THE PURPLE ROSE OF CAIRO (1985) *** Despite what damn near every critic in the world has said, this isn't a particularly original premise. Not only has everyone, at some point or another, wished that some character from the screen could be real and alive for them (my own favorite was Daryl Hannah's mermaid in Splash, and I'm still not even sure if that was a Grateful Dead necklace she was wearing), but the film is suspiciously similar to a short story written decades earlier by, that's right, Woody Allen. I say that Woody lifting ideas from, if not necessarily plagiarizing, himself and everyone else is hardly original. The genius is in the treatment. We can all imagine the character coming down off the screen, but I admit to failing to give any consideration whatsoever to the problems that might ensue in this dimension, the reaction of the other members of the cast, legal concerns of studio lawyers, the effect on the ticket-taker, the currency exchange rate between celluloid and Bank of America...add pathological to the list of Woody's psychiatric maladies. Admirably so. It's all not Woody, though, I mean, he's not even on the screen. Not even on the screen inside the screen. It's difficult to imagine any actress besides Mia Farrow pulling this off without looking like an idiot. Of course she hung out with the Beatles and the Maharishi, married Frank Sinatra, humped on Allen's leg...the action depicted here may even strike her as somewhat mundane. Jeff Daniels wouldn't have been my pick for the male lead, but is more evidence (as if any was needed) that Woody selects cast better than anyone else who has ever lived. Danny Aiello is so good as the penny-pitcher that there's a danger of him distracting from the greater points that are made-not deeply, but very, very broadly: film is powerful, obsession can be good and bad, escape is real, reality is undefined, humans distract themselves to the point of weakness, and Hollywood corrupts the soul.
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