Woody Allen (1979)

TV writer Isaac Davis (Allen) is worried that his love affairs with women don’t last.  His second marriage recently ended – as Isaac says to his latest girlfriend Mary Wilkie (Diane Keaton), while they’re preparing for sex one night, he’s never had a relationship with anyone that lasted as long as Hitler’s with Eva Braun.  This struck me as a characteristically funny Woody Allen line – one of many in the script which he and Marshall Brickman wrote for Manhattan.  According to Andrew Sarris, though, this:

‘… devastating line … must take its place in film history alongside Jean Renoir’s ‘Tout le monde a ses raisons’ from La Règle du jeu.  … This is a blackout line of sorts, and we are not primed for a belly laugh, but as the idea sinks in, the ethical configuration of Manhattan emerges in broad relief, and the desperation of the characters finds its comic correlative.’

Sarris’s Village Voice review from 1979, which the BFI used as its programme note, is a startling reminder of how overpraised Woody Allen was liable to be around this time.  Manhattan was released in the US in April 1979 and Sarris begins his piece by calling it ‘the one truly great film of the 70s’.  He is explicit that it ‘tops Annie Hall in brilliance, wit, feeling and articulation’ but he must mean that it’s also superior to, for example, the first two Godfather films, Cabaret, The Conversation, Shampoo, Nashville and Taxi Driver – and Sarris isn’t even specifying that it’s the one great American film of the decade.  I’d seen Manhattan just once, when it was first released in this country and didn’t like it too much then.  The reasons I felt the same way seeing it again now are a mixture of different and the same.

The personalities of Woody Allen and Isaac Davis are fused from the very start of Manhattan as Isaac’s voiceover tries out different opening lines for a book he’s planning to write about his love of New York City.  At the start, Isaac is dating a seventeen-year-old girl called Tracy (Mariel Hemingway).   His academic friend Yale (Michael Murphy) is having an extra-marital affair with the emotionally brittle culture vulture Mary.  In the course of the film, Mary starts seeing Isaac instead, before resuming her affair with Yale.  By the time the final scene arrives, when Isaac has come to his senses and realised that the purely loyal and innocent Tracy is the girl for him, I felt hostile towards Manhattan.  I’d misremembered the ending, though:  I thought Tracy, packed and ready to go to drama school in London, capitulated when Isaac asked her not to leave New York.  It came as a surprise and a relief when she didn’t give in – the question of whether they’ll keep in touch and have a future together is nicely unresolved.  Even so, and appealingly as Mariel Hemingway plays Tracy (her lovely, open face and emotional transparency are affecting), I felt uneasy watching the relationship between her and Isaac played out because of what happened in Woody Allen’s own life subsequently with Soon-Yi Previn.  Whereas I found the censorious reaction of critics to Whatever Works unkind, it makes me uncomfortable seeing prior evidence that Allen has always had a thing about very young women.  The antipathy these feelings provoked expanded as I watched Isaac, in the closing stages of Manhattan, running through the streets of New York from his apartment to Tracy’s.  I was irritated that Allen was blending this particular sexual predilection into his love affair with other romantic comedies (and their heroes’ climactic sprint to claim the heroine), and with New York itself.  It’s personal film-making of a peculiarly limited kind.

Woody Allen’s enthusiasm for Ingmar Bergman is amusing because their styles are usually so different but they often seem to be kindred spirits too – not only in their shared fear of death and a godless universe but in their treatment of relationships between men and women.  They write good female roles and are very skilled in casting and directing the actresses in those roles.  But the women are often conceived as on the receiving end of male egotism and obsession; although we’re meant to see how fascinating these women are to the film artists who created them, there’s often a sense in both men’s work that the audience is also supposed to find their male alter egos on screen more fascinating than the women.  This is more easily achieved when the men are played by the likes of Gunnar Björnstrand and Max von Sydow than when Woody Allen is playing himself – or, in later years, giving another actor lines written for a voice which is unmistakably his own.  At this stage of his film career, Allen seemed inclined to cast in other male roles either decent, unspectacular actors who were better looking than him but whom he could easily eclipse by his wit (Michael Murphy here, Tony Roberts more often) – or even shorter and/or more physically unprepossessing ones (Paul Simon in Annie Hall, Wallace Shawn – in an admittedly very funny scene – in Manhattan).

The script in Manhattan has witty one-liners to spare:  they’re often for the audience’s benefit only – asides or throwaways after the other person in the conversation on screen has stopped listening.  The exchanges between Allen and Diane Keaton in particular have a wonderful zing and rhythm:  Keaton seems completely in tune with him.   That’s not the case with Meryl Streep in the small role of Isaac’s second wife Jill (who’s now in a lesbian relationship and writing a book about her marriage to Isaac).  Streep’s emotional detachment and Jill’s formidable lack of humour give her scenes a distinctive discordance.  The cast also includes Anne Byrne as Emily, the wife Yale keeps being unfaithful to.   But Woody Allen’s principal co-star in Manhattan is New York City itself, realised in Gordon Willis’s elegant black and white cinematography and the George Gershwin music that dominates the soundtrack.

2 January 2012