Essay
When the story belongs to everyone.
Allen’s ensemble films keep shifting our attention. A sister, a playwright or a fading performer may take control of a scene, then give way to someone whose choices change the story. In Hannah and Her Sisters, Bullets Over Broadway and Radio Days, the supporting players help determine what happens next.
An ensemble film has no permanent centre.
Hannah and Her Sisters moves between Hannah, Lee, Holly, Elliot and Mickey without reducing any of them to a subplot. Each sees the same family from a different angle. A Thanksgiving gathering can hold Hannah’s calm, Elliot’s guilt and Holly’s frustration at once.
1986
Hannah and Her Sisters
Three sisters move through marriages, affairs and changes of direction over two years.
- Hannah holds the family gatherings together
- Lee begins an affair with Hannah’s husband
- Holly searches for work and confidence
- Thanksgiving reveals how the relationships have shifted
1994
Bullets Over Broadway
A playwright stages his new work with a demanding star, a hopeless actress and a gangster in the rehearsal room.
- Helen Sinclair feeds David’s vanity
- Olive Neal’s casting damages the production
- Cheech quietly improves the play
- The company turns artistic compromise into farce
Case study
Hannah and Her Sisters
The Thanksgiving scenes give the film its structure. Hannah appears settled and dependable, but Elliot is hiding his affair with Lee. Holly arrives with another plan for her future and another reason to compare herself with her sisters. The room looks calm because the guests don’t know what everybody else is carrying into it.
The balance changes as the film continues. Elliot’s private excitement becomes selfishness. Lee begins to see the limits of both men in her life. Holly, initially the least secure sister, finds a direction through writing and an unexpected relationship with Mickey. Hannah remains the family’s anchor, though the film gradually shows the pressure that role places on her.
Case study
Bullets Over Broadway
David Shayne begins Bullets Over Broadway convinced that he is the artist in the room. The production soon belongs to a much less orderly collection of people. Helen Sinclair flatters him, Olive Neal cannot act, and Cheech understands the weaknesses in the play better than its author does.
The comedy comes from the damage they do to one another’s plans. Olive is there because her gangster boyfriend is financing the show. Cheech is there to watch Olive, yet his blunt notes improve the script. David accepts each compromise while continuing to describe himself as a serious artist. By the time the play works, authorship has become an awkward question.
Case study
Radio Days
Radio Days is held together by memory rather than a conventional plot. Joe recalls his childhood home in Rockaway, the relatives who filled it and the radio programmes that reached them every day. News reports, music, adverts and adventure serials become part of the family’s routine.
The film also leaves the house to follow the performers behind those voices. Their glamorous public lives sit beside arguments at the dinner table and Aunt Bea’s disappointing dates. No character controls the whole story. The subject is the way separate memories accumulate until they begin to resemble a shared past.
Casting and performance
Different rhythms in the same scene
The actors do not all move at the same speed. Michael Caine gives Elliot a hesitant, guilty energy in Hannah and Her Sisters. Dianne Wiest lets Holly speak and act too quickly when she feels insecure. In Bullets Over Broadway, Wiest turns Helen Sinclair’s pauses and gestures into part of the performance Helen gives both onstage and off.
Those differences stop a crowded cast from becoming a row of interchangeable voices. Each actor brings a distinct pressure to the scene. Put the characters around a dinner table or inside a rehearsal room and their timing tells us who is confident, who is pretending and who has already lost control.
Shifting attention
Changing the centre
An ensemble lets Allen change the question without changing the film. Crimes and Misdemeanors can follow Judah’s fear of exposure, then turn to Cliff’s professional resentment and romantic hopes. The stories barely touch at first, but each alters how we read the other.
The same effect appears in the comedies. A minor character can enter with a better idea, expose someone’s vanity or redirect the plot. On another viewing, a reaction at the edge of the scene may become more interesting than the speech at its centre.
The art of the ensemble
Watch who changes the scene.
In Allen’s strongest ensemble films, the central character is whoever has the most at stake at that moment. Control passes across the table, through the rehearsal room or from one memory to the next.
The plot stays the same on a repeat viewing. Our attention does not. A supporting performance, a pause or somebody listening in the background can become the detail that changes the film.