Manhattan (1979)
The thing about New York that always defeats and trivialises
attempts to analyse it is its elusive quality. It's a city that
becomes whatever it is you want it to be, and the metaphor is
always changing.
In a sense, it's like a Woody Allen movie. Ten different people
might see Manhattan and see ten different movies, the way
ten different visitors might leave New York with ten different
impressions.
All of which makes it difficult to write about Woody Allen
movies, the way it is almost impossible to describe New York for
someone who has never been there. As soon as you get the words on
paper, they've become obsolete.
Manhattan is not Woody's best film. The final half hour
is tedious and vague, and the entire territory was explored better
in Annie Hall with more sophisticated results. Still, with
its flaws and its missed opportunities, it is nevertheless more
endearing and entertaining than nine out of ten movies. It is
certainly not a movie you should pass up.
Woody plays Isaac, the kind of anxiety-ridden "everything
happens to me" schmo who gets followed around by life's
plagues the way a terminal cougher and militant non-smoker always
end up in the smoking section on a ten-hour flight, complaining
all the way.
"When it comes to relationships," he moans, "I'm
the winner of the August Strindberg Award." With two
alimonies, child support, and no job, his insecurity increases.
One ex-wife has ended up working for the William Morris office.
The other ex-wife (Meryl Streep) has left him for another woman
and is publishing a book about the horrors of her marriage to
Woody for all of his friends to read.
His current amour (Mariel Hemingway) is a seventeen-year-old
student at the Dalton School who has to leave Elaine's early to do
her homework. Clearly, Woody is not the kind of loser who needs
the burden of another affair, but when his best friend (Michael
Murphy) introduces him to his own mistress (Diane Keaton), a
hostile, neurotic journalist, it's hate - and love - at first
sight.
Keaton has an instant opinion on everything. She hates Ingmar
Bergman and Norman Mailer, whom Woody considers
"achievers," and all they do is fight, while some
negative energy keeps them going. But not for long.
Murphy leaves his wife, Keaton goes back to feed her
self-destructive needs, Woody returns to the woman-child who
really understands him (she left a message that Grand Illusion was
playing at the Bleecker Street Cinema on his answering service),
but she's grown and moved to London.
Like all Manhattan survivors, Woody will wait, like the city
itself, until another neurotic attachment comes along.
The characters pretend to have old-fashioned virtues. Keaton
keeps talking about how bright, beautiful and lucky she is to come
from a stable Philadelphia family in which marriage is an
institution, yet she lives with a dachshund named Waffles who
serves as a "penis substitute" and gets involved with
men who don't deserve her.
Woody pretends he believes in monogamy ("People should
mate for life, like pigeons - or Catholics.") yet he gives up
the one girl who worships him to seek more challenging thrills
with women who torture his frail psyche. Streep sees nothing wrong
with exposing her ex-husband to ridicule because in her book she
has told the truth.
These are the people of Woody's world - not the leeches and
drug-crazed dropouts in the discos, but the battered intellectuals
who hang out in revival houses, concert halls, and the Russian Tea
Room.
To reiterate and emphasise the point, Woody has set his
characters and action in a romantic soft-focus Manhattan
orchestrated by Gershwin music and photographed in mellow,
beautiful black-and-white images by Gordon Willis that make New
York look like a modem photography exhibit at the Museum of Modern
Art.
Woody believes Manhattan can still work as a faithful metaphor
for survival, but it is an explosive comic effect when his
characters waft through the landscapes of the moon at the
Planetarium or watch the sun rise gracefully at dawn over the 59th
Street Bridge, while chattering incessantly about Freud,
self-delusion, and Bella Abzug. There is no welfare, crime,
violence, racial unrest, or garbage in Woody's Manhattan.
Woody Allen is probably the only filmmaker who can show
contemporary Manhattan and play Rhapsody in Blue at the
same time and make everyone else wish they had thought of it
first.
You don't have to love Manhattan to like Manhattan but
it helps.
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