Amazon Al

As has been noted, when Amazon signed a huge deal with Woody Allen it thought it was getting prestige, but then came the #MeToo movement and all it got was controversy.  Whether or not the movies and TV episodes Woody produced are any good is secondary.

But if you were wondering, they're not good.  Wonder Wheel was a poor movie, even by recent Woody standards. I finally got a chance to check out Crisis In Six Scenes, Woody's mini-series for Amazon, and it wasn't much better.

The show is six episodes, each a bit over 20 minutes, so really we're getting a new Woody Allen movie.  The plot is pretty simple.  It's the late sixties.  Middle-aged couple Kay and Sidney Munsinger (played by Elaine May and Woody Allen, who are past middle age), living in suburban splendor outside New York City, have their house broken into by Lennie (Miley Cyrus), the daughter of some people who once helped Kay.

Lennie's a violent 60s radical, and a fugitive from justice.  The couple put her up while she plans her escape to Cuba.  Meanwhile, she radicalizes Kay, who is soon quoting from Mao's Little Red Book and having her book club read Marx.  Also, Lennie almost breaks up a young, engaged couple, Ellie (Rachel Brosnahan) and Allen (Jay Magaro), when the latter falls for Lennie and takes up her radical politics as well.

The idea isn't bad, and a young Woody Allen might have made something of it. In fact, he sort of already did.  His first hit play, Don't Drink The Water, had a mix of political and domestic comedy, as it was about a family stuck in an American embassy behind the Iron Curtain during an international crisis. (For that matter, Woody was able to get a laugh out of a throwaway gag in Radio Days when one character talks to some communists and is immediately converted.)

But the energy is gone, as is most of the wit.  The occasional line works, but overall the show is tired. Instead of clever banter, we get Miley Cyrus spouting a lot of revolutionary rhetoric, when just a little would make the point. (When the book group later says the same things, it's supposed to be funny, but it just comes across as silly.)

And, as so often in recent Woody Allen films, the plotting is lackadaisical.  There should be a sense of danger that a couple are harboring a known fugitive--this would actually help the comedy--but there's really no feeling of menace.  And when Kay and Sidney go into town for a big action sequence, it doesn't even make sense.  They meet a contact in Brooklyn at 2 pm who gives them a suitcase filled with Cuban money (why not dollars?--they're good anywhere).  The couple then have to drop it off at a phone booth at 3 pm where it will be picked up by someone else.  Why is this couple needed?  Just have the one contact give it to the other.  The only reason they're involved are to have some comic moments which, alas, don't work.

A number of familiar faces pop up in small parts:  David Harbour, Max Casella, Judy Gold, Christine Ebersole, Lewis Black, Joy Behar, Nina Arianda, Michael Rappapart and others, which would be fine if they had something interesting to do.

There are a few laughs, but for Woody completists only.