Everyone Says I Love You (1996)

Woody Allen's 1996 musical concerns an extended Manhattan family of liberal lawyers who sing Cole Porter and Kalmar and Ruby standards at each other across three cities. The ensemble is white, comfortable, and given to romantic confusion. Edward Norton croons to Natasha Lyonne. Julia Roberts, as an art historian in Venice, is wooed through a series of staged coincidences engineered by a teenager with too much time and a hole in the wall. The tone is affectionate from the first bar, and the film never asks us to do anything but enjoy the melodies.

Politics drift through the proceedings without ever settling. Alan Alda and Goldie Hawn play Democratic attorneys who volunteer for the ACLU and are mildly appalled that their son has joined the Young Republicans. The running gag resolves when a blocked artery clears and the boy instantly abandons conservatism, which is a joke about temperament, not a thesis about justice. A recently released felon is brought to an engagement party as a curiosity and promptly turns out to be a genuine menace. The film treats its own liberal pieties as material for comedy. It never interrogates the money behind the Parisian garret or the diamond ring.

What is missing proves as instructive as what remains. There is no racial argument, no environmental concern, no body politics, no advocacy of any kind. The gaze stays fixed on the director's familiar neuroses, and the women exist largely to be pursued and won. A demented grandfather and his foot fetish are played for laughs. This is a pleasant, tuneful relic of 1996, and its cultural ambitions extend no further than the next chorus.