Everyone Says I Love You
Woody Allen’s 1996 musical comedy Everyone Says I Love You was the break from monotony that I had been enduring as evidenced through my last two or three reviews. Finally, here comes a film with pop and sizzle that is what it tries to be and so much more than that! As my regular readers know, Woody Allen is one of my favourite filmmakers. With Everyone Says I Love You, Allen has crafted a film that is not easy to make and has knocked it out of the park at the same time. Musicals are often not the first choice in terms of modern films, yet there are some successful ones and there are some enjoyable ones. This one is damn sure enjoyable and it did okay at the box office, despite opening on only three screens in its opening weekend.
Everyone Says I Love You is jam-packed with movie stars. With Goldie Hawn, Woody Allen, Julia Roberts, Edward Norton, Drew Barrymore, Alan Alda, Natalie Portman, and Tim Roth all cramming into the film, you would think it would be difficult to spot a performance that wasn’t bent on outdoing the others. Instead, Allen’s film works with a joyous cooperative energy and nothing feels as though performers are showing off for the accolades. Allen keeps it all in gentle focus here and tells a beautiful story with humour, music, and surprisingly poignant moments as well. It unfolds wonderfully, taking its audience on a beautiful journey and packing plenty of heartwarming laughs for the trip.
The plot here is relatively simple. It’s about a group of people from New York attempting to recapture (or in some cases capture for the first time) that simplicity of first love. This simplicity is incredibly buoyant and enticing, of course, and this causes the characters in the film to break out into song, whether they can sing or not. Vocal talent is not the issue within Everyone Says I Love You, though. Song and the art of breaking into song is the issue, as these characters are so flabbergasted with joy in their situations that they cannot help to bust right into happy tunes. The end result of such exuberance is a happy, goofy film that will result in huge smiles and big laughs throughout. It’s quite simply just a happy film experience from Woody Allen. It’s also one of his best.
Everyone Says I Love You works because it remembers the joyous moments of old Hollywood screen musicals and comedies. It works because it has a resonating innocence within it that, like most of Allen’s films, do more justice to the natural characters throughout humanity than raunchfest comedies or bland archetypal films featuring over-the-top characters. So when Allen goes slapstick, it feels natural and more enticing. When Allen delves into sexual humour, which is always more suggestive than obvious, it’s more engrossing because it’s more compassionate. Woody Allen’s gift in terms of his filmmaking is that he understands, more than any other comedic director working today, how the human spirit responds to situations that are funny.
Within the framework of Everyone Says I Love You, it’s important that the performers are the ones that are singing. Only Drew Barrymore is not actually singing here, mainly because she was convinced her voice was so terrible that she couldn’t possibly even hit one note. Interestingly enough, Barrymore does sing alongside Hugh Grant in 2007′s Music and Lyrics. Anyway, some of the singers in the film are accomplished and gifted. Edward Norton, Alan Alda, and Goldie Hawn are all noted to be good singers. In fact, Hawn was noted to be such a good singer that Allen told her to tone it down a little to sound more natural. She apparently had to work pretty hard to sound terrible.
The songs in the film, from the jubilant “Just You, Just Me” as sung by Norton in the beginning to the classic tune “I’m Through With Love” all require the vocal talents of someone that, frankly, doesn’t sing the hell out of them. Instead, Allen’s film used songs that call upon fractured vocals to enhance the sound and the richness of what is being said through the song and not through the quality of the singer. The vocals here, therefore, impose a freshness and a charm on the film that doesn’t let up until the end credits roll.
The performances here are all good and the plot devices are typical Woody Allen. It is about unwise choices in love, for the most part, and the characters meditate and debate the meaning of these choices through the events that unfold. When a family member dies, Alan Alda’s character debates aloud the meaning of life and espouses his atheistic philosophy on the rest while others chime in with their points of view. It is scenes like this that create a value in Allen’s films, as they are so intelligently layered with all of the various components of love and are not singularly focused. Everyone Says I Love You is a broad story; it’s a painting of a film. It has a lot to look at and a lot going on, but at the same time it creates one simple and bold vision that is clear to anyone that sees it. Simply put, it’s a marvelous film.
