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M  O  V  I  E  S

Woody Allen's good-natured
"Everyone Says I Love You" aims
for '30s musical charm, and misses

By CHARLES TAYLOR

"Everyone Says I Love You,"
Written and directed by Woody Allen
A Miramax release

if movies were judged according to how good-natured they are, Woody Allen's musical "Everyone Says I Love You" would be tops. For a picture that's almost a complete misfire, it's painless to sit through. Shot in three cities — New York, Venice and Paris — "Everyone Says I Love You" has an indolent lushness, like leafing through travel brochures for vacations that are hopelessly beyond your means. And much of the cast — Alan Alda, Goldie Hawn, Lukas Haas, Edward Norton and especially Drew Barrymore — is utterly delightful. But Woody Allen seems to have been so smitten by the idea of making a musical that he's neglected to come up with a script. He uses the romantic entanglements of a family of wealthy Upper West Siders as a flimsy pretext for stringing together a bunch of his favorite songs. The numbers include "Just You, Just Me," "My Baby Just Cares For Me," and the title song, written by Bert Kalmar and Harry Ruby and originally performed by Groucho Marx in the 1932 movie "Horsefeathers." Allen seems to be counting on the audience to be won over by the casualness of it all. And since he's entering his third decade as the most enduring sacred cow in American movies, the critics have fallen in line. You can see that almost nothing here works and still feel some empathy for the way Allen is trying to recapture the no-big-deal grace of '30s movie musicals. The mood of those pictures — elegant, snappy, romantic but wised up — is the antithesis of what musicals eventually became, elephantine blockbusters like "The Sound of Music" and "West Side Story." And it's eons away from the Broadway musical as spectacle that shows like "Cats" and "Les Miserables" ushered in. Almost all of the numbers Allen has chosen here are in the dreamy-romantic tempo, and even that sameness can be a relief for those of us who recoil from the forced heartiness and rhythms of "show music." But the ease you see in the Astaire-Rogers musicals, or the rapport between Al Jolson and the wonderful black actor Edgar Connor in "Hallelujah, I'm a Bum" isn't really ease at all: it's what happens when pros know how to submerge their hard work so that what they're doing looks easy. Allen has his actors (with the exception of Barrymore) do their own singing, and most of them seem so nervous about trying to get through the numbers that they're not able to act. The songs aren't dramatized in any way, so Allen has made a curio: a musical that reduces the songs to little more than mood music. I got the feeling that Allen thinks dubbing his actors would be cheating, although it didn't detract from the charm of Catherine Denueve and Nino Castelnuovo in "The Umbrellas of Cherbourg." And Steve Martin and Bernadette Peters' performances weren't hurt by lip-synching to old records in "Pennies from Heaven." Hawn, who does a dandy job on "I'm Through with Love," has admitted in interviews that Allen told her to tone it down so as not to show up the other actors. Allen wants us to be charmed by all this nonprofessionalism. But singing and dancing isn't a style you can try on, the way the characters in Godard's "Breathless" and "Band of Outsiders" playact at being gangsters. Watching Allen's actors cavort around Harry Winston's, you're tempted to give them points for being game. Other dance sequences, like one in a hospital and another at a masquerade ball, are so clumsily staged they recall the primitive technique of "Bananas" in which the camera did little more than record gags. Allen doesn't have the panache that could pull off sequences like the one in "Everyone Says I Love You" where shop-window mannequins come to life, or a later one where Allen and Hawn (as the ex-wife he's still on good terms with) dance by the Seine, and she literally floats up in the air. The execution of that scene doesn't come close to its wonderful idea: how Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers looked so perfect to us we believed they could fly. As Hawn hovers just out of reach of the earthbound Woody's arms, it's also a bittersweet joke on how far most of us are from achieving that perfection. It's the performers who keep "Everyone Says I Love You" from going under. Alan Alda, who gets the best number (singing Cole Porter's "Looking at You" to Hawn) has regained all the mischievous charm he lost during his years as the sensitive-male poster boy, and he's lost all the self-satisfaction that had crept into his marvelous, face-creasing grin. His work with Hawn here, with Diane Keaton in "Manhattan Murder Mystery" and with Lily Tomlin in "Flirting with Disaster," has established him as a rarity in movies: a mature, comic swain. As Drew Barrymore's preppie fiancé, Edward Norton may be on his way to establishing himself as a romantic-comic leading man — or for that matter, as anything else he puts his mind to, judging from his performances in "Primal Fear" and "The People vs. Larry Flynt." This is his third screen role this year, and each one has been completely different. Here he has a beguiling confidence. He and Barrymore have the funniest scene: he proposes to her at Le Cirque, and she swallows the engagement ring he's hidden in her dessert. ("Was it big?" she asks, panic stricken, and he replies, "No, it was tasteful.") And Drew Barrymore lights up every frame she's in. Ping-ponging from Norton to Tim Roth (amusing as a con that Hawn "rehabilitates") and back to Norton, Barrymore is a radiant, luscious comic. Her ready-for-anything cheerfulness seems fully contained in the pert little flip of her hair. In one scene, preparing for the date where she expects Norton to pop the question, she wanders around her room in a slip, lip-synching to "I'm a Dreamer, Aren't We All?" She barely does anything, and yet she's the embodiment of the romantic expectation that movie musicals have taught us to treasure. When Drew Barrymore's onscreen, you'd have to have a heart of stone to keep from being a dreamer. She's sunshine with curves. A R C H I V E S Movie Archive | Previous 5 reviews: "Gator" needs aid By Gary Kamiya (1/13/96) "Citizen Ruth" By Nell Bernstein (1/06/96) "Evita" By Laura Miller (12/23/96) "Beavis and Butt-head Do America" By Gary Kamiya (12/23/96) "Ghosts of Mississippi" By Charles Taylor (12/23/96) "The People Vs. Larry Flynt" By Charles Taylor (12/23/96)