Lenny Weinrib (Woody Allen) is a relatively successful sportswriter who specializes in boxing. He leads quite a happy life – he is married to the intelligent and beautiful Amanda (Helena Bonham Carter), who has her own thriving career as an art curator, but has two very bold dreams. The first is that she wants to open her own gallery, where she can be in charge of exhibitions and discovering new artists, an ambition that she is actively working to manifest. The second is one that involves Lenny – she desperately wants a child. However, choosing not to give up a year to pregnancy and the early stages of motherhood, she expresses her desire to adopt, which conflicts with Lenny’s own desire to have a biological child. Regardless, they soon find themselves taking on the newborn son of a young, unwed mother who decided to give up her child. Max grows up to be an exceptionally intelligent boy, becoming the pride of his adoptive father’s life – but naturally, Lenny’s curiosity gets the better of him, and he finds himself seeking out any information he can find of the boy’s mother. This leads him to Linda Ash (Mira Sorvino), a dim-witted young woman who has dabbled in adult film and escorting for most of her adult life, but is now seeking a way to enter into a more steady field. At first, she is bewildered by the presence of this nervous, middle-aged man who she believes to be a client (especially since he doesn’t make his intentions in visiting her clear), but they soon strike up a friendship, with Lenny discovering that Linda is a diamond-in-the-rough, possessing a good brain and a gentle heart, which compels him to help get her life together, giving her a chance in life that she had never before been offered. Yet, it’s not common for complete strangers to appear out of nowhere and aim to change someone’s life, so naturally Linda is sceptical, all the while being blissfully unaware that this new friend is actually the person who has been giving her son the chance in life she badly wanted him to have.

Somewhere towards the beginning of Mighty Aphrodite, a minor character refers to the fact that all relationships go through “peaks and valleys”, and that it is perfectly natural for something designed to be long-term having moments where it falters, as long as there is an active effort to repair it when this happens. I feel this is a good way to look at the career of Woody Allen, since anyone that produces at least one film a year for most of his directorial career is going to have a few failures between the masterpieces. The 1990s was a decade in which Allen was in a bit of a transitionary stage – he had started to move away from his Bergman and Fellini pastiches that dominated during the 1980s, and while he wasn’t going back to the days of his outrageous 1970s comedies, he was once again working within the realm of the broadly comedic, combining the previous two decades’ worth of work into sweetly sentimental comedies with a great deal of depth, at least for the most part. Mighty Aphrodite isn’t anything particularly special – it’s a charming comedy that is mildly amusing and has a few decent performances at its core, but very little else. Yet, we still can’t help but be enticed by Allen’s promise of yet another endearing romance, with the director himself turning in one of his more memorable late-career performances as a man desperately trying to learn the truth about his adopted son’s background. It’s not a perfect film, and its flaws often come in the way of it achieving any kind of greatness – but with a charming script and a lot of heartful commentary, it does manage to be relatively entertaining, to the point where it’s the kind of lovable diversion that Allen would start to produce more regularly around this particular moment.

Mighty Aphrodite is the kind of film that would be forgettable had there not been a concerted effort by a small but dedicated group of supporters, who will often point to its value as more than just a small-scale comedy. Very few (if any) viewers would consider this a masterpiece, but it still has its merits, particularly in the way of Allen’s approach to telling this story. The premise itself isn’t particularly complex, and could really be found in any of Allen’s comedies from this period. The difference comes in the specific gag the director uses to tell it, employing a recurring Greek chorus of characters that narrate the events and perform material that supplements the story. This is an aspect of the film that has divided audiences, some considering it brilliant, others not being quite as positive. It’s important to remember that Allen often made use of very abstract ideas to bolster his films, and while this recurring Greek chorus may be interesting, it’s rarely little more than a novelty, while still hinting at the possibility of something more meaningful coming from this material. The premise isn’t strong enough to maintain itself, and the high-concept story doesn’t always work in isolation – but when taken together, they become much more successful. The most pertinent critique with Allen’s career after what many consider to be his peak in the 1980s with films like Broadway Danny Rose and Hannah and Her Sisters, is that he became too reliant on novelty, rather than weaving together a strong story. Mighty Aphrodite is a good example of where his attempts to be more experimental did work out relatively well, creating a decent film – but not enough to elevate it beyond a middling entry into his already large body of work.

If it wasn’t for Mira Sorvino, Mighty Aphrodite would be much more obscure. She single-handedly anchors the film, despite not being the central character. Allen, who seemed to be growing weary of being his own primary star, is turning in a decent but unremarkable performance, and instead is shifting attention to the supporting cast, almost all of which are doing solid work. Sorvino is by far the most interesting component of the film, taking the trite concept of the “hooker with a heart of gold” and elevating it from a stereotype into a very funny, interesting character. Her choices in building Linda Ash (or whatever pseudonym she chose to use at a particular moment) make for a very charming performance that perhaps deserved to be in a better film. Allen certainly doesn’t have any qualms with constructing a film that highlights the talents of the actresses he clearly admires, and in allowing Sorvino the free-reign to develop the character, he helped facilitate a really amusing performance that warrants a lot more acclaim than the middling film it appears in. Helena Bonham Carter and Michael Rapaport have great moments as well, albeit constantly being shifted to the background for the most part, with the dynamic really focusing on Allen’s typical nervous nebbish trying to make sense of his particular situation, which just so happens to involve a dim-witted amateur actress who steals the film with such precision, leaving very little doubt that, despite her relatively late entrance and absence for large stretches of the film, Mighty Aphrodite belongs entirely to Sorvino, who is really impressive, despite playing a somewhat stereotypical character.

Mighty Aphrodite is a decent but forgettable entry into Allen’s long career, and while it is not even close to being one of his worst films, it isn’t always the best example of what he could do as a director. It’s typically well-written (there are a couple of jokes in here that would have certainly not felt out of place in one of the director’s earlier, more irreverent comedies) and has some very good performances at the core, but other than these components that we’d expect from an Allen film in the first place, it isn’t anything particularly special or unique, at least not in terms of how it was made in between two of his more interesting projects from this time, the riotous period comedy Bullets Over Broadway, and the ambitious original musical Everyone Says I Love You, which are much better encapsulations of Allen’s ambitious as a director. Yet, Mighty Aphrodite does over 90 minutes of entertainment, and can be appreciated as just another amusing comedy by a director who churned them out rapidly, so much that the middling nature of the film barely registers, since there is an abundance of other films that Allen made that are unique and audacious enough to justify his choice in playing it somewhat safe here. The structure is peculiar and may not always work, but he was trying something slightly new here, staying within the confines of what he knew, while still putting in the effort to attempt something different. Whether he was successful or not remains to be seen, but it still is fun to see the world through Allen’s idiosyncratic perspective, regardless of how it may not be nearly as good as his more prominent comedies.