The habitus of Woody Allen's MIGHTY APHRODITE couldn't be more unsavory in the light of the current political and cultural ethos and the alleged accusation in which he is personally enmeshed, roughly taking its cue from PYGMALION, its story goes like this, after Lenny Weinrib (Allen), a middle-aged sportswriter, has found out that the biological mother of his adopted son Max (McQuaid), who is endowed with a higher IQ, is a bimbo prostitute and part-time porn star named Linda Ash (Sorvino) , he tries every which way to persuade her to give up her profession and get settled down with an ideal man who loves her.
But Lenny's action is anything but altruistic, he has his own face to save in case in future Max might want to know the truth of his parentage, a hairdresser of happy domesticity is what he aims for, although most of the fun derives from Lenny's unresolved discombobulation about the genetic pedigree of Max's genius, and gauging by Linda's divulgence, the child might very likely be a “bad seed”, anyway, that is an excursus.
If Allen is often faulted for delusions of grandeur in his lesser works, MIGHT APHRODITE is guilty as charged, mostly for Lenny's paternalistic attitude of playing God to save a ditzy sinful soul of the opposite sex, not to mention chiefly for his own sake, but courtesy to a corn-fed Sorvino's zippy, down-to-earth unrestrainedness (an Oscar winner!, the Academy surely adores the stereotype of a call girl with a golden heart), Linda freshens up most comically and sympathetically for her unalloyed openness and genuineness in spite of being physically compromised in the morass of moral depravity, if Max does inherit any “good genes”, we can assure that is where they come from. In that regard, Allen's homage to a woman's incorruptible purity of immanent goodness is condescending, yes, but also amusingly touching.
Helena Bonham Carter, who plays Lenny's two-timing curator wife Amanda, fares less agreeable in a mostly sidelined position, and it is rather difficult to dispel Allen's prurient proclivity of the couple attaining a reconciliation only after both get their feet wet in adultery, a waters-muddying ploy that recoils on the movie's intended feel-good aftertaste.
Surely one cannot finish the review without mentioning Allen's hyperbolic conceit of orchestrating a Greek chorus to add some flourish, which bookends and punctuates the whole movie (often as a phantom manifestation), but the catch is, Lenny's twee story is, to all intents and purposes, out of the proportion with such a majestic gesture. However, the movie's finale is a good one, instead of blowing the lid off the secret we audience is let on from the very start, appending a fresh one to counterpoint the quirk of fate is quite a cheery kicker.
referential entries: Allens' HUSBANDS AND WIVES (1992, 7.3/10); George Cukor's MY FAIRE LADY (1964, 7.8/10).
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