Can I have a side of being with that nothingness bartender? The unpredictability of life's twists and turns often make us wonder what would have been had one small event gone otherwise. The order which our minds impose on otherwise disconnected events comforts us with the known, the linear, the predictable. Yet, as the existentialists, especially Woody Allen, tell us, the freedom to choose to be other than we are or what others expect us to be is at once as exhilarating and terrifying as it is omnipresent. In between decisions, we are left with the emptiness of knowing that we control our destinies. Yet, we are challenged to fill that emptiness with the projects that become the sum of our lives. Such is the plight of the characters in this film whose lives could have been and paradoxically were very different.
This film is an entertaining device that encourages self-reflection American style. It shows a mature Woody polishing his personal existentialism in a much more entertaining and accessible manner than earlier European films.