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The Purple Rose of Cairo is a movie that I would love to see. You see, The Purple Rose of Cairo is actually a film-within-a-film. Mia Farrow’s sad, lonely, sweet character goes to see the film repeatedly to escape from her boorish husband, lack of job prospects and the Great Depression. There’s something about an excavation inside an Egyptian tomb, wining and dining in Manhattan, some romance, some comedy and a nightclub act. It looks like a nice screwball comedy and I would love to see it.
Since that film is fake, I’ll just have to settle for the surrounding Woody Allen film, which I would rank amongst his best. It’s funny and charming, with just the tiniest hint of sadness bubbling underneath the surface. Mia Farrow’s character can’t keep her job and is prone to daydreaming her life away instead of actually living it. Her husband drinks too much, won’t get a job and is prone to violence. But she has the local movie theater to escape to. That’s where The Purple Rose of Cairo comes into the film.
You see, a curious but wonderful thing happens – the line between imagination and real life get so blurred that characters can literally walk right off of the screen and into our world, and vice versa. I know I have dreamt about doing this, especially as a child. I really wanted to explore the jungles in King Kong and join the denizens of The Nightmare Before Christmas in their preparations. Mia Farrow’s reaction is realistic, and her performance keeps half the move afloat. Her own intelligence and charm makes Allen’s wit and whimsy all the better.
Jeff Daniels has the other half of the movie to keep afloat as he plays two characters: the actor portraying the character who walked off the movie screen, and the movie character who did it. He’s your typical inflated Hollywood windbag in one case, and a charmingly naïve and sweet hero in the other. One has lost all mystery and wonder of the movies since he’s more interested in their box office gross, his image and recognition than what they can do for us emotionally. The other is like an overgrown child discovering the real world and learning that what he knows in the movie can’t apply to the real world beyond a very small percentage.
Allen’s bouncing back and forth between reality and artifice shows us our main reason and main problem with the movies. We go to see things we can’t in our real world, and sometimes wish that things would play out as easily as they do in them. You can’t have it both ways; you have to embrace it all. But, the movies are just the movies, no matter how deep and involving they are, and real life is real life, no matter how movie-like it can get. I expect nothing less than wit and intelligence from Woody, and here he delivers big time.
