RADIO DAYS. Directed and written by Woody Allen; produced by Robert Greenhut for Orion. Starring Seth Green and Mia Farrow. Rated PG (a little off-color humor and situations).
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Will our grandchildren or greatgrandchildren wonder how we could be entertained for hours by TV? After all, it has only two dimensions, and sight and hearing are the only senses it stimulates. Seems tame compared to the "feelies," or the "smellies," or 3-D holographic movies.
Younger people today (and some not so young) ask the same question about radio. I mean, all you do is listen! How could it have been useful for anything but background noise, or an occasional ball game, like we use it today?
If that question can be answered for the TV generations, Radio Days will do it. But it's not a simple answer, and this is not a simple movie. It has no plot to speak of, but a large, almost bewildering array of characters. It has humor, often quite clever and occasionally surreal, but your response is more likely to be fond smiles than belly laughs.
The extended family of Joey, the adult narrator, is the main focus of Radio Days. This is a diverse bunch of confirmed and constant radio listeners. (Joey's voice is that of director/writer Allen, in case anyone wouldn't recognize it.)
The child Joey is capably and unsentimentally played by Seth Green. While the boy's parents (Julie Kavner and Michael Tucker) are also good, the star of the household is Aunt Bea (Dianne Wiest), a single lady on her way to becoming an old maid, who holds to her romantic dreams and retains her sweet nature despite much buffeting by reality.
The movie also follows, more or less, the fortunes of Sally White (Farrow) a cigarette girl who eventually and improbably winds up a radio celebrity. Her story is told in brief snippets squeezed in among views of Joey's family. Sally's scenes offer not only glimpses of the glamorous world of rich and famous people, but also some of the best laughs in the movie.
Farrow is as excellent here as she has been in all of her movies with Allen. She is the main reason I wish there were more of Sally in the movie. Not less of the family, just more of this other world of radio.
Radio Days has a plotless structure for good reasons. Its episodic, almost stream-of-consciousness style is appropriate to the movie as a grab-bag of memories. And it's a close visual approximation of the variety offered by radio in the 1930's and 1940's. A large assortment of personalities and types of programs were what made the medium so popular, with every listener having a favorite show and performer.
Admirable as this artistic theory may be, however, in practice it makes for a somewhat slow-moving movie, and one that's occasionally hard to follow. Not all viewers will like it.
But the characters are the kind we've come to expect from Allen lately. Down-to-earth, more than a little eccentric, but affectionatley portrayed. The movie's humor stems not only from their faults, foibles and delusions, but also from our understanding of and identification with them.
For this reason, Radio Days grows on the viewer in spite of its unconventional style. Like most of Allen's movies, it's short and we're sorry to see it end.
February 25, 1987