The strange case of Allen v. Farrow
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The charges made against Woody Allen by Dylan Farrow, his daughter, and Mia Farrow, her mother, have resonated for decades. But it took a while for them to really be heard.
That — the story of their finally being metabolized — makes for the narrative arc of the new documentary series Allen v. Farrow.
Dylan Farrow’s 1992 allegation of childhood sexual assault, which she put into writing on journalist Nicholas Kristof ’s blog in 2014, was treated as both serious and ancillary to the career of one of the leading U.S. directors of his time.
Previously, this accusation had been widely reported (never having resulted in a conviction for Allen) and existed as a free-floating association that alternately stuck or didn’t to Allen’s name. For many, they were part of the his oddity, along with his having married Mia Farrow’s daughter Soon-yi Previn, that it was easier not to think about when buying a ticket to Midnight in Paris.
This series puts forward an exhaustive telling of Dylan Farrow’s story, accompanied by interviews with her mother, various of her siblings and family friends. (Allen’s point-ofview is represented, eerily, by an audiobook recording of his 2020 memoir, which consistently does him so few favours as to seems to have been ghostwritten by his worst enemy.)
If a punishing watch, it is a valuable thing to have as a part of the cultural record, twice over: It allows, at expansive length, Dylan to meaningfully be heard, and not solely about the worst thing that ever happened to her. And it exists as countervailing force on what had been a cultural tendency toward, if not forgiveness of Allen, then a sort of ambient willingness to forget.
Directors Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering have worked in this sensitive vein several times before, including last year’s On the Record, about allegations against Russell Simmons.
The story will be familiar to many, but her voice is not; Dick’s and Ziering’s camera provides her space to unfold her story with minimal feeling of coercion or voyeurism. Similarly, Mia Farrow is allowed time to speak, lending gravity and sorrow to the story. That she, multiple times, refers to Allen as “the great regret of my life” feels both like effective emphasis by restatement and proof of this story’s taking the scenic route, insistent on being less explosive than deliberate.
What is new here are not necessarily revelations but indications of degree. The mistrust between Allen and Mia Farrow, for instance, ran so deep as to yield video recordings of Dylan’s accusations against her father shot by Mia, as well as taped phone calls between the two parents. The antipathy within those calls is striking, as is Allen’s cold insistence on his rightness.
Similarly, Allen’s reading of his own memoir seems a major journalistic coup rather than just a re-airing of publicly available material, so rigid is he in his sense of conspiracy against him. The Connecticut criminal investigation, too, is plumbed in a way that, to many viewers, will suggest that a lack of conviction is hardly the end of the story.
But there can, throughout Allen v. Farrow, come a point at which embroidery around the edges of the Farrow testimony takes away from the story being put forward for the record. Early recounting of just how successful Allen’s career was feels simply unnecessary for most viewers, if perhaps important for some future audience.
But several cultural critics’ detailed recounting of, say, the variety of romantic partners Allen cast for himself onscreen seems less relevant than an attempt to over-prove a case that already, for many viewers, holds merit.
That Mariel Hemingway played his teenage lover
in Manhattan is indeed a wince-inducing artistic choice. That most of his onscreen relationships featured a power dynamic slips further from pertinence.
This had been a perennial problem in covering Allen and the allegations against him. He has worn his peccadillos so proudly that allegations of behaviour that is actually criminal and deeply wrong tend to get tied up with observations of traits that are merely weird.
It’s when the documentary takes a global view of Allen — his oddities as a filmmaker, say, or the defences various actors have made, with various degrees of passion, on his behalf, which the series implies without outright saying are part of a co-ordinated PR push — that it loses some of its sure-footedness.
What seems in the main to be on trial here is Allen’s conduct within the Farrow family. Allen’s strangeness, and his power in Hollywood, have roles to play in that story, but they can cut against it, too. Dylan Farrow’s story is that of a daughter alleging the most primal sort of violation by the man she considered her father. Distractions are just that.
This work is imperfect. One senses in the voices of cultural commentators employed by Dick and Ziering a desire to place a new spin on questions of “separating the art from the artist” and of perceived great men escaping culpability.