Woody Allen’s musical asks a cast hired for other reasons to sing old standards in their own thin voices, and the gamble mostly pays off. It is slight, one subplot is uncomfortable, and Goldie Hawn is the best thing in it.
Woody Allen has made a musical in which almost nobody was cast for their singing. The songs are old standards, the settings are New York, Venice and Paris, and the voices belong to actors doing their best. That is the whole idea, and it is a good one. Everyone Says I Love You is slight, and it is charming, and the two things are connected: it asks for nothing but a little goodwill and it repays that in full. It is worth an evening if you can bear people singing badly for the right reasons.
The numbers work because Allen does not pretend they are anything other than ordinary people bursting into song. Edward Norton opens the film with Just You, Just Me on Fifth Avenue in a voice that is eager, small and slightly behind the beat, and the jewellers’ assistants join in. A hospital sequence turns Makin’ Whoopee over to patients on gurneys and doctors with their charts. In a funeral parlour the dead sit up in their coffins and sing Enjoy Yourself, and we laughed out loud, partly at the audacity and partly because it is the one idea in the film that could not exist anywhere else. Susan E. Morse cuts the numbers with patience, letting a whole verse play out in a single frame so we can see the actors’ nerve.
Carlo Di Palma shoots the New York interiors in warm, low, book-lined light, and Santo Loquasto designs the Dandridge flat as the kind of liberal money that has never had to count anything. Jeffrey Kurland puts the family in soft autumn wools and Allen in the same corduroy he has worn for thirty years. Paris is shot at night, on wet stone, and it is here that the film has its best-known scene: Allen and Hawn dancing on the bank of the Seine to I’m Thru with Love, Hawn lifted off the ground and floating as if the song had picked her up. It moved us more than we had any right to expect. Two middle-aged people who used to be married, one of whom cannot dance and one of whom plainly can, and the film lets it run without a joke to cover the feeling.
Hawn is the reason to see it. She sings properly, she moves properly, and she plays Steffi as a woman whose kindness is a kind of appetite, adopting causes the way other people adopt cats. Alan Alda gives Bob a mild, put-upon decency and the film’s funniest political rows with Lukas Haas. Natasha Lyonne narrates with the flat authority of a girl who thinks she has everyone worked out, and is usually wrong. Tim Roth, as the paroled Charles Ferry, arrives late and is menacing in a film that otherwise has no idea what menace is, which is the point of him.
The trouble is Allen’s own storyline. Joe woos Von Sidell, a married woman he has never met, using the secrets D.J. has overheard in therapy, and the film treats this as whimsy. We did not. Julia Roberts is game and lovely and has almost nothing to play, since her character exists to be manipulated and then to be philosophical about it, and the sixty-year-old Allen opposite her is a piece of casting the film never quite justifies. Every time it cuts back to Venice we found ourselves waiting to return to the family.
There is also too much of everything. At 101 minutes, with a dozen speaking parts and half as many plots, several of the Dandridges are sketches rather than people; Gaby Hoffmann and Natalie Portman share one joke between them. Drew Barrymore, alone in the cast, was dubbed, and the film would have been more honest if it had let her sing as badly as everyone else.
Allen has made this family portrait before, most fully in Hannah and Her Sisters (1986), where the household had weight and the year meant something. This is the same shape with songs and half the ballast. Take it for what it is: a small, sunny film about people who love each other and cannot sing, watched at home on a grey evening, where a wobbling voice and a floating woman by a river are exactly enough.
