Review: Woody's new film another middling comedy

No 'Hollywood Ending' here

Woody Allen and Tea Leoni star in "Hollywood Ending."

(CNN) -- In his latest evaporating doodle, "Hollywood Ending," Woody Allen plays Val Waxman, a two-time Oscar-winning director who, having fallen on hard times, agrees to direct an explicitly commercial studio picture.

Sketchy or not, this may well be Allen's most personal release since 1992's "Husbands and Wives." Val bears more than a passing resemblance to Woody himself, except that he's actually forced to play by the rules when audiences quit caring what he does next.

By now, Allen is beyond admitting he's lost his moorings; he's managed to transform himself from a legitimate artist into a serial disappointer.

He shows a bit of gumption at the beginning, anyway, with some respectable jabs at the pitfalls of working in a filmmaking system that eats its heroes. Woody is first seen trapped in a Canadian blizzard, where he's unsuccessfully trying to direct a TV commercial. He phones his ever-loyal agent, Al (Mark Rydell), and wonders what happened to the offer he had to helm a lousy TV movie back in the States. It turns out that Peter Bogdanovich, whose mid-1970s fall from grace is the stuff of Hollywood legend, has been signed to do it instead.

If you're not a movie buff, that particular joke might sail over your head. But don't worry. It won't be long before Val is breaking vases and slamming into walls, due to the psychosomatic blindness that befalls him just as he's set to start shooting a career-saving film noir for a big-time studio.

Good pokes at filmdom

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Val's ex-wife, Ellie (Tea Leoni), is a film executive who's engaged to Hal (Treat Williams), the head of the studio, and she puts her career on the line to give Val one last shot. She's convinced he has what it takes to bring the Manhattan-centric screenplay to life, even though he's developed a reputation for being a major pain to work with.

Hal and his barely-there underlings (George Hamilton and Bob Dorian) need to be convinced, but they eventually do Ellie a favor and sign Val up.

Easily the most successful scene in "Hollywood Ending" is a pre-production dinner meeting between Val and Ellie. Allen is hilarious as he tries to discuss how he'll handle the project, but repeatedly falls into theatrically snarling fits of rage over the way Ellie dumped him for a Hollywood executive.

At this point in the movie, Allen is far more tightly coiled than usual; Val really does seem a little crazy. Even his air-headed actress-girlfriend, Lori (Debra Messing, cute, but trying too hard), can see that he grows irrational when confronted with film industry business-as-usual.

But that righteous anger quickly fades, along with the satirical thread that's necessary to sustain an entire film.

Blind man bluffing

The night before the first day of shooting, Val suddenly falls blind. Al takes him to several specialists who determine that it's all in his head. However, since this is his last shot at getting his career back on track, Val tries to direct the movie anyway, without telling anyone he can't see what he's doing.

Debra Messing plays Allen's girlfriend in "Hollywood Ending."

This causes major problems, especially for his Chinese cinematographer (Lu Yu), whose earnest translator (Barney Cheng) is secretly enlisted to help Val around the set and tell him whether or not he's properly framed his shots ... to, it turns out, little avail.

The joke, of course, is that anybody could shoot a blockbuster these days, especially since audiences can't tell the difference between a filmmaker who's really making an effort and one who's just cranking out another piece of pre-digested dèjvu. This all could have been a rich set-up for more industry needling, but Allen basically stops shaking the tree just when the fruit is ripe.

For the most part, he simply faces the wrong direction during important conversations and repeatedly bumps into things. Though it draws several decent laughs, it's low-cal Woody at best.

Val and Ellie, as you might expect, start re-falling for each other during the shoot, and Leoni makes the most of her screen time. She looks terrific, and has an athletic, Katherine Hepburn-like screen presence. Hopefully her work here will lead to bigger and better roles, but she may be too casually elegant to land the kind of work that garners attention from adrenaline-junkie audiences.

The rest of the cast members, including Tiffani Thiessen as an actress who offers her exceptionally convincing chest to Val for fondling, are game, if unchallenged. A late-coming revelation about Val and his punk rocker son seems tacked on as an afterthought, and a weak one at that.

So much for this installment. In case you're wondering, that dot you see floating on the horizon is "Annie Hall."

"Hollywood Ending" is suitable for pretty much anyone. It's a sure sign, by the way, that a writer is losing his imagination when he names three of his main characters Val, Al, and Hal. George Lucas does much better.