Woody Allen may be guilty of child molestation. Or he may not be. However, making a movie as irresponsibly one-sided as Amy Ziering and Kirby Dick’s “Ronan v. Farrow” doesn’t help anybody, except maybe Mia Farrow. In it, Farrow is portrayed as an angel, and Allen as a monster. “Allen vs. Farrow” is not a documentary. It’s a hit job.
I covered the controversy in “The Case for Woody Allen’s Innocence,” which was published around the time Dylan Farrow’s sexual abuse allegations against her 82-year-old father were reignited, courtesy of the #TimesUp and #MeToo movements in late 2017. Mia Farrow and her kids, Ronan and Dylan, have vehemently stayed true to their convictions: when Dylan was 7, Allen took her to the family attic and molested her. Allen’s reputation has taken a major hit, his contract with Amazon annulled, and his films now blacklisted from the U.S. market.
Mia’s son, Ronan Farrow, a journalist for “The New Yorker,” is a well-known media asset for her. Their victim is Dylan, a smart young woman who’s had the misfortune of being brainwashed with lies by her mother since she was 7. Dylan agreed to speak publicly about the abuse charges in the doc; one gets the sense that she has no idea if what she’s saying is true, she just believes it.
There is no “evidence” of wrongdoing in “Ronan V Farrow,” just heresy and speculation. The smoking gun is nowhere to be found. Split into four 60-minute episodes, Ziering and Dick start off by tackling the beginnings of Mia and Woody's relationship which, contrary to what many remember, was a lovely thing. It was such a perfect match that Allen even cast Mia in 13 of his movies. If it weren’t for the ensuing controversy that would engulf their lives for the next 3 decades, Allen-Farrow would be up there with the great cinematic partnerships like De Niro-Scorsese, and Huston-Bogart.
Sadly, Dick and Ziering have decided to do a full-on smear of not just Allen’s personal life, but that of his art as well. They initially set-up their attacks by criticizing Allen’s knack of casting himself with younger actresses in his movies. It’s well known that the writer-director would write himself in his ’40s and ’50s as the on-screen love interest of women half his age. But he wasn’t the only one doing it back in the day, and it wasn’t necessarily done in poor taste. The filmmakers here believe it to be the signs of a monstrous figure preying on younger women. Why didn’t Dick and Ziering mention the fact that Mia Farrow married Frank Sinatra when she was 21 and he was 50? That short marriage was followed by one to Andre Previn. She was 25. He was 41. This narrative wouldn’t be beneficial to Dick and Ziering. And so, they pretend it never existed.
Their thesis also relies heavily on Woody’s “awkward” behavior towards Dylan. Initially, Allen didn’t want to have kids; he never thought he’d actually appreciate having them, and then Dylan came along and he fell in love with her (as a father) and neglected the other ones who weren’t biologically his. He’s always been a neurotic and awkward guy, but making the case that a father would overwhelmingly prefer a child to the others isn’t a smoking gun. It’s common sense.
Even worse, the Dylan confession home videos Mia shot back in 1993 looked and feel scripted. I cringed watching them, mostly because it felt like child abuse. Before she pressed “record”, I could just picture Mia asking Dylan “So, what are you going tell the camera?” Even the Yale/New Haven child abuse report, based on 9 interviews Dylan had with three experts in the field, concluded the child may have been coached by Mia. Ziering and Dick try their best to smear the reputations of the three child psychologists who conducted the study.
Mia also has her friends joining in for the assassin kill, with all of them, more or less, reiterating the same talking points, that “Woody was too close to Dylan.” “He was obsessed.” Yet again, Ziering and Dick have no interest in interviewing people who dispute the claims.
You could sense the real dynamics at play here: the way that, when interviewed, Mia’s eyes light up in anger when the topic of Allen and, her adopted daughter, Soon-Yi comes up. When she found out the two of them were having affair, she justifiably snapped. She wasn’t thinking straight. Allen claims she set him up, accusing him of pedophilia because she knew she could a) vengefully ruin his reputation and b) get away with it. That’s why she shot the scripted Dylan videos. It was her “evidence.” She knew Woody was already in therapy because of his “odd” behavior towards Dylan. It would be so easy to convince the public that he did it. Except, not many were convinced, not for 25 years at least. Not until Donald Trump became President and movement upon movement occurred in a country freaked out by its future.
Soon Yi and Woody have been together since 1992. They have raised two daughters, now in college. And yet, Mia hasn’t let go of the grudge. The truth of the matter is, there is no smoking gun in “Allen v Farrow”. It’s a skewed one-sided view of things. The other side declined to rebuttal, but do you blame them? It feels orchestrated and performed by The Farrows with the direction of Dick and Ziering.
SCORE: C
EDIT: I assume Ziering and Dick have read Robert Weide’s excellent dissections of Allen vs Farrow which were posted on 12.13.17, 5.30.16, and, most recently, 1.14.18, but refused to cover it in “Allen v Farrow.” Ronan and Dylan’s brother, Moses Farrow, has also vehemently defended his dad in a pertinently written essay, saying “My mother [Mia Farrow] drummed it into me to hate my father for tearing apart the family and sexually molesting my sister, and I hated him for her for years. I see now that this was a vengeful way to pay him back for falling in love with Soon-Yi.” Have Ziering and Dick just decided to ignore him as well?