Allen v Farrow review: The new documentary will sound
the death knell for Woody Allen’s career
The chilling four-parter allows Allen’s adopted
daughter Dylan, now 35, to make her childhood sexual abuse allegations in a new
medium, and with new layers of stomach-turning detail
Rachel
Brodsky
Monday 22
February 2021 12:56
Woody Allen’s
career has been in a state of free fall for a few years now. In 2014, the
once-iconic director’s adopted daughter Dylan Farrow wrote an open letter in
The New York Times, claiming that Allen sexually abused her in their
Connecticut home when she was a child (he denies the claims). A few years later
came the advent of the #MeToo movement. Top-tier actors and Hollywood elite
distanced themselves from Allen. His 2020 memoir, Apropos of Nothing, was
dropped by its publisher. Now, the chilling new HBO documentary Allen v Farrow
will surely sound the death knell for his career.
The fact
that Allen has been blacklisted by Hollywood does not make Allen v Farrow an
exercise in redundancy. The four-parter allows Dylan, now 35, to make her
allegations in a new medium, and with new layers of stomach-turning detail.
Through home movie footage, recorded calls between Allen and Farrow, interviews
with family friends and Dylan herself, investigative filmmakers Kirby Dick and
Amy Ziering demonstrate what appears to be a horrifying pattern of abuse.
(Allen has always maintained his innocence, alleging that Farrow had lied about
the abuse as revenge for his involvement with her older adopted daughter
Soon-Yi Previn. Allen also was not interviewed for Allen v Farrow; instead, the
documentary gets his side of things via Apropos of Nothing audiobook passages.)
As the
documentary depicts, for many years Woody Allen and Mia Farrow were something
of a New York power couple – and an idyllic example of a modern blended family.
Farrow appeared in a number of the famed director’s films (1986’s Hannah and
Her Sisters perhaps being the most well known). Over the course of their
relationship, they kept separate residences across Central Park in New York
City and had one biological child, Satchel (who later changed his name to
Ronan). Farrow had adopted a number of children prior to her relationship with
Allen, one of whom was Soon-Yi, whose adopted father was composer Andre Previn.
After her divorce from Previn, Farrow adopted two other children: first Moses,
who is shown to have been very close to Allen, and then Dylan.
Come 1992,
a media and legal frenzy overtook the family due to a combination of events:
Farrow found graphic photos of a then-21-year-old Soon-Yi in Allen’s possession
(Soon-Yi and Allen have been married since 1997) and the seven-year-old Dylan
alleged that Allen had sexually abused her. A year later, a six-month criminal
investigation by the Child Sexual Abuse Clinic of Yale-New Haven Hospital
concluded that Dylan had not been sexually abused. The investigation is a
historical bullet point Allen’s team is quick to utilise on the rare occasion
the director defends himself in the media, but it’s difficult for some not to
question a 30-year-old finding after viewing the diligently executed Allen v
Farrow.
Though she
has been a vocal advocate for abuse victims in recent years, and her brother
Ronan, who helped break the allegations against Harvey Weinstein, has echoed
his support for her, Dylan has never had the chance to tell her story in this
way. The results are as compelling as they are disturbing. In speaking to her,
plus several key witnesses, and Mia, Ronan Farrow, and Mia’s older son Fletcher
Previn, Allen v Farrow presents in painstaking detail what appears to be a
grooming process and subsequent pattern of inappropriate behaviour on Allen’s
part. In one anecdote, Mia Farrow claims that one time Allen abruptly slapped
Dylan’s hand away from him. When she asked why he’d slapped her, he replied
that she’d tried to touch his genitals. Why, Farrow wondered, would a little
girl think to do that?
Elsewhere,
multiple family friends corroborate Farrow and Dylan’s account that Allen’s
interest in Dylan appeared nearly obsessive, with a young Dylan, who had once
been outgoing and effervescent, becoming sullen and withdrawn. “I was always in
his clutches. He was always hunting me,” she says to the camera at one point.
“I have memories of getting into bed with him … He would just wrap his body
around me very intimately.”
It’s worth
noting that Moses and Soon-Yi, who did not participate in Allen v Farrow, have
spoken publicly about their own experiences growing up in the Farrow-Allen
household, alleging constant physical abuse from Farrow. Even Moses, who is now
a licensed therapist specialising in adoption trauma, pointed out in a 2018
essay that paedophilia is a “compulsive sickness” and “deviation that demands
repetition”, arguing that Allen’s one reported instance of alleged abuse was
unlikely because it was a one-off. He alleges that Dylan was brainwashed by
Farrow and is a staunch defender of his adopted father.
What Allen
v Farrow proves time and again, though, is that Allen’s alleged behaviour
towards Dylan, which is at times captured on video and is repeatedly described
as “intense” and “intimate” by eyewitnesses, appeared to be highly consistent
with abuse. To actually get at the truth, Allen v Farrow might have benefitted
from the impossible: interviews with every last family member. Regardless, it’s
safe to say that whatever dwindling respect Allen has enjoyed in the last few
years may be wiped away after Allen v Farrow.
Allen v Farrow review – effective docuseries on
allegations of abuse
The sexual abuse allegations leveled at Woody Allen
are put under the spotlight with exhaustive research in a damning if bloated
series
Allen v Farrow. The series has a lucid sense of its
central image: that of a family ripped in half, with the kids left to choose
sides.
Charles
Bramesco
@intothecrevasse
Thu 18 Feb
2021 16.04 GMT
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2021/feb/18/allen-v-farrow-review-netflix-abuse-allegations
Woody Allen
will not be ignored. After decades of controversy engulfing his personal life,
it would have been easy enough for him to retire and enjoy what must surely be
a lot of money, or to just continue working in volitive obscurity, making his
ever-worsening movies in Europe for a rapidly shrinking audience. But as
viewers of HBO’s new miniseries Allen v Farrow will amply learn, a refusal to
back down forms a key part of the pathology animating the man referred to by
the mononym of “Woody”.
From a New
York magazine interview alongside his wife, Soon-Yi Previn, in 2018 to a
mud-slinging memoir last year, he is still doing press and insisting that he is
innocent of the claims of sexual abuse levied against him by Mia Farrow’s
daughter Dylan. The four-part documentary from Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering
represents an equal and opposite effort, as Dylan herself and those in her
corner meet Woody’s unbudging denials – he has forcefully denied the
allegations – with their own steadfast determination. Starting with the title,
the series portrays this long-and-deep-running acrimony as a domestic war
between two feuding camps. It decisively takes a side, too, but only once a
comprehensive presentation of the information has made that much appear to be
the lone reasonable option. Coupled with affecting testimonials from Mia and
Dylan, telling her story with an immediacy inaccessible to her accounts in the
printed word, the reportage does everything short of actually proving guilt.
Dick and Ziering leave the matter a he-said-she-said, and methodically show
that what he is saying is unconvincing, while what she is saying seems too
well-founded (and shattering) to be doubted.
Spanning
nearly 40 years and spun around an intricate family tree, this complicated case
requires a lot of untangling. To that end, the series is almost diligent to a
fault, repeatedly reiterating the same points and analyses already known to
anyone with even a passing familiarity. Like so many true-crime nonfiction
cinema projects these days – the clear mold from which this approach has been
cast – it seems to bulk up its own length for length’s sake, topping out at
over four hours. Though more palatable when doled out over a month’s
broadcasting, viewing the screeners in a single binge underscores just how much
of that time gets eaten up by restatement and rephrasing.
But Ziering
and Dick, along with a stable of interview subjects ranging from tertiary characters
in the Farrow orbit to film critics contextualizing Woody’s life and works, do
convey the key information authoritatively and emphatically. Mia and Woody
linked up around 1980, and while he took a shine straight away to her adopted
son Moses (a glaring absence in the series, like Woody himself and Soon-Yi,
cast here as a coordinated opposition), he would cultivate a more fraught
relationship to young Dylan, adopted by the couple in 1985. As an adult, she
recounts him allegedly smashing her face into a plate of spaghetti and other
enraged outbursts, an enmity which culminated in her allegation at age seven
that she had been sexually violated by her father. Woody countered that the
girl had been coached into a false confession by Mia, furious with him upon her
then-recent discovery that he had been conducting an affair with the
college-aged Soon-Yi.
One of the
miniseries’ primary objectives is to expose the apparent lapses in the justice
system that exonerated Woody in the 90s, even as his reputation now sinks
deeper into the toilet with each passing year. He filed for custody of Moses,
Ronan, and Dylan in 1992 to get Mia on the defensive, a trial that would unduly
come to stand as a referendum on his innocence. Ziering and Dick question the
results that shot down both his custody bid and the accusations of sexual
abuse, drawing attention to a Connecticut district attorney lacking in zeal and
pivotal psych evaluations since discredited. Woody’s legal team did everything
in its power to cast Mia as a vindictive manipulator and Dylan as the
impressionable child in her thrall, but the mainstream embrace of feminism
clarifies that those attacks were largely rooted in misogynistic notions of
hysterical, untrustworthy women.
In an
effort to touch on everything, some sub-topics (separating the art from the
artist for Woody fans, the scuttled release of his latest film A Rainy Day in
New York) get addressed so glancingly, they’d be best omitted. But however
overinflated, the series has a lucid sense of its central image: that of a
family ripped in half, with the kids left to choose sides. Like them, all the
public can do is believe one set of premises or the other. Did a man famed for
his well-documented, self-confessed attraction to teenage girls cross a line with
his daughter, or did the Farrows, one of whom has a name synonymous with
defense for abused women, concoct and spend their whole lives defending a
conspiracy as a spiteful response to a sexual indiscretion from nearly 30 years
ago? Dick and Ziering’s presentation hones Occam’s razor to a point sharp
enough to draw blood.
Allen v
Farrow begins on HBO on 21 February with a UK date yet to be announced
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