![[box cover]](../../reviewimgs/s/september.jpg)
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September
Although a touch melodramatic, Woody Allen's stark 1987 drama exquisitely reveals the writer-director's gift for human observation. Mia Farrow stars as Lane, the wrecked adult daughter of an overbearing mother and former Hollywood starlet (Elaine Stritch). A dark episode from Lane's youth is just one of the unpleasantries surfacing amongst the house guests during a late-summer night at her secluded Vermont cottage. September quietly observes that as seasons change, people do not, and Allen is an expert at subtly revealing the casual ways in which people hurt each other and delude themselves from that reality. Emotionally greedy, every character attempts to fill their emptiness by subconsciously digging new voids in others, repairing nothing and breaking everything. September would make an excellent stage play, with its confined set and small cast, and the actors here make the most of it. Diane Weist continues to shine under Allen's direction, Sam Waterston is both touching and thoughtless as an aimless writer, Denholm Elliot is heartbreaking as an older man in love with Lane, and Jack Ward gives the film a provocative, but steady, anchor as a physicist who understands that the universe is chaotic so he needn't be. Both Farrow and Stritch are excellent examples of the kind of complex female characters Allen was known for writing before the 1990s. Presented in anamorphic widescreen (1.85:1) with audio in Dolby 2.0 mono. Trailer, keep-case.
—Gregory P. Dorr
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