elaine Stritch). A man of professorial dignity, he tries to mediate the endless family quarrels with his rational approach to the issues, but never really manages to rein in his compulsively destructive wife. In a moment of quiet one evening, while half-heartedly playing a game of pool with Peter (Sam Waterston), the aspiring novelist who has taken the cottage by the lake in the hope of overcoming his writer’s block, the would-be author distractedly rolls balls around the table. The unpredictable interaction of their collision provides an image of the brute forces colliding mindlessly in the furthest reaches of space. As they play in the semi-darkness, Peter asks about Lloyd’s work, having been told by Diane that he was involved in the development of the atomic bomb. Lloyd tells him that he works on something far more terrifying than blowing up the planet. Peter asks if anything could be more terrifying than that, and Lloyd replies: “Yes. The knowledge that it doesn’t matter one way or the other. It’s all random, radiating aimlessly out of nothing. Then it vanishes forever. . . . All space, all time, just a temporary convulsion.” When Peter, an aspiring artist, invites him to look at the beauty of the nighttime sky, Lloyd agrees with his perspective, but then continues: “I see it for what it truly is: haphazard, morally neutral, and unimaginably violent.” Peter becomes upset, and comments that he has to sleep alone that night. Lloyd replies: “That’s why I cling to Diane.” The scientist admits that he stays with this difficult woman simply because she provides a point of human contact in an otherwise hostile world.

Two decades pass and the physicist returns in the form of Boris Yellnikoff (Larry David) in Whatever Works (2009). Lloyd functions as one of the lesser characters in the ensemble cast of September, but Boris dominates virtually every moment of Whatever Works. He deliberately cultivates his persona as a loudmouthed misanthrope – or, more accurately, a boor. He claims to have almost been nominated for a Nobel Prize but, because of politics, he never made the final list. He knows about string theory, and taught for a while at Columbia, but he presently occupies his time by teaching chess to children, whom he calls cretins, morons, and subhumans because of their inability to conceive of the chessboard in the same mathematical terms that he does. To Boris, their incompetent moves seem irrational, if not perverse. In frustration, he lashes out verbally and, on occasion, physically. Yet in contrast to his rational grasp of the random nature of the physical universe, the random nature of his human relationships baffle him. His first wife, Jessica, provided everything he could want in a partner, but even though their marriage seemed ideal, he tried to kill himself during one of his panic attacks. She left him. Boris reluctantly admits that his improbable meeting and marriage to Melody (Evan Rachel Wood) brought some happiness into his life, but the relationship is a farce. It is doomed from the outset. From the first flicker of affection between these two cartoonish characters, we know the simple country girl from an Evangelical family in Mississippi and the acerbic Jewish intellectual from Lower Manhattan cannot remain together for long. When Melanie finds someone closer to her own age and interests, the marriage ends, and Boris once again jumps out a window, only to land on a woman who would become his third wife. It’s all an accident of timing, even though the prospective bride claims to be a psychic who knew the precise time of his jump. Neither reason nor magic offer a plausible explanation of this random event.

Through their scientific knowledge Lloyd and Boris both appreciate the chaotic nature of the universe, but their reactions differ dramatically. As though fighting back, Lloyd cultivates a lasting personal relationship to make life endurable. He interacts patiently with Diane’s dysfunctional family. In contrast, Boris rants at his inexplicably loyal friends and turns to the camera to harangue the audience in the theater. When the principals gather for a New Year’ s Eve celebration at the end of the film, he berates them, and the audience, for failing to realize that the turning of the year is a sham. Everybody tries desperately to be happy, but the event simply marks but another steppingstone toward death.² His sardonic response to existence is do “whatever works” to filch a few transitory moments of happiness that will vanish immediately. His only concession to morality is his proviso, “as long you don’t hurt anybody.” His vision reveals a consistent continuity: human relationships mirror cosmic forces; they are by nature unpredictable. To borrow Lloyd’s words, Boris sees them as haphazard, morally neutral, and unimaginably violent. Lloyd, however, makes a distinction between human and cosmic forces; Boris won’t, or can’t.

With Match Point, Allen moves the location from Manhattan to London, but he continues Boris’s reasoning. This film provides Allen’s most pointed comment to date on his conflation of the personal and physical universes as equally haphazard and meaningless. The opening image consists of a slow motion shot of a tennis ball soaring over the net. It strikes the upper rim, and flies straight up. It is not clear on which side the ball will drop, and that of course will determine the outcome of the volley. As the dramatic action starts, Chris Wilton (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) presents his credentials while he applies for work as a coach in an exclusive London tennis club. He is the typical Allen hero. His modest success on the pro tour marks him as a man of some talent in his chosen line of work, just as Allen’s heroes are generally successful writers or artists. As a native of Ireland and a man of modest background, Chris feels himself an outsider in the sophisticated world of prosperous London society, just as the stammering Allen characters struggle to become accepted in a Manhattan world of beautiful women and articulate men. Sometimes talent and application do not guarantee success. In the earlier films, the heroes’ frustrations have comic overtones. Chris lacks any humor. In Allen’s random universe, without any grounded morality, Chris is deadly serious in his determination to do anything necessary to become accepted into this world of privilege.

Through his work at the club, Chris ingratiates himself with the Hewett family. Tom (Matthew Goode) takes tennis lessons, and introduces Chris to his sister Chloe (Emily Mortimer). They grow close. In a candid conversation with her, he describes his background and determination to better himself. He reads Dostoevsky, two novels at a time. She volunteers to take him to galleries. Before long, they plan to marry. Tom also introduces Chris to Nola Rice (Scarlett Johansson) a sensuous but unsuccessful American actress. After one of her failed auditions, Tom takes the role of the “man of science” by explaining that success on the stage is not a matter of talent; it’s only a matter of chance, just like everything else in the universe. Nola’s floundering career and her modest family background make her an unlikely aspirant to the Hewett family. At his mother’s instigation, Tom drops her. Chris stands ready to take his place, even though Nola warns him that he could “blow it” with the Hewetts by “making a pass” at her. Chris wants both women and connives to have them. He marries into the Hewett family, while continuing a passionate relationship with Nola. The marriage accomplishes what he intended. He enters the family firm with a spacious office whose interlaced steel lattice external framework suggests his being imprisoned in a birdcage.³ At one point, he even suffers an attack of claustrophobia at work. He accepts his confinement as the price to pay for his success: a luxurious apartment in town and access to the Hewetts’ country estate, and, because of his job in the family business, a generous expense account and a car and driver.

Although the marriage is imaged as imprisoning him in a steel cage, it is in fact a fragile union. Chris continues regular trysts with Nola. Chloe clearly loves him, but soon their intimacy revolves around her desire to have three children while she is still young. She plans carefully. At breakfast she takes her temperature to gauge her fertility and asks Chris to have sex with her before he goes to work, since the morning offers the best chance for conception. Her careful calculations not only drain the romance from their marriage, but they are useless – they fail. Planning counts for little, since conception is as haphazard at the universe itself. While Chloe’s frustration deepens, Nola becomes pregnant, noting that just one time, because of his eagerness, they failed to use proper protection. Again, it is a matter of chance. Nola refuses to undergo her third abortion, nor will she be bought off. Always high-strung and moody, she becomes hysterical and determined to replace Chloe as Mrs. Wilton. Chris lies continually to both women. Not willing to sacrifice everything his marriage has brought him, Chris concludes that he has no option but murder, and once he makes his decision, not the slightest twinge of conscience will interfere with his carefully calculated plans. The woman in the next apartment will be sacrificed to make the murder appear as part of a drug-related robbery. Luck is on his side. With sly Hitchcockian touches of suspense, Allen has Chris deal with Chloe’s near-discovery of the murder weapon at home and with dropped shotgun shells and an intrusive neighbor at the crime site, but luck allows Chris to escape all these close calls.

In his earlier films, Allen frequently allowed his characters to gather moments of genuine love in their relationships, as fleeting as they might be. In Match Point, he constructs a thoroughly loveless universe. Chris uses Chloe to further his career, and Chloe soon allows their marriage to become merely the necessary means to her having a family. Allen makes Nola a most disagreeable woman. She is self-centered and ill tempered, and she makes little effort to be pleasant to anyone. She and Chris indulge in a spontaneous moment of passion after she realizes she will have no place in the Hewett family, and their ongoing liaison seems largely confined to the physical. Like Tom Hewett, her previous lover, Chris provides Nola with some touch of personal and social self-affirmation to prop up her fragile ego. Two singularly unlikeable people scarcely love each other; they may not even like each other. Their relationship, much like that of Boris and Melody in Whatever Works, holds little prospect for success.

While the themes of morality and marriage stand at the core of the film, Allen introduces the theme of magic only in the penultimate scene.⁴ In a dream sequence, suggesting a miraculous apparition of ghosts, both Nola and her murdered neighbor, Mrs. Eastley (Margaret Tyzack), appear as personifications of his conscience. Mrs. Eastley asks why she had to be killed along with Nola and his unborn child. By borrowing the familiar military explanation for civilian casualties, his response is chilling: they were merely “collateral damage.” He explains: “The innocent are sometimes slain to make way for a grander scheme.” Life is meaningless, he continues: “Sophocles said never to have been born may be the greatest boon of all.”⁵ Nola’s ghost tells him that his actions were clumsy, and it would be fitting if he were caught, but her remarks make no impression. Chris has already been definitively exonerated by the police through a series of lucky coincidences that connect the incriminating evidence to another criminal. He is confident in his reply: “It would be fitting if I were apprehended and punished. There would be some small sign of justice, some small measure of hope for the possibility of meaning.” But by this time he knows he will not be caught.

The cold, methodical murders, executed without remorse, show the final disintegration of any morality whatever – not only for Chris, but, one might surmise, for Woody Allen as well. Allen seems to accept crime without punishment as part of the normal order in a universe without order, but he does not delight in this position. In the famous exchange at the end of Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989), Allen closes with a question mark. Dr. Judah Rosenthal (Martin Landau) has also gotten away with murder. Over time and after several rough periods, he gradually overcomes his guilt, and he prospers. Cliff Stern (Allen) has just suffered the collapse of his marriage, his romantic aspirations, and his film project. Although he is a man who has tried to live his life with some degree of moral integrity, his efforts lead only to a series of failures. In this film, Allen leaves the question open: if there is morality in a rational universe, how is it possible to find it, and what can motivate one to try to lead a decent life? Match Point ends with a period. Chris wrestles with his conscience only for a few moments in one bad dream, and then, like Judah Rosenthal, he too prospers. In its final scene, the Hewetts and the Wiltons gather for a champagne toast to welcome the arrival of his and Chloe’s first child, and Tom comments that he doesn’t care if the child becomes great, as long as he is lucky. Allen certainly does not condone murder, or any other form of amorality for that matter, nor does he make any attempt to justify Chris’s actions or values, but the scene does suggest that he has given up on his attempt to ground his ethics. There is no commentator like Cliff Stern to raise the possibility of finding moral consequences for one’s actions and thus meaning in the universe.

Allen clarifies the distinction in his interview with Eric Lax in 2007. While they discuss the morality in Match Point, Allen challenges the notion that he has dismissed any notion of morality in a godless universe:

What I’m really saying, and it’s not hidden or esoteric – it’s just clear as a bell – is that we have to accept that the universe is godless and life is meaningless, often a terrible and brutal experience with no hope, and that love relationships are very, very hard, and that we still need to find a way to not only cope but lead a decent and moral life (Lax 2007: 123–124).

Allen’s analysis seems more appropriate to Crimes and Misdemeanors. The unrelieved nihilism of Match Point suggests that Allen has taken his search for morality into a blind alley, even though he might not be ready to acknowledge that inescapable conclusion. In Match Point, unpunished crime happens as a fact of life. No one can do anything to alter the fact. One merely tries to keep a distance from criminality and continue trying to live a decent, moral life without trying to understand the basis of morality or its imperatives.

In a far more lighthearted treatment, Allen continues his exploration of moral consequences in a random universe in Scoop, the second of the London trilogy. With this film, he returns to familiar Allen territory. His principal characters might have come straight from the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Allen appears as Sid Waterman, aka the Great Splendini, a tummler from the Borsch Circuit in the Catskills, who is taking a summer break from his usual round of birthdays and bar/bat mitzvahs to bring his magic act to London. He teams up with Sondra Pransky (Scarlett Johansson), who has given up her ambition to become a dental technician to pursue a career in journalism. She considers herself an ace reporter for her college newspaper. Her name (Sid keeps referring to her as “Mandelbaum”) and Brooklyn background enable Allen to revert to his trademark ethnic verbal humor and the familiar comic device of having his middle class Jewish characters trying to fit in with wealthy and refined gentile society.

Since Scoop provides many of the comic elements of Allen’s lighter works, the film is fanciful in tone, and thus magic can provide the pretense of order in a random universe, since reason obviously cannot. Magic provides the catalyst for the action. The narrative begins with the death of Joe Strombel (Ian McShane), a famous investigative reporter. Joined by other newly deceased passengers, Strombel sails down the Styx with a hooded Charon, complete with scythe, at the helm on their way to the Underworld. Another traveler (Fanella Woolgar) tells Strombel that she has been poisoned because she discovered evidence linking her employer, Peter Lyman (Hugh Jackman), son of the wealthy Lord Lyman, to a series of murders by the notorious Tarot Card Killer. Intrigued by her story, Joe cannot resist the challenge of one last scoop. He slips overboard in order to return to London as a ghost to solve the crime, but of course he will need accomplices among the living.

The strands of the plot come together neatly when Sondra and her English girlfriend Vivian (Romola Garai) take Vivian’s nephew to Sid’s show. After a series of magic tricks involving the standard props, Sid turns to a magic box the size of a telephone booth that makes audience members disappear. The gimmick reprises the routine in his Oedipus Wrecks episode of New York Stories (1989), even to the point of citing “molecules” as the explanation for the vanishing, as did the assistant in Oedipus. In both cases, this “scientific” explanation is clearly absurd; magic is a series of inexplicable events, like the universe itself. In the earlier film, Sheldon Mills (Allen) sits in the audience while his mother (Mae Questel) disappears, only to reappear as an immense mirage floating over Manhattan. In Scoop, Sid’s decorative assistant leads Sondra to the stage, and after a few exchanges of Borscht Circuit banter not unlike the patter of the magician in Oedipus (George Schindler), Sid puts her into the box, where she meets Strombel and learns of his suspicions about Peter Lyman. Ever ambitious, she realizes that this story could make her career as a journalist. At home she goes online to learn all she can about the Tarot Card Killer and Peter Lyman, and she concludes that the ghost’s story is credible. Sondra decides to assume the role of an investigative journalist and crack the case. She returns to the theater and asks Sid to put her back in the box, where she hopes to gather further information from Strombel. He appears on stage and repeats his story to both Sondra and Sid, but Charon interrupts the conversation to retrieve his missing passenger. Against his better judgment, Sid joins Sandra to form an investigative team in a classic movie caper. They plan to gain access to the Lymans and get to the truth about Peter.

Magic rarely leaves the screen for long. Lacking social skills appropriate to his new social setting among Lord Lyman’s coterie, Sid avoids risky conversation by performing card tricks for the family and their guests. Sondra tells Peter of her interest in tarot and other forms of new age “mysticism,” a bit of information that allows Peter and Sondra to become involved with an antique tarot deck that will eventually lead her to identify the murderer. When the investigation becomes stalled, Strombel makes another appearance to Sid, giving him the combination to a vault that contains vital clues to the case. Only magic can explain how he obtained the information or how he knew that it had become crucial to the investigation. In the final scene, Sid uses card tricks to entertain his fellow passengers on his own ferryboat ride to the Underworld.

Despite its being a light comedy, Scoop reprises several of the motifs of marriage and morality that Allen explored in Match Point. Sid and Sondra, as Americans, inhabit a world apart from the titled Lymans, as did Chris Wilton, as an Irishman, in the world of the Hewetts. This difference in social standing among the characters runs through many of the comedies, but in Scoop the comic situation also involves two serious moral reflections. First, Sid and Sondra will do whatever is necessary to accomplish their objectives. This factor drives the plot and will be treated in some detail in a moment. Second, and briefly, Allen asks whether, in the absence of an ethical structure in the universe, class determines the outlines of morality. Chris, safely ensconced in the Hewitt clan by the end of the film, has murdered two women of lower social station. Peter Lyman, because of his family’s station, seems at first to be able to escape punishment for the murder of a series of prostitutes, which in fact he did not commit, as well as his actual murder of a former mistress and the attempted murder of Sondra, which finally proves his undoing. For Allen, the rich clearly enjoy a different relationship to conventional morality, the police, the media, and their own consciences than do those of lesser station.⁶

This caustic view of social class as determinative of morality reveals another element of Allen’s deepening pessimism. In Bullets over Broadway (1994), Allen explored the proposition that “the artist creates his own moral universe” in a comic format. Cheech (Chazz Palmnteri) plays a mafia hit man assigned to protect the leading lady, Olive Neal (Jennifer Tilly), who has little talent beyond being the Boss’s protégée. Initially assigned the task of seeing that the playwright, David Shayne (John Cusack), does not diminish Olive’s role, Cheech makes several artistic suggestions that clearly improve the Shayne’s work. After nearly rewriting the entire play, Cheech becomes possessive of his artistic creation, and does not hesitate to murder Olive to prevent her inept performance from ruining a work that he now considers his. Throughout his work, Allen routinely has the talented (at least talented in their own narcissistic self-image) exploit others for their own ends. In Scoop and Match Point, the justification of morality by talent morphs into something quite different. Allen sees his amoral characters as claiming the right to define their own ethical boundaries not by talent but by social standing.

Finding moral principles in any of the characters in Scoop can be a challenging task; they do whatever they must to accomplish their goals. Sondra first appears as she tries to ambush a famous film director Mike Tinsley (Kevin McNally) to obtain an interview for her college newspaper. As a veteran celebrity, he initially dismisses this naive but pushy reporter as yet another annoyance, but he reconsiders. He takes her to his hotel room with the promise of giving her the interview she wants. The conversation scarcely begins when he offers her whiskey, with the inevitable result. In Tinsley’s mind, his artistic status justifies his taking advantage of an impressionable American college student. He leaves before she awakens, and her only regret, as she tells her girlfriend Vivian, is that she can’t remember the sex and never got the interview.

Sondra has grown wiser from her encounter with Tinsley, at least wise enough to use her attractiveness to her own advantage as she turns the tables on Peter Lyman. With Sid’s help, she plans a mock drowning incident in the pool of an exclusive London club while Peter swims his daily quota of laps. He rescues her; she looks smashing in her bright red swimsuit and without her glasses. She introduces herself as Jade Spence, of the Palm Beach Spences, and Sid as her father. As their relationship deepens, Peter clearly feels attracted to Jade/Sondra, and even though she deliberately uses her charms to try to convict him of murder, she finds herself gradually falling in love with him. Their romance is genuine, and satisfying, from their point of view, but an audience cannot forget that it is founded on a series of lies, and, given their difference in social station, it has as little chance of enduring as did the marriage of Boris and Melody in Whatever Works. Strombel reappears to berate her for falling in love with the subject of her investigation. Through their relationship, Allen provides more evidence of his darkening pessimism. In Jade/Sondra and Peter, Allen argues that happiness that comes from love is not only fleeting, as he maintained in the earlier films – it is delusional, based as it is on deceit and self-interest.

The lies continue, and they become even more consequential. Just as Sondra decides to confess her assumed identity, Peter tells her he must leave town for a few days, but while Jade and Sid share a birthday dinner in a modest restaurant, they spot Peter striding toward an even less savory part of town. As they follow him, they hear a scream, and the police discover yet another victim of the Tarot Card Killer. That convinces Jade that she has been right. She takes the story to the editor of a prestigious London newspaper (Charles Dance), a friend of Vivian’s father, who points out that he would never run the story for two reasons. First, she presents only circumstantial evidence against a highly respected citizen; and second, the actual Tarot Card Killer has been apprehended and has confessed. While she believes the explanation and regrets her suspicions, Sid remains skeptical. With an insight that borders on the magical, he explains his theory that Peter had become a victim of blackmail by a prostitute, and to eliminate her, he merely mimicked the methods of the Tarot Card Killer, knowing the police would link his crime to the murders of the real serial killer. Sondra cannot believe such a wild story and returns to Peter. Sid cannot drop the case. Assuming yet another fictitious identity, he poses as an ace reporter for the Los Angeles Times, and bribes a prostitute to reveal information linking Peter to the victim, at least to the initials on an envelope he had stolen from Peter’s luggage during his first visit to the Lymans’ country estate.

The final deception backfires. When Sid telephones Sondra to warn her of the danger, Peter intercepts the call, and invites Sondra for a pleasant row on the lake, where he intends to drown her after telling the true story of his committing the one murder. He pushes her overboard and watches as she struggles to keep afloat. He calls the police to tell them of a terrible boating accident, but Sondra, who was captain of the Brooklyn Community Center swimming team, not the foundering waif he thought he had rescued from the pool at the club, reappears just as the police prepare to leave. The web of deceptions, woven by Sondra and Sid, produces a successful outcome. Peter is arrested and Sondra’s story receives praise from her editor. During her final scene, Sondra reveals that Sid cannot share her success. Racing to her rescue in a Mini Cooper and driving on the left side of the road, Sid crashed and was killed. (Allen had not killed off his character since Love and Death [1975]. Could this be Allen’s way of telling his audience that he is finally laying to rest the nebbish character he embodied in dozens of films over the last 40 years?)⁷

Allen’s dark joke about his own demise that ends Scoop sets the stage for the even darker tone for Cassandra’s Dream. In it, Allen leaves behind the sunny garden parties and the breezy charms of Scoop and returns to the murky, airless world of Match Point. Magic in the form of an amiable ghost helps Sid and Sondra accomplish their goals, but in the amoral universe of Cassandra’s Dream, Terry (Colin Farrell) and Ian (Ewan McGregor) find little outside help to enable them to escape the whirlpool of events dragging to them to destruction. As in Match Point, luck determines everything in Allen’s random universe. A run of good fortune in gambling lures two young men into a vulnerable state of self-delusion, and as they grow in confidence, their good fortune turns cruelly against them. They plan a perfect crime, but in fact they can do little to influence the ultimate outcome of their actions. As was the case with Chris Wilton in Match Point, circumstances force them to cross that invisible line of morality that keeps most men from committing premeditated murder. There is a difference, however. Through his good luck, Chris gets away with murder and prospers. Terry and Ian succeed in eluding the police, but that matters little. Luck finds other ways to convict them of their crimes. In Allen’s stark version of a meaningless universe, some people are simply dealt a good hand at birth; others are not, and their luck changes capriciously and often. It’s simply the way things are, as Allen understands it.

The title of the film provides a clear indication of Allen’s perception of the events he portrays on the screen. In Greek myth, Cassandra had the gift of prophecy but, sadly, her gift did little good, because she also received a curse from Apollo, whose attentions she spurned. Because of the curse, no one would ever believe her prophecies. Virgil borrows the Greek material for his Latin epic, The Aeneid. The poet describes Cassandra during the final hours of Troy. While the Trojan leaders believe that their enemy has sailed away, she tries to warn them about the treachery of the Greeks with their wooden horse. Of course, the leaders of Troy regard her message as the ravings of a lunatic, and welcome the wooden horse within their walls as a parting gift from the vanquished army.⁸ Once within the city walls, the Achaean warriors, hidden within the huge horse, break out, open the gates, and let the destroying army enter. Cassandra thus represents a warning of doom that goes unheeded.

Allen uses her name as a title to underline his theme of hopelessness. Ian and Terry should have recognized the signs of their rapidly approaching doom, but they could not believe that they were headed for disaster. Cassandra’s Dream is the name of the greyhound that paid 60-to-1 in a race Terry bet on. With his winnings, he has the money to buy a sailboat with his brother and, out of gratitude, they name their boat after the dog that made it all possible. In a terrible twist of irony, the boat eventually becomes the setting for both of their deaths. In this world that Allen creates for the two brothers, good fortune provides only delusion, like the Trojans celebrating the gift that they believe symbolizes a successful end to the war. For Allen, Cassandra’s dream of imminent catastrophe embodies a more accurate understanding of the universe in its mindless reality. Terry and Ian can do little to alter the outcome of their actions.

Terry’s gambling addiction makes his life a rollercoaster ride. Allen’s script emphasizes his sudden changes in luck. His run of winners at the track leads to the illusion that his streak of good luck makes him a sure bet in a high stakes poker game, in which he is clearly in over his head. His face changes from worry to panic, and he borrows heavily to continue playing. Although the scene closes with a sense of foreboding, it turns out that in fact his luck changed later in the night, and he actually won enough to finance a house with his wife Kate (Sally Hawkins). Before long, Terry loses heavily again, but this time his luck does not change. He must borrow £90,000 from loan sharks. His life begins to split at the seams. He drinks heavily and turns to prescription drugs to get him through the day. When the owner of the garage discovers Terry has been secretly lending out his customers’ cars, he loses his job. In an effort to help his brother, Ian takes money from the safe in his father’s restaurant, and tries to borrow from his mother, but even their combined efforts leave them desperately short of the amount they need.

Ian’s risk taking assumes a more subtle form. Like Chris Wilton and many other Allen characters through the decades, Ian longs to rise to another level of society, and he will take whatever chances he must to make it. He determines to move beyond helping his father with the restaurant as soon as possible. Despite his limited resources, he nurtures a fantasy about investing in a chain of hotels in California, and if he can’t realize his fantasy immediately, he can try to create the illusion that he has. At every moment, he risks having his lies uncovered. To impress his girlfriend of the moment, Lucy (Ashley Madekwe), a waitress at his father’s restaurant, he takes her for a ride on his boat and borrows an expensive Jaguar from the garage where Terry works, without the owner’s consent. During the ride home from a picnic in the country with Lucy, he stops on the roadside to help Angela (Haley Atwell), a beautiful actress, who by chance has broken down on his route. She thanks him by giving him tickets to her show. Lucy knows about the borrowed Jaguar, but Ian tells Angela that the car is his, and that he has made his money from investments, like a chain of hotels in California. Faced with the prospect of moving into an artistic set with a beautiful actress and model, Ian drops the waitress without a word. With a simple call to Angela, Lucy could destroy Ian’s web of lies in an instant, but his luck holds. Although she has been rejected without a word of explanation or apology, for some inexplicable reason she never speaks up.

The deception cuts in both directions, however. Angela’s role in her play involves nudity and simulated sex, as Ian discovers, but she denies any embarrassment by explaining that she is only acting. Ian may not suspect it, but in their romantic relationship she may be acting for him as well. She hopes that Ian will take her to California, where she may meet some film directors. His illusion of having found love, and someone who could help him live his fantasy, lasts but a short time. He eventually realizes that Angela merely uses her beauty to get what she wants. Visiting her flat one evening, he discovers that she is with someone else. Ian waits outside for hours to confront her about the man she has been with all night. She neither apologizes nor expresses regret for compromising their relationship. In a moment of candor, she admits she might be willing to sleep with a director to get a part in a film, depending on the part and the director. At one point, Angela tells him matter-of-factly that she plans to go to Morocco for a few days with someone else. Their relationship fits the pattern for Allen’s lovers during this period: it is based purely on self-interest, and will in all probability end very quickly, without the lingering pleasant memories found in, say, Annie Hall or Manhattan.

Terry’s debt, coupled with his physical and psychological disintegration, and Ian’s desperate need to make his fantasy a reality and hold on to Angela, have backed the brothers into a corner. They can be rescued only by a miracle, and that miracle appears as if by magic, like the classical deus ex machina, in the form of their Uncle Howard (Tom Wilkinson), their mother’s brother. Allen’s presentation of the character makes him seem unearthly – perhaps godlike – from the beginning. Early in the film, at the dinner table, the family matriarch (Clare Higgins) boasts about Howard’s achievements, not only to prod her sons, but to humiliate her husband, whose restaurant continues to struggle. Howard started with nothing, she says, became a world famous physician, does cosmetic surgery in the third world, and has become fabulously wealthy in the process. His success represents precisely the kind of transition to another social class that Ian yearns for. As a sign of his boundless intellectual energy, she mentions that even in middle age he is learning Chinese. Most admirable of all, she notes, he has remained loyal to the family. He has helped them financially on several occasions. She knows the terrible predicaments of her sons, but she believes her brother would be willing rescue them. If he seems too good to be true, he is. Howard is another of Allen’s examples of deception.

Howard arrives in London for a few weeks’ respite between his business activities in China and those in California. At a three-way meeting in the garden, he seems amenable to helping his nephews, even though Terry has asked for £90,000 and Ian for £100,000, and neither has collateral or any proven business experience. His generosity borders on folly, but generosity does not motivate him. A sudden rain shower drives them to take shelter in a thicket that ensnares them, much like Chris Wilton’s latticed office windows. There, Howard reveals that he wants something in return. (To heighten the intensity of the scene, Tom Wilkinson recites his lines with the nervous stammer that Woody Allen has perfected when playing his neurotic characters, and that other actors try to imitate in Allen films.) He explains that Martin Burns (Philip Davis), a business associate, knows too much about Howard’s illegal activities and will talk to the police to save himself from prosecution. Howard fears that he may have to spend the rest of his life in prison. He concludes that Burns must be eliminated. The brothers gasp in disbelief, and Howard rages at their disloyalty to the family: “Family is family; blood is blood!” The brothers back away, but they eventually come to grips with the hopelessness of their situation without Howard, and they conclude that they actually could commit murder and get away with it. In that case everyone’s problems would be solved.

Again, an interesting comparison shows Allen’s progression. Judah Rosenthal in Crimes and Misdemeanors is also a physician who filched money from his philanthropic organization, but when confronted with the fact, he claims that he paid back every cent with interest. For some days he wrestles with his decision to murder Dolores (Anjelica Huston), as his brother Jack (Jerry Orbach) had urged, but in the end he goes ahead, entrusting Jack to handle the details. Jack helps him because of family loyalty; he acknowledges that Judah has helped him in the past. In contrast, Howard makes no mention of paying back anything he has stolen. He shows none of Judah’s reluctance to authorize a murder. He presents his plan to his nephews forcefully as the only possible solution, and not only urges them, but essentially coerces them to undertake the project. Judah suffers remorse for a while; Howard simply disappears from the story. Once Burns has been murdered, Howard goes off to further business dealings in California, apparently safe from prosecution. The question of morality struggle never nuances Allen’s portrait of Howard, as it did Judah. Judah evokes some trace of sympathy for his plight; Howard does not.

Terry does not have Howard’s moral callousness. After the murder, he falls more deeply into drugs, alcohol, and depression. His wife tells Ian that he in fantasizing about having committed a murder and is talking about suicide. He rants about “breaking God’s law,” but Ian sees this explanation as the reasoning of a man who is clearly losing control of his life. Ian – and Allen – regard this kind of explanation as a desperate attempt to impose a moral value on their actions by citing a higher authority, an idea that Allen has already dismissed in Crimes and Misdemeanors and Match Point. Terry tells Ian that he intends to confess to the police; he telephoned once, but hung up before telling his story. Ian urges him not to do anything foolish. He argues that they inhabit a violent, cruel world, and that Terry has to come face-to-face with his own human nature. Making things right through confession and accepting punishment for crimes strikes Ian and Howard – and possibly Woody Allen at this point – as an absurd concept in a world without moral imperatives. When Ian tells Howard about Terry, Howard immediately concludes that they have only one possible solution: Ian must kill Terry to prevent his informing the police. The irony is blatant. Howard once cited family loyalty as the compelling motivation for murder. At the end of this cycle of crime, he cites self-preservation as the overriding value that justifies fratricide.

As if to mock the meticulous planning of his most horrendous crime, luck determines the outcome for Ian. He takes the prescription drugs from Terry’s bedroom with the idea of mixing them into a beer for Terry when they go sailing on Cassandra’s Dream. With Terry’s well-known history of alcohol and drug abuse, finding these substances in his body would raise few questions. During an afternoon of heavy drinking, Ian plans to doctor one last beer with the drugs and simply push Terry overboard in his stupor. After mixing the drink, Ian realizes the enormity of what he is about to do, and in the first moral decision he has made since they entered into their original conspiracy with Howard, Ian smashes the bottle before Terry can take it. His moral decision brings disastrous consequences. Terry stumbles down the ladder into the cabin and crashes into Ian, who falls backward, strikes his head and dies, as though paying a price for his own moral scruple. The police investigators on the scene conclude that Terry committed suicide by drowning after he killed Ian in an apparent fight in the cabin. Howard does not reappear in the film, but since he has no traceable link to the crimes, one can conclude that he will escape suspicion. A brief coda shows Kate and Angela, as yet unaware of the tragedy, shopping for clothes in a fashionable boutique. Their appearance suggests that life in this uncaring, morally indifferent universe goes on with all its mundane activities with little notice of treachery, deceit, and murder.

In moving from London to the sunny Mediterranean before returning to New York for Whatever Works, Allen might have been tempted to lighten his pessimism, but he resisted the temptation as he wrote and directed Vicky Cristina Barcelona. He certainly offers a brighter palette of color with the help of his cinematographer Javier Aguirresarobe. He delights in the art and architecture of Barcelona, stages much of his dialogue in brightly lit verandas, parks, and gardens, and dresses his actors in colorful summer clothes. Arguably, this is Allen’s most visually appealing film. Appearances can be deceptive, however. Despite their beautiful setting and genial socializing, the characters remain desperately alone. Allen stresses the theme by repeatedly demonstrating the difficulties they have with simple communication: cell phones that don’t work, a poet who refuses to release his poems to the public, a failed documentary film project, a language barrier that proves not only an embarrassment but a weapon.

For Allen, authentic intimacy has always been the form of human communication that is most difficult to achieve. In recent years, it becomes an impossible delusion. As the story of this film unfolds, each of the characters sees her/his illusions of romantic relationship shattered, and must face a future of unrelieved loneliness, which Allen continues to propose as the universal lot of humankind in this uncaring universe. Their actions have little effect on bringing happiness into their lives.

The plot follows the adventures of the two eponymous heroines. When Vicky (Rebecca Hall) comes to Barcelona to spend the summer with family friends, the Nashes, she is already engaged to Doug (Chris Messina), a very successful but dull young businessman from New York. Her life becomes complicated when a charming artist, Juan Antonio (Javier Bardem) invites her and her travelling companion Cristina (Scarlett Johansson) to Oviedo for a weekend of sightseeing, music, and sex. Vicky recoils at his crass invitation, but Cristina is intrigued by his candor and welcomes the adventure. After icily rejecting his advances for a time, Vicky finds herself seduced by the wine, guitar music, and the hypnotic, if not magical, persuasive powers of Juan Antonio. Afterwards, she feels embarrassed about her momentary dalliance with a near stranger, but before long she discovers that she has actually fallen in love with him. Some days later, a conversation with a dreary young couple from New York, in which they talk of property values in the suburbs, interior decorators, bridge, golf, and Doug’s business connections, gives Vicky a glimpse into her own future. The message is reinforced when Judy Nash (Patricia Clarkson), her hostess for the summer, confesses that she finds her marriage to Mark (Kevin Dunn) barren, but that even with the help of psychotherapy she hasn’t found the courage to leave her dull husband and start a life of her own.

Into this web of intertwined connections and relationships, Allen places Vicky as the central figure of the narrative. When Doug unexpectedly joins her in Spain, he rushes her into a civil marriage to satisfy his conventional sense of propriety. Their trip to Seville together thus becomes a honeymoon. Marriage only makes Vicky feel more repressed. She angrily rejects a harmless flirtation from a fellow language student, explaining that she is a married woman. Shopping in an outdoor market with Vicky, Doug buys a caged bird for Judy and Mark as a gesture of gratitude for their hospitality, and says he plans to get one just like it for their own home in New York. Vicky may or may not grasp the tragic symbolism of the gift. As the newlyweds prepare to return home for the formal church wedding they have planned for their friends and family, Juan Antonio makes one last attempt to rekindle his and Vicky’s romance. She almost succumbs, but Maria Elena (Penélope Cruz), Juan Antonio’s former wife, interrupts their tryst, firing wildly with a revolver. One bullet nicks Vicky’s hand, but she tells Doug the wound came from an antique gun her Spanish teacher was demonstrating for her during their farewell lunch. For the rest of her life, the resulting scar will undoubtedly remind her of Juan Antonio, Barcelona, and the life she might have had. A voiceover explains that, in the end, Vicky returned to the Westchester suburbs of New York to embrace the dull dependable life she had envisioned for herself before her summer of awakening.

Before their vacation trip, Cristina (Scarlett Johansson) had spent three years making a 12-minute documentary film entitled Why Love Is So Hard to Define, but she was dissatisfied with the finished work. Always more of a free spirit than Vicky, she eagerly accepts Juan Antonio’s invitation to Oviedo despite Vicky’s objections. On the first night, she agrees to meet Juan Antonio in his hotel room, but as they embrace, she becomes sick with what may be food poisoning. Cristina must remain in her hotel room for the weekend, while Vicky and Juan Antonio continue without her. Back in Barcelona, Juan Antonio renews his pursuit of Cristina. He invites her to a wine tasting, and this leads to a tour of his studio and paintings, and love. Before long, Cristina moves in with him. Their romance takes a surprising turn when Juan Antonio learns that his former wife Maria Elena, hospitalized after another suicide attempt, is being released. He explains that she has no money and nowhere to go; she must live with them until she becomes more settled. Neither woman is pleased with the arrangement. Hoping to ease the situation for Cristina, he immediately assigns Maria Elena to the guest room, and he insists that she speak English in deference to Cristina, but Maria Elena defies his request to spite Cristina.

Their rivalry takes an odd twist. Before long, Juan Antonio admits that he makes love to both women, and Maria Elena and Cristina also become intimate with each other. They all thrive in this irregular arrangement. Maria Elena and Juan Antonio enter into a productive period with their painting, and Maria Elena seems to become more stable. With the help of Maria Elena, Cristina discovers a talent for photography, and devotes herself to the work. When Cristina seems to have found a direction in her life, she simply leaves the house and goes to France for a while with no credible explanation. In the end, the voiceover explains that she is going back to America, still searching for what she wants, but clear about what she does not want.

Despite his self-confidence and undeniable charm, Juan Antonio loses all three women, but in different ways. Ever the restless wanderer, Cristina grew tired of their relationship and simply walked away. Maria Elena remains with him, but they resume their old pre-Cristina relationship in which they continually fight, even to the point of physical violence. Maria Elena becomes more unhinged and eventually leaves him. Alone once again, Juan Antonio tries to recreate his romance with Vicky. With Judy’s encouragement and assurance that Vicky knows her marriage will not bring happiness, Juan Antonio makes one last attempt to reach her before she returns to America. After a quiet lunch, they visit his studio, and they kiss. Vicky weakens for a moment. Juan Antonio might conceivably have persuaded her to leave Doug and stay with him, but he never has the opportunity to find out. At the moment of decision, Maria Elena rushes in with the pistol she claims she initially intended to use to kill herself. With Vicky and Cristina gone, Juan Antonio has only Maria Elena, who may be homicidal as well as suicidal, and may never have the capacity to enter into a stable relationship.

Judy remains in Barcelona, trapped in a marriage she finds intolerable. Early in the film, she explains her feelings to Vicky, after she realizes that Vicky stumbled upon her in the embrace of a guest at one of her afternoon receptions. She claims the indiscretion, involving little more than a lingering kiss in an open veranda with several guests only a few yards away, should not be taken as a sign of an actual affair, but she admits it does reveal the emptiness of her marriage. Weeks later, in her effort to keep Vicky from entering into a hollow marriage like her own, she arranges a meeting between Juan Antonio and Vicky, and tries to persuade Vicky to leave Doug. Vicky sees through the ploy and tells Judy that her meddling is only an attempt to rewrite her own life. Both women express fear at the prospect of making a change, and in fact neither does.

Vicky and Cristina return to America with dubious prospects for happiness; Judy and Juan Antonio remain in Barcelona to find whatever satisfaction they can. For each of the principals, the summer in Barcelona provided but a momentary taste of happiness, but in the psychic world that Allen inhabits at this period in his life, that moment is illusory and leaves a bitter aftertaste. The memory of delusional love only heightens their awareness of their own emptiness. How, they might ask themselves, could they have been so foolish as to believe that happiness is possible in this loveless universe? At the end, no one survives unbruised, with the exception of Doug, who appears too shallow to look beyond his business, his properties, and his golf.

With these European films, Allen has reached the logical conclusion to the reflections he has been struggling with in his films for the past 30 years. He has become a quieter version of his creation Boris Yellnikoff, a man who sees no purpose to the universe and has become increasingly impatient with those who fail to see what he sees with utmost clarity. At this point in his life Allen may even be imposing his own thought into Boris’s closing words. After berating revelers for celebrating New Year’s, for not realizing they are “one step closer to the grave,” Boris looks into the camera and addresses the audience in the theater: “I’m the only one who sees the whole picture. That’s what they mean by genius.”

1 Annette Wernblad takes the title of her study of Allen’s development from this sentence. In her treatment of Hannah and Her Sisters (1986) she includes a citation from Leo Tolstoy that might be the motif of Allen’s work, as explicated in her study and the present one: “The only absolute knowledge attainable by man is that life is meaningless” (Wernblad 1992: 115).

2 Leo Robson (2010) comments that all the characters end up “blissfully happy.” That’s true, but Boris dismisses their happiness as an illusion.

3 The building at 30 St. Mary Ax, London, was constructed for Swiss Re, an international insurance corporation. Designed by Norman Foster, it has become a unique landmark, resembling a huge pineapple. Londoners refer to it as the “Erotic Gherkin.” Its rounded surfaces are sheathed in a web of steel rods that are clearly visible from within the building, giving one the illusion of being in a giant birdcage.

4 Richard Schickel (2003: 17) opens a lengthy analysis of Allen’s use of magic realism by citing “his belief that salvation is available to humankind only through the intervention of mysterious, inexplicable forces in our everyday lives.” In a universe where events are beyond human control, magic provides a way out. The magic often leads to comic situations; at times, however, preternatural interventions can have quite sinister implications, as in Match Point.

5 Sophocles does not suggest that life is worthless to the extent that the elimination of the innocent as collateral damage is defensible, as Chris seems to imply. In Oedipus at Colonus, l. 1225 ff., the chorus offers a meditation on old age and death by decrying the folly of wanting to live on beyond one’s allotted time: “Not to be born is, beyond all estimation, best; but when a man has seen the light of day, this is next best by far, that with utmost speed he should go back from where he came. For when he has seen youth go by, with its easy merry-making, what hard affliction is foreign to him, what suffering does he not know? Envy, factions, strife, battles and murders. Last of all fall to his lot old age, blamed, weak, unsociable, friendless, wherein dwells every misery among miseries” (Sophocles 2007: 193–194).

6 Vittorio Hösle (2007: 59) observes that in Match Point and Scoop Allen depicts the nature of class-conscious society with “merciless realism.”

7 In Lax (2007: 184), Allen addresses his ambivalence about future appearances in his films. On one hand he maintains that having a Woody Allen character limits his creativity: “It limits me when I’m conceiving a project to have to think there needs to be a Woody Allen character, because that immediately requires it to be a certain type of movie.” He leaves the door open for future roles, however, when he says that if someone read his script and said: “‘Oh, you’ve got to get Woody Allen to do that part,’ then fine, I would do it.”

8 Then, even then, Cassandra’s lips unsealed The doom to come; lips by a god’s command Never believed or heeded by the Trojans (Virgil 1984: 42, Book 2, 330–332).