Anything Else (2003)

Woody Allen's Anything Else arrives in 2003 with the confidence of a man recycling his own furniture. Jason Biggs plays Jerry Falk, a young comedy writer who wants to be a novelist, worries about death, and cannot end a relationship, a job, or a course of psychoanalysis. Christina Ricci drifts through as Amanda, a free spirit whose main function is to withhold affection and explain herself at length. Allen casts himself as David Dobel, a paranoid older mentor who lectures in Central Park about self-reliance, firearms, and the collapse of civilization. The film is talky, white, and set in a New York of comfortable apartments and jazz, which is to say it is a Woody Allen film from 2003.

On the cultural ledger, this one is close to bare. The cast is uniformly white, the romance is heterosexual and male-centric, and the philosophical musings belong to the characters, not to a sermon the film is delivering. Jerry's neuroses are period furniture from the Allen catalog, not a modern account of mental health. Dobel distrusts psychiatry and religion, but his suspicion reads as personal paranoia, the worldview of a man collecting canned goods, and it never hardens into a critique of money or power. Amanda's restlessness hints at an inner life, though the camera keeps returning to Jerry's hurt feelings, so the film offers no real feminist argument. There is nothing here about climate, bodies, race, or history. A state trooper mutters an antisemitic remark, and it functions as plot mechanics, not as commentary.

The result is a modest, melancholic comedy that mistakes repetition for wisdom and calls it a philosophy. Ebert found the conversation musical. Leonard Maltin gave it a bomb. Both are defensible. What we have is a film about a man learning to be alone, told by a director who has told it before and will tell it again. It is pleasant, overlong, and largely innocent of the social enthusiasms of its era, which is its own quiet kind of distinction.