Grade: B

Woody Allen’s thirty-third film is basically just an extended skit, but it’s quite a funny one, and though at 114 minutes it overstays its welcome a bit, “Hollywood Ending” is one of the writer-director’s most sheerly enjoyable movies in a long while. The story, it should be noted, is one of those inside-the-movie-business constructs that often appeal to critics more than to ordinary filmgoers (just think of Robert Altman’s “The Player”), but in this case the slapstick nature of most of the piece will trump the fact that a few of the jabs are so obscure that they’ll probably sail over most viewers’ heads. The plot is simple: Val Waxman (Allen) is a once-celebrated movie director desperately in need of a job after a series of disasters, brought about by not only his arrogance but his neurotic personality. His ex-wife Ellie (Tea Leoni), now the fiancé of studio chief Hal (Treat Williams), persuades the mogul that Val’s just the man to helm their new project, a New York-based film noir. Despite Hal’s doubts, he gives Val the job; on the first day of filming, however, Waxman’s hypochondria sets in, and he finds himself psychosomatically blind. With the aid of his wonderfully shark-like agent Al Hack (Mark Rydell) and a straightlaced business student (Barney Cheng) hired as translator for the Chinese cinematographer (Lu Yu) Val insists on hiring–as well as Ellie late in the game–Waxman literally makes the picture without seeing what he’s doing. Though he regains his sight after shooting has wrapped, it’s too late to do the picture any good; a nifty twist at the close, though, makes it, shall we say, a success d’estime.

This is actually a pretty thin conceit for a feature, and though Allen dresses the narrative up with an inevitable reunion of Val and Ellie, it still seems overextended; it doesn’t help that some of the major supporting figures (Ed, Hal’s man on the set played by George Hamilton, and Lori, an aspiring actress and Val’s current girlfriend played by Debra Messing) are weak time-wasters, generating surprisingly few chuckles. On the other hand, Allen has provided himself with some very amusing rants and one-liners, and employs the blind shtick to good effect. (One might think that it would be a little tasteless, but actually it proves no more so than the sequence involving old Mr. Muckle in W.C. Fields’ “It’s a Gift,” even though as things go on, the variations Allen is able to contrive on the theme grow a bit redundant.) Leoni, moreover, is better than she’s been on screen before, and she and Woody make a good team. Even more important, Rydell, the well- known director, proves a highly adept scene-stealer as Waxman’s conniving agent–some of his lines are as funny as those Woody has written for himself–and Cheng is greatly amusing as the dour, unflappable translator; Allen’s scenes with these two are among the best in the film. Williams gets by playing things fairly straight, and Peter Gerety is suitably low-key as the psychiatrist Val consults about his affliction. (Unfortunately, the “solution” to Waxman’s problem, involving his relationship with his estranged son Tony, a rock musician played by Mark Webber, is one of the clumsier plot elements, and it’s not pulled off well.) In a case of life imitating art, Allen, like Waxman, also makes use of a foreign cameraman–German Wedigo von Schultzendorff–but in his case the result is fine; the picture looks beautiful.

To a certain extent, “Hollywood Ending” is another of Allen’s self-referential pictures, but this time around he takes himself less seriously than usual, and the result is a charming trifle. (One also has to compliment his instinct in not showing us any of the completed footage from Waxman’s picture. Such sequences inevitably fall short of what we imagine, and it’s best that the script confines itself to showing the characters’ reactions to the horror that Val has perpetrated.) The picture isn’t as imaginative or searching as his best work, but especially after the extraordinarily thin “Curse of the Jade Scorpion,” its good-natured silliness represents a welcome return to jocular form.