Husbands and Wives (1992)

(On TV, March 2020) One of the issues with Woody Allen and trying to separate his art from his somewhat unsettling life is that his movies are big giant signposts telling us about his state of mind at any given time. Husbands and Wives, for instance, is a tale of marital dissatisfaction that just happened to come out at the end of his relationship with Mia Farrow—with Farrow and Allen fighting it out on celluloid. Whew. There’s more, of course—the seediest things in Allen’s filmography are the constant relationships between much older men and women at most half his age, and we get that once again here—hey, Allen, can’t you at least stop writing that stuff in your scripts? As for Husbands and Wives itself, there’s a reason why it generally holds up when compared to the other Allen films of that era: the intense navel-gazing eventually leads somewhere, and the film doesn’t even unfairly evoke the memory of Allen’s comedies. The mixture of Manhattan DINK lifestyle, documentary style and messy examination of personal foibles is certainly classic Allen, done in a still interesting-enough way compared to some of his later works. He also, as usual, gets great performances from his supporting cast: Juliette Lewis makes an impression in a more sedate role than the ones she’d play throughout most of the 1990s, a rising-star Liam Neeson barges into the plot and Blythe Danner makes a very quick appearance. Husbands and Wives is a kind of film best suited for adult audiences, not so much for any risqué content than because it’s glum and unromantic about long-term relationships—and it takes some living to relate to that.