Who would have thought that Woody Allen could graft the trappings of an old-fashioned musical-comedy onto his own nebbish, angst-ridden film style and come up with something as wonderful as "Everyone Says I Love You"?
This light, sprightly piece manages to somehow both embrace and spoof the late musical genre in a way that will have audience members laughing with, not at the song-and-dance numbers, and feeling surprisingly fulfilled and joyous as they leave the theater.
On paper, however, this probably doesn't sound like such a great idea. Especially since, in many ways, "Everyone Says I Love You" is typical Allen fare, an ensemble piece about interlocking relationships, in which people tend to fall in love with the wrong people for the wrong reasons.
He also has a primarily non-singing cast doing the warbling, including a few big stars, which one might think would be a chart for disaster. But only one of the stars (Drew Barrymore) was dubbed by a professional singer, and everyone else — including Allen! — comes off fairly well.
It probably helps that the songs are old standards, lovely tunes with rich, romantic lyrics that encourage that old-fashioned feeling, while lending emotional resonance to the romantic entanglements.
The film opens in Manhattan, naturally — but Allen fans will be surprised to see that he has expanded the locations beyond New York to include Paris and Venice.
Narrated by a teenage character named DJ (Natasha Lyonne), the film opens as young lovers Holden (Edward Norton) and Skylar (Drew Barrymore) are strolling through the Upper East Side singing "Just You, Just Me." It's a quick introduction to the film's offbeat sensibility.
DJ and Skylar are sisters, and gradually we meet the rest of their clan — misguided mother Steffi (Goldie Hawn), glib but out-of-it stepfather Bob (Alan Alda) and his kids from his first marriage, Lane (Gaby Hoffman), Laura (Natalie Portman) and Scott (Lucas Haas). We also meet Joe (Allen), who is Steffi's former husband, an expatriate writer living in Paris.
Some of the subplots are odd but quite funny, as when Joe falls for a beautiful, married art student (Julia Roberts) and his daughter DJ helps him woo her with inside information, and Skylar's attraction to a hardened ex-con (Tim Roth), who proves to be anything but rehabilitated.
As for the performers, Roberts' sad lament "All My Life" is flat and listless, and here and there the less-than-professional singing gets in the way. But Hawn and Alda are trained in musical theater, and therefore fare better than most, while Norton (who also plays the lawyer in "The People vs. Larry Flynt") has a wonderful song-and-dance sequence set to "My Baby Just Cares For Me," and a Groucho Marx chorus line near the end is a riot. But the real surprise is Roth, whose characterization is the most grounded and real, and yet he is perhaps the most hilarious of all.
As with most of Allen's films, there are explorations of promiscuity and adultery, with sexually frank dialogue that pushs it a bit, but the R rating here is actually for one specific scene, a parody of rap music that includes extremely profane language. On the other hand, this spoof also provides the film with a truly hysterical moment.
The rest of the film is easily in the PG to PG-13 range.