Hollywood Ending (2002)
Film Overview
A once-successful filmmaker gets the comeback opportunity he desperately needs and develops psychosomatic blindness just before shooting begins.
Woody Allen plays Val Waxman, a two-time Academy Award-winning director whose career has declined to the point where he is struggling to find worthwhile work.
His former wife Ellie, played by Téa Leoni, persuades Galaxie Studios to hire him for The City That Never Sleeps, a major New York production she believes he is uniquely suited to direct.
The difficulty is that Ellie is now engaged to studio head Hal, played by Treat Williams, giving Val plenty of emotional reasons to refuse the job and even more professional reasons to accept it.
Shortly before photography begins, Val loses his sight for psychological rather than physical reasons. Convinced that admitting the problem will destroy his career permanently, he attempts to direct the entire film without allowing the studio to discover he cannot see.
George Hamilton plays producer Ed, Mark Rydell is Val’s agent Al, Debra Messing appears as girlfriend Lori, and the film’s production problems multiply through a Mandarin-speaking cinematographer, an increasingly essential translator and a director who has to pretend he can evaluate images invisible to him.
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My Review
A director who cannot see the film he is making
The central joke in Hollywood Ending is ridiculous enough to carry an entire film: Val Waxman finally gets the comeback picture he has been waiting for and becomes blind just before he has to direct it.
Val’s career has already become an exercise in blaming other people. Studios do not understand him, producers interfere, actors disappoint and every past failure seems to contain somebody else’s mistake.
Psychosomatic blindness therefore feels almost too appropriate. The filmmaker who has become incapable of seeing what is wrong with his career develops a condition that turns metaphor into medical problem.
Naturally, Val’s solution is not to stop production. It is to conceal the blindness and continue making a multimillion-dollar film.
Val has spent years insisting nobody else can see what he sees. The comeback finally arrives and he cannot see anything at all.
The film is funniest when it treats the mechanics of directing as something that can almost be faked. Val has to approve costumes, compositions and performances using information supplied by other people.
He develops techniques for sounding decisive while avoiding every situation in which a director might reasonably be expected to look at something. The more confidently he behaves, the more ridiculous the production becomes.
There is also a neat satire of the collaborative nature of filmmaking. Val likes to imagine the director as the unquestioned creative centre of the film, yet the moment he loses sight his dependence on everybody else becomes impossible to hide.
A film set may have an auteur. It still takes hundreds of people to stop the auteur walking into the furniture.
Hollywood Ending reduces the mythology of the all-seeing director to a man quietly asking somebody where the actors are standing.
Téa Leoni gives the story its emotional centre. Ellie is the person who still believes Val can make a worthwhile film even after the industry has largely stopped believing it.
That faith is complicated by their history. She left Val and is now engaged to Hal, the studio executive paying for his comeback. Every production discussion therefore carries an additional conversation about the marriage they no longer have.
Leoni is especially good at showing why Ellie once loved Val without pretending his behaviour is easy to tolerate. She understands his insecurity because she has already spent years living beside it.
Val gradually discovers that the person he treats as part of his professional problem may actually be the person most responsible for giving him another chance.
Ellie gets Val the film because she remembers the director he once was. Val spends most of the production making that generosity as difficult as possible.
The Mandarin-speaking cinematographer provides another layer of comic miscommunication. Val hired him partly because he wanted a strong visual style. Once blind, he is unable to see the very images that justified the hiring.
The translator becomes essential, not because Val suddenly needs sophisticated artistic discussion but because he needs somebody to guide him through the physical reality of the set.
There is a nice behind-the-scenes connection here: the gag was loosely inspired by the communication challenges Allen had experienced working with Chinese cinematographer Zhao Fei on the three films immediately preceding this one.
Wedigo von Schultzendorff photographs the actual film while Val’s fictional production becomes increasingly visually unknowable to its own director.
The soundtrack enjoys the Hollywood subject directly. Bing Crosby sings Going Hollywood, while Hooray for Hollywood appears in the film’s collection of older popular music.
The songs belong to an era when Hollywood itself could be imagined as a place of glamour and arrival. Val is living the less romantic version: meetings, budgets, reputations, career decline and the terror that one bad picture may be the last one anybody lets you make.
That contrast is exactly right for the film. Hollywood remains a dream factory whose employees spend much of their time worrying whether they will ever work again.
Val’s blindness simply turns ordinary professional anxiety into physical farce.
The old songs promise Hollywood glory. Val spends the film discovering the industry mostly consists of people terrified of their next review.
The finished fictional film is a disaster in America, which is exactly what Val has feared throughout. His attempt to save his career appears instead to have completed its destruction.
Then France loves it.
The joke is broad, but it gives the ending its title and its final argument about artistic reputation. The same film can be dismissed as incompetence in one country and praised as genius somewhere else.
Val immediately accepts the French verdict. Naturally, the critical opinion that restores his career also happens to be the one he considers intellectually correct.
Val discovers the perfect cure for a terrible review: find a country that thinks the disaster is art.
The final reconciliation with Ellie is predictable but satisfying. The production has forced them to work together again and, beneath the hostility, revealed that the old creative and emotional connection never entirely disappeared.
I like Hollywood Ending most as a comedy about filmmaking rather than as a romantic story. The pleasure comes from watching the supposedly powerful director become completely dependent on the people around him.
Kaufman Astoria Studios is especially appropriate as a major location because Allen had already made so many films there. A story about the absurdity of film production is itself being made inside one of his most familiar production homes.
It is a film industry joke extended to feature length — sometimes uneven, but with a central idea too good not to enjoy.
Cast and Characters
Woody Allen
A once-successful filmmaker whose long-awaited comeback is threatened when he develops psychosomatic blindness.
Téa Leoni
Val’s former wife and the producer who fights to give him another opportunity to direct a major studio film.
George Hamilton
The producer caught between Val’s behaviour and the studio’s need to keep the expensive production under control.
Treat Williams
The head of Galaxie Studios and Ellie’s new partner, making Val’s comeback professionally and personally uncomfortable.
Debra Messing
Val’s actress girlfriend, determined to secure a part in the film despite having very little connection to the role.
Mark Rydell
Val’s loyal agent, who helps devise the increasingly absurd plan to keep his blindness hidden from the studio.
Hollywood sings about itself
Older songs about movies, romance and glamour surround a contemporary film set where almost nobody feels particularly glamorous.
Going Hollywood
Bing Crosby’s recording provides the perfect musical title for a story about the distance between the Hollywood imagined in songs and the industry Val actually has to navigate.
The dream factory remembers its own mythology
Hooray for Hollywood, Edmond Hall’s It’s Been So Long and Barbara Carroll’s No Moon at All are among the recordings used.
The polished older music makes a neat contrast with the practical confusion taking place behind Val’s camera.
Hooray for Hollywood
The classic film-industry anthem turns the subject of the story into part of the soundtrack itself.
It’s Been So Long
The jazz recording brings warmth to a film largely concerned with careers and relationships attempting a comeback.
No Moon at All
Carroll’s performance adds another sophisticated jazz standard to Val and Ellie’s New York world.
Sweet and Lovely
Another older song reinforcing the film’s affectionate relationship with classic Hollywood music.
Locations
Despite its title, Hollywood Ending remains largely a New York film, using Manhattan, Queens and nearby locations for both Val’s life and the fictional production he is directing.
Kaufman Astoria Studios
Much of the production was filmed at Allen’s longtime studio base, which also appears as the working environment of Val’s fictional movie.
Central Park
The park provides one of the film’s principal real New York exterior locations.
Carlyle Hotel
The Upper East Side hotel belongs naturally to the film’s polished New York entertainment-industry world.
Hal’s House
A Long Island property was dressed to represent the West Coast home of studio executive Hal.
The City That Never Sleeps
The fictional movie within the movie gives the real New York locations a second identity as Val’s supposedly prestigious comeback project.
Hollywood Made in Queens
A comedy about Hollywood is appropriately created largely inside the New York studios where Allen had worked for decades.
Awards and Recognition
Opening Film
Hollywood Ending opened the 2002 Cannes Film Festival.
Out of Competition
The film screened outside the main competition at Cannes.
Wedigo von Schultzendorff
The German cinematographer began a new collaboration with Allen after the three-film Zhao Fei period.
A Movie About Making Movies
The production turns the practical business of filmmaking itself into the central source of comedy.
The French Punchline
The fictional film’s enthusiastic reception in France provides the joke that completes both Val’s career comeback and the title.
The Director as Comic Subject
Few Allen films turn the daily mechanics, insecurity and vanity of directing quite so directly into the story itself.