https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2019/07/richard-brody-on-woody-allen-and-louis.html
I found Brody's declaration that he would keep watching Woody Allen films in spite of believing what has been alleged about him, as distinct from his verdict that the films of Louis C. K. are "not art" has, for me, distilled what it is about Brody that I find dubious. Brody's criticism can, I have proposed, be taken as emblematic of a moment in which art as a kind of religious experience faces a new variation of an old crisis, the question of whether we should continue to appreciate art made by people who are regarded as monsters. It's one thing to say in a completely generalized way that if we got rid of all the art of monsters we'd have no art left. It's one thing for an author at, say, Mbird to write that, and another thing to note that Louis C. K. has not figured all that prominently in the last few years at Mbird since disclosures about his conduct have come to light.
Brody's writing on C. K. was more moral disapproval and declarations of moral imperatives than an actual discussion of the film. For something more along the lines of a discussion of I Love You Daddy resembling film criticism and discussion of the film rather than moral condemnation of a man as not-an-artist, I'd have to go to something more along the line of Noah Millman's piece.
Millman made a point of comparing C. K.'s film to Allen's work:
...
Speaking purely in artistic terms, if you followed the progress of Allen’s career after Manhattan, you probably would be okay with that. In his great run through the mid-’80s, Allen made a series of finely crafted and nostalgia-tinted pieces that were the most durable works of his career: Zelig, The Purple Rose of Cairo, Broadway Danny Rose, and Hannah and Her Sisters. There is a level of confident control in these films that Allen never achieved before or since. They are the work of a man who knows what he believes and why he believes it. And what he believes is that life is fundamentally miserable; that trying to connect in an emotional way with other human beings is an invitation to deeper misery; and that immersion in art and beauty is the best way to distract oneself from those cruel facts about existence. Allen did not so much discover or reveal in these films as expound, but he expounded masterfully. [emphasis added]
But there was one time at the end of this stretch—probably the only time—that Allen explored and revealed, as he had in Manhattan, by delving into himself. That was in his 1992 film touching once again on themes of recombining couples and intergenerational romance: Husbands and Wives. Inspired, as Allen’s work so often was, by Ingmar Bergman—in this case by Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage—the film is a caustic portrait of marital collapse. And that collapse feels significant, feels like it matters to the author—likely because it was created and released in the context of Allen’s own marital collapse: the end of his relationship with Mia Farrow and the exposure of his relationship with Farrow’s daughter, Soon-Yi Previn, hard upon which came the explosive accusation that he had sexually abused his adopted daughter Dylan Farrow.
At the end of Annie Hall, Alvy Singer writes a play within which he can rewrite the ending of his relationship with Annie so that it comes out happy. This, Alvy explains, is one reason to make art: to revise reality in a more pleasant form. No one would accuse Woody Allen of having made a pleasant movie in Husbands and Wives, but the film does have the feel of self-justifying revisionism. It’s notable that Gabe, the character Allen himself plays, declines to pursue a relationship with a much younger woman while Allen himself began a relationship with his longtime lover’s daughter when she was still in her teens; meanwhile, Jack (played by Sydney Pollack) does leave his wife (Judy Davis) for a younger woman only to repent and return to a relationship that remains distinctly unfulfilling on a physical level. These are perfectly reasonable dramatic choices, but they are also ones that read quite differently once you know about Allen’s own activities at the time. Still, despite the air of self-justification, the film has considerable power, perhaps because even the act of constructing such a justification requires access to the feelings that need to be justified.
...
Brody made a point of saying that Allen the person and Allen the artist are not separable but ... Brody was going to keep watching Allen films anyway.
Millman's take on Allen is that Allen's core idea can be summed up as presented, life is miserable, attempting to meaningfully connect to others leads to more misery, and you can escape the misery of that realization through immersion in beauty.
Put that way a Woody Allen film could be no less escapist than a Michael Bay film.
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