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Ordinary People

Brian Hamill

Heart of Gold: Mira Sorvino in "Mighty Aphrodite"

Allen tries the common touch in 'Mighty Aphrodite'

By Richard von Busack

HAVE YOU noticed a certain patronizing streak in Woody Allen's latest movies? The implicit point of Bullets Over Broadway was that ordinary people would be happier outside of Manhattan. In Mighty Aphrodite, his disappointing new offering, he condescends to an archetypal dumb blonde hooker named Linda (Mira Sorvino) in a grating way.

At one point, the Allen character (named Lenny here) makes a joke about how he wants to corner the franchise for penicillin in Linda's building--a gag fit for a late-period Bob Hope to unleash on Elke Sommer. It's about par for the film, which has the marks of lost bearings all over it.

The frame of the film is a parody of ancient Greek drama complete with a chorus, warning against Lenny's hubris, or criminal pride. These introduction and transition sequences are shot in an ancient Italian amphitheater; the name cast is mixed up in this chorus, and thus most of the noteworthy actors have about as much to do as a celebrity in a middling Saturday Night Live sketch.

Lenny is married to an art gallery owner (a very hangdog Helena Bonham Carter), with whom he has adopted a child. Five years into the marriage, Lenny is disenchanted. He's suddenly fixated with the idea of looking up the natural mother of his son, soon developing a crush on her before he meets her.

She turns out to be a prostitute and star of porn movies--one is called The Enchanted Pussy, an enchanting if unlikely title for an XXX movie. Sorvino keeps the movie from collapsing. Her Linda is beyond gold-hearted into beatification, but Sorvino takes the caricature seriously enough to prop up the whole film.

Without telling her that he's the adopted father of the son she gave up, Lenny interferes in her life, trying to matchmake her, so that Linda can get married and never have to take her clothes off again, as that Mel Brooks joke goes. Lenny sets her up with a not very bright boxer (Michael Rappaport) who has aspirations of becoming an onion farmer. Meanwhile, the Greek gods warn of a reckoning to come.

The lack of ordinary people in an Allen film hasn't ever seemed like a problem previously, but whenever he tries to work them into Mighty Aphrodite, the film falters badly. Allen as Lenny, trying to be a sort of everyday dad is unconvincing; Allen as director trying to envision an encounter between two fairly dumb people in a Times Square restaurant produces as clumsy a scene as he's ever filmed. Allen has never been a master of the common touch, of small talk and of tidy happy endings, but in Mighty Aphrodite, he weighs in with a great deal of both.

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Mighty Aphrodite (PG-13; 90 min.), directed and written by Woody Allen and starring Mira Sorvino.


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