Everyone Says I Love You (1996)
Film Overview
Woody Allen turns the romantic complications of a large New York family into a musical in which people who would normally talk through their problems suddenly start singing them instead.
Natasha Lyonne plays D.J., whose narration connects the various romantic stories surrounding her extended family. Her mother Steffi, played by Goldie Hawn, is married to lawyer Bob, played by Alan Alda, while D.J.’s father Joe lives largely in Paris.
Drew Barrymore’s Skylar is engaged to Holden, played by Edward Norton. He struggles to find the perfect way to propose, while Skylar’s apparently settled romantic future becomes considerably less certain after she meets recently released prisoner Charles Ferry.
Joe, meanwhile, travels to Venice and meets Von, played by Julia Roberts. With information secretly supplied by D.J., he presents himself as the man who shares all of Von’s interests, fantasies and preferences.
Their relationship carries the story from Venice to Paris, while the New York family moves through engagements, teenage romances, political arguments, funerals and Steffi’s endless enthusiasm for charitable causes.
Allen uses classic American standards rather than newly written songs, and deliberately cast actors who were not primarily known as singers. Dick Hyman arranged and conducted much of the music, while Carlo Di Palma photographs New York, Venice and Paris with an appropriately romantic glow.
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My Review
When talking about love is no longer enough
Everyone Says I Love You is one of the most purely pleasurable experiments in Woody Allen’s filmography: a romantic comedy in which New Yorkers, Parisians and Venetians behave normally until emotion becomes too much for ordinary conversation and a song takes over.
Allen’s decision not to build the film around professional singers is what makes the idea work for me. The voices are sometimes polished and sometimes clearly not. That imperfection gives the musical numbers an intimacy they might have lost if every character suddenly sounded like a Broadway star.
These are people singing because the film has temporarily allowed them to express something differently. The musical grammar is classic Hollywood, but the performers remain recognisably the slightly awkward, complicated people we were watching before the orchestra arrived.
The result is less about musical virtuosity than the pleasure of imagining everyday life as though an old MGM musical might break through it at any moment.
The charm of the film is that ordinary voices are allowed extraordinary musical moments.
Natasha Lyonne’s D.J. is the ideal narrator because the family is complicated enough to require somebody to guide us through it. Steffi and Bob are happily married, Joe is Steffi’s former husband and D.J.’s father, and various children, partners and friends move through the enormous household.
The family is wealthy, politically opinionated and emotionally energetic. They discuss romance, philanthropy, politics and one another’s decisions with the certainty of people who are accustomed to having an opinion on everything.
Allen uses that abundance rather than trying to reduce the film to one central couple. Love occurs everywhere at once. Teenagers fall in and out of relationships, adults revisit old ones, engagements wobble and parents offer advice they are not always qualified to give.
D.J. moves among these stories with the amused perspective of someone young enough still to find adult romantic behaviour slightly absurd.
The film treats love less like one great story than a condition the entire family keeps catching from one another.
Edward Norton’s Holden provides the first major musical declaration. He loves Skylar and wants to propose, but the mechanics of romance continually defeat him. Even finding an engagement ring becomes a comic ordeal.
Norton is particularly funny because Holden appears so fundamentally conventional. He is exactly the sort of young man who would like love to proceed according to an orderly plan: proposal, marriage and a secure future.
Drew Barrymore’s Skylar initially seems to want the same thing. Then Tim Roth’s Charles Ferry enters her life and introduces a form of attraction that is almost the opposite of Holden’s careful respectability.
The detour is temporary, but that is the point. Romantic certainty proves surprisingly fragile once another possibility appears.
Holden plans romance like a man following instructions. Charles arrives and reminds Skylar that desire rarely reads the instructions.
The biggest romantic deception belongs to Joe. Woody Allen plays him as a man permanently unsuccessful in love despite the large number of theories he has developed about relationships.
When he meets Von in Venice, D.J. provides him with information she has overheard about Von’s private fantasies and preferences. Joe then constructs himself into the man Von thinks she has always wanted.
The situation is morally dubious and extremely funny because Joe has effectively received the answer sheet before taking the romantic exam. Every miraculous compatibility convinces Von that fate has brought them together.
Joe knows perfectly well that fate has had considerable assistance from his daughter.
Joe finally becomes a woman’s perfect man by discovering the easiest method available: find out exactly what she wants before meeting her.
Julia Roberts gives Von enough warmth that the deception never becomes merely mechanical. She genuinely believes she has encountered somebody who understands her with extraordinary precision.
Joe has to keep maintaining the fiction, particularly once Von follows him to Paris. Suddenly his apartment, habits and interests need to match the person he claimed to be in Venice.
This is where the romantic fantasy starts revealing its limitation. Joe can manufacture compatibility, but he cannot manufacture the history Von already has with her husband Greg.
Eventually she returns to that marriage. The fantasy did what fantasies often do in Allen’s films: it illuminated something real without being capable of replacing reality permanently.
Joe can manufacture the perfect first act. He cannot manufacture the life Von had before he entered the story.
Goldie Hawn and Alan Alda give the film its most stable marriage. Bob and Steffi argue, tease one another and disagree, but there is very little doubt about the affection underneath it.
Steffi’s political idealism produces one of the film’s funniest complications when she becomes involved in helping Charles Ferry after his release from prison. Her determination to believe in rehabilitation introduces him directly into Skylar’s extremely comfortable world.
The clash between Steffi’s abstract principles and Charles’s very practical criminal instincts is pure Allen comedy. She wants society to give him another chance. Society does. Charles then behaves like Charles.
Alan Alda is especially good at giving Bob the exhausted tolerance of a husband who loves Steffi and has learned that her causes will continually reorganise the household around him.
The musical numbers are the film’s real reason for existing, and the best of them treat ordinary environments as if they have suddenly remembered they belong to a musical.
Holden’s jewellery-store sequence turns the anxiety of proposing into choreography. The funeral-home number is even better because Allen takes a place associated with absolute stillness and allows the dead to dance.
The joke is outrageous but also perfectly consistent with the film’s philosophy. Death may be unavoidable, but apparently even death does not entirely stop the show.
Dick Hyman’s arrangements are crucial. The songs retain their period elegance while fitting actors whose voices have very different levels of technical polish.
In this film even a funeral parlour eventually decides there is no good reason everybody should remain lying down.
The choice of songs is inspired because Allen avoids writing new material to explain the plot. Instead he takes standards that already carry decades of romantic associations and gives them to contemporary characters.
Just You, Just Me, My Baby Just Cares for Me, I’m a Dreamer, Aren’t We All? and the title song all belong to an earlier popular tradition. Hearing them from Norton, Lyonne and the rest of the cast creates a deliberate distance from polished musical theatre.
Drew Barrymore’s singing voice was dubbed, but most of the cast perform their own songs, and that matters to the character of the film. Woody Allen singing is never going to be confused with Fred Astaire. It is not supposed to be.
The film is interested in what happens when someone who normally talks suddenly has permission to sing.
The songs work because the characters never stop sounding like themselves merely because an orchestra has appeared.
Carlo Di Palma has the happiest assignment imaginable here. Manhattan, Venice and Paris are all allowed to look romantic, and the film makes no apology for enjoying their beauty.
Venice is especially suited to Joe’s manufactured romance with Von. Almost anywhere he turns already looks like the setting for something improbable. The city itself assists his deception.
Paris becomes more personal. Joe lives there, D.J. visits him there and eventually the whole extended family gathers there for Christmas. Montmartre provides an appropriately cinematic home for a man who spends much of the film trying to transform his own life into a romantic story.
New York remains the family’s centre, but the filmography suddenly feels much more international. The camera can move from Fifth Avenue to a Venetian canal and then to Montmartre without the musical fantasy feeling interrupted.
New York is where the family lives. Venice and Paris are where the film gives their romantic fantasies room to behave like movies.
Edward Norton deserves particular credit because Holden is exactly the kind of role that could disappear inside such a large ensemble. Instead his slightly awkward sincerity becomes one of the film’s most likeable qualities.
The National Board of Review recognised him as Best Supporting Actor for a year that also included Primal Fear and The People vs. Larry Flynt. Watching this film now, it is striking how early it arrived in his film career.
The rest of the cast has the pleasure of appearing almost like members of an unusually expensive repertory company. Goldie Hawn, Alan Alda, Julia Roberts, Drew Barrymore, Natalie Portman, Lukas Haas, Gaby Hoffmann, Tim Roth, Billy Crudup and others pass through the musical structure without any one performer needing to dominate it.
That abundance is part of the fun.
The final Paris sequence between Joe and Steffi gives the film an unexpectedly lovely emotional centre. They were once married and know each other too well for romantic fantasy to operate in the same way it does between Joe and Von.
Goldie Hawn and Allen dance beside the Seine, eventually floating above the ground in an image that makes no attempt to obey physical reality. It is one of the most openly romantic images Allen ever filmed.
What makes it work is that Joe and Steffi do not need to reunite. Their marriage belongs to the past. They can acknowledge the affection that survives without deciding the past was a mistake that must be corrected.
The musical permits them something reality normally cannot: a few weightless minutes outside the consequences of time.
Joe and Steffi do not need their old marriage back. For one dance, memory is allowed to become weightless.
I think that sequence explains why the whole experiment works. Musicals have always allowed feelings to become temporarily larger than ordinary behaviour can contain. Allen uses that tradition without pretending his characters have suddenly entered a completely different emotional universe.
They remain neurotic, selfish, romantic, confused and frequently ridiculous. They simply get better accompaniment.
Everyone Says I Love You is lighter than many of the films around it in the chronology, and that lightness feels earned. It is a filmmaker who has spent decades talking about love deciding, for once, to let everybody sing about it.
Sometimes that really is enough.
Cast and Characters
Woody Allen
D.J.’s Paris-based father, whose romantic history is filled with unsuitable women until he attempts to manufacture perfect compatibility with Von.
Goldie Hawn
Joe’s former wife and D.J.’s mother, now happily married to Bob and permanently committed to a succession of political and charitable causes.
Julia Roberts
A married woman Joe meets in Venice and attempts to win by secretly learning everything she believes her ideal man should be.
Alan Alda
Steffi’s husband and the calm centre of an enormous household filled with romantic crises, political arguments and family complications.
Edward Norton
Skylar’s earnest fiancé, whose carefully planned engagement is repeatedly threatened by the unpredictability of romance.
Drew Barrymore
Holden’s fiancée, whose apparently certain romantic future becomes considerably less certain after she meets Charles Ferry.
Classic standards sung by people who suddenly find themselves inside a musical
Dick Hyman arranged and conducted a soundtrack built almost entirely from older American popular songs, performed by a cast chosen primarily as actors rather than singers.
Everyone Says “I Love You”
Bert Kalmar and Harry Ruby’s song gives the film its title and its central musical idea: declarations of love may be everywhere, but understanding what people actually mean by them remains considerably more complicated.
Actors sing the songs instead of disappearing behind perfect voices
Edward Norton, Natasha Lyonne, Goldie Hawn, Julia Roberts and Woody Allen are among the actors performing within the musical structure.
Drew Barrymore’s singing was dubbed by Olivia Hayman, while the musical arrangements draw on the Dick Hyman New York Studio Players and additional vocal ensembles.
Just You, Just Me
The opening number turns Holden and Skylar’s apparently straightforward romance into the first indication that this New York family lives inside a musical.
My Baby Just Cares for Me
Edward Norton and Natasha Lyonne are among the performers in one of the film’s lively ensemble musical sequences.
I’m a Dreamer, Aren’t We All?
Performed for Skylar with Drew Barrymore’s singing dubbed by Olivia Hayman, the song fits a film where romantic fantasy is constantly competing with reality.
Makin’ Whoopee
The funeral-home sequence turns one of the least likely locations for musical comedy into one of the film’s most memorable production numbers.
Locations
Everyone Says I Love You moves between three cities perfectly suited to romantic fantasy: New York, Venice and Paris.
Carlo Di Palma photographs each city with an unabashedly romantic eye, while the musical structure allows real streets and landmarks to become stages without losing their identity.
Harry Winston
The Fifth Avenue jewellery store becomes the setting for Holden’s attempts to find an engagement ring worthy of his proposal to Skylar.
Campbell Funeral Chapel
The funeral-home setting becomes the starting point for the film’s wonderfully improbable dance of the dead.
Venice
Canals, palazzi and narrow streets provide an almost unfairly romantic setting for Joe’s carefully engineered courtship of Von.
Rue Cortot
Rue Cortot supplies the exterior of Joe’s Paris apartment, placing him in one of the city’s most recognisably artistic neighbourhoods.
Restaurant Julien
The historic restaurant on Rue du Faubourg Saint-Denis is one of the genuine Paris locations used during the production.
New York · Venice · Paris
Together the three cities give the film something unusual in Allen’s work: a romantic geography large enough for the story itself to behave like a classic Hollywood musical.
Awards and Recognition
Best Musical or Comedy Nomination
The film received a Golden Globe nomination for Best Motion Picture — Musical or Comedy.
Edward Norton Wins
Norton received the National Board of Review’s Best Supporting Actor award for his work during 1996, including Everyone Says I Love You.
Top Film of 1996
The National Board of Review included the film among its top films of the year.
Dick Hyman
Hyman’s arrangements make a large collection of classic standards feel like one coherent score while accommodating performers with very different singing styles.
Allen’s First Full Musical
Although music had always been central to Allen’s films, this was his first feature built completely around the conventions of a Hollywood musical.
A Musical Made from Old Songs
The film remains a singular entry in the filmography: an ensemble romantic comedy in which classic standards allow New York, Venice and Paris to become one enormous musical stage.