Apropos of Nothing by Woody Allen review – a life and an accusation
This controversial memoir displays the filmmaker’s self-deprecating wit, but his account of Mia Farrow and their family veers between sadness, fury and spite
In this memoir, Woody Allen is keen to clear up some misconceptions. He is not, as he has frequently been described, an intellectual. As a man who is practically “illiterate and uninterested in all things scholarly”, he dismisses the notion as being as “phony as the Loch Ness Monster”. He also explains that, contrary to appearances, he is no slouch on the sports field. In his youth he was a fast runner, “very fine” at baseball and a decent schoolyard basketball player who could also “catch a football and throw it a mile”.
Allen, 84, also wants it to be known that he is not a child molester, as claimed by his former partner, the actor Mia Farrow, and his alleged victim, their seven-year-old adopted daughter, Dylan Farrow, who is now 34. Throughout this complicated saga, which erupted in 1992, and was reignited in 2014 when Dylan wrote an open letter reasserting the alleged assault, many have had their say on the matter. Along with Dylan’s letter, there have been public missives from Allen’s son Ronan (who has stood firmly with his sister), Mia’s adopted son Moses (who has taken Allen’s side and whose letter is extensively quoted here), and Soon-Yi Previn (Mia and her ex-husband André Previn’s adopted daughter, who had an affair with Allen and later married him). Police investigators have twice found no legal case against Allen, a fact that is sometimes forgotten amid the public rush to judgment. While Allen quips that the main theme of Apropos of Nothing – which was controversially binned by its original publisher, Hachette, after staff staged a walkout – is “man’s search for god in a pointless, violent universe”, the 90-odd pages devoted to the Farrow “to-do” would suggest that, after remaining mostly quiet on the subject for 30 years, he has deemed it time to offer his version of events.