It’s easy to appreciate a new Woody Allen film in these CGI-happy times, when good character sketches are as hard to come by as a leading lady with hips. That’s why “Anything Else,” which stars the trimmed-down yet (thankfully) still curvaceous Christina Ricci, gets two thumbs up (courtesy of my left and right hands) even though, as Allen flicks go, it ranks in the middle of the pack with the likes of “Mighty Aphrodite” and “Small Time Crooks.”
Ricci plays Amanda, a provocative wanna-be actress in — where else? — Manhattan, who bewitches a budding young comedy writer named Jerry Falk (Jason Biggs). Jerry’s a real pushover, beset by a number of destructive relationships that he cannot bring himself to walk away from. He timidly endures Amanda’s incessant cheating, a bumbling shyster of a manager (Danny DeVito) and a therapist who, in three years, has yet to offer a single word of advice. The nebbishy Jerry represents one half of the Woody Allen persona. The other manifests itself in Jerry’s closest confidant, comedy writer David Dobel (Allen himself), a conspiracy theorist with an expansive vocabulary and a large gun collection. Dobel takes it upon himself to motivate Jerry to become his own man, free from the dys-functional ties that bind him. The scenes of Dobel dispensing counsel such as “Never trust a naked busdriver” are often hilarious, as well they should be, since Allen shamelessly pilfered some of the gags from his earlier, most successful, work.
There’s still a respectable audience for Allen’s films, but in recent years the ranks of the faithful have dwindled. There are an assortment of valid explanations for the decline, one being that as he’s gotten older, the filmmaker’s characters have become increasingly saturnine, and as a result, harder to embrace. It’s a critique that applies here. The players in “Anything Else” will make you laugh some, and think a little, but they won’t go out of their way to make you like them very much. (Rated R for a scene of drug use and some sexual references. Running time: 108 minutes)
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on September 19, 2003. Read the original PDF.