My wife was complaining the other day that it’d been a while since we’ve watched a romance movie. She’d also recently mentioned that some of the only kind of humor that she can appreciate are Woody Allen movies. Everyone Says I Love You has all that and is a musical to boot, thus killing many birds with one stone. It’s particularly known for featuring singing performances by famous actors not known for their musical talents.
The story is centered around the Dandriges, an upper-class family in New York with leftist sympathies. The entire family maintains a close relationship with the ex-husband of the mother, named Joe who is played by Allen himself. Joe is distraught after his latest lover leaves him and the entire Dandrige family sympathizes with him. His daughter hatches a scheme to set him up with a woman who sees a psychiatrist next door. By eavesdropping on her sessions, she coaches Joe on how to present himself as her ideal fantasy. Meanwhile, the eldest daughter of the family is getting married but becomes tempted by a criminal whose cause the mother takes up.
As usual in Allen’s films, snappy dialogue does most of the heavy lifting while the prolific director plays his usual on-screen persona. The difference here is that occasionally everyone breaks out in song and dance as in the Hollywood musicals of yore, providing an extra dose of entertainment. I understand that Allen made a deliberate choice here to make the musical routines more naturalistic, even going to the extent of asking the more accomplished singers to perform more poorly. While I agree that this fits in better with how the rest of the film feels, it often looks sad compared to the real musicals that Allen tries to evoke. The final scene is magical, no doubt about that as cheesy as it is. But most of the time I’m simply reminded that Allen isn’t especially talented in this area, especially since we’ve only recently watched musicals like The Young Girls of Rochefort.
Thematically Everyone Says I Love You plays around with the notion that everyone desperately seeks romantic love at every opportunity, yet it is a transient and nebulous thing that one is never satisfied with. This is well-trod territory and though the director handles it respectably enough, notably by giving each of the female characters a different version of the lesson, he adds nothing that is new. Even the jokes here feel tired or else downright crass. At one point the film states that anyone who upholds Republican values must have a mental illness. This may well please the left-leaning crowd who likes Allen’s films but it doesn’t feel like a very intelligent jest to make. It’s especially ugly now that the political divide has become so much sharper today than when this film was made. To be fair, he does also skewer Democrats by making fun of how liberal compassion of criminals only goes so far and often backfires, but the jokes in that direction aren’t any cleverer.
My wife commented that Allen’s on-screen persona often likes to mention how sexy and good-looking he is, while the film itself exposes and even exaggerates his nerdish looks and slight frame. It’s this contradiction between defiance and self-deprecation that lies at the heart of so much of his humor. This extends beyond his character as is obvious in this film: being simultaneously leftist and rich, and so feeling guilty about it; being intellectual and yet being engaged primarily with what we would today call First World Problems instead of trying to solve more serious issues and so forth. When the script is good, this dichotomy makes for funny material. But when the treatment is merely superficial, as it ultimately is here, it feels pointless at best and at worst somewhat nauseating and out-of-touch with the times.
Anyway, that was a bit of a digression. The upshot is that this film is decent enough to be entertaining but barring some exceptional scenes, it’s nothing special. I’m also tempted to say that it’s fun to see this as a reminder of what all these famous stars looked like twenty years ago but considering that Allen makes on average one film a year like clockwork, it’s nearly impossible to find a major Hollywood star who hasn’t appeared in an Allen film at least once so you could the say the same for all of his films.