Director Woody Allen
Allen with actress Mariel Hemingway
Mariel Hemingway
Allen with actress Mariel Hemingway
MANHATTAN A
USA (96 mi) 1979
‘Scope d: Woody Allen
Made in an era when Woody Allen films were still funny,
where his cleverly written dialogue was likely the best thing you heard in a
movie all year, convincingly real and naturalistic, with Allen’s giant ego as
well as his phobias and anxieties at the heart of the film through his own
autobiographical central character, yet this also has a majestic view of New
York City and is really a love letter to a city of magical possibilities,
beautifully captured in black and white by cinematographer Gordon Willis, the
same man who filmed THE GODFATHER (1972), where this may be Allen’s first art
film, shot in ‘Scope, visually intoxicating while driven by the melodies and
natural rhythm of George Gershwin’s music, making this the quintessential Woody
Allen film, listed at #1 from an October 4, 2013 Guardian Poll, "The
10 best Woody Allen films".
Accentuating the impressive skyline as well as city streets, parks, and
museums, much of the film becomes a travelogue taking us through a tour of New
York City’s most magnificent borough, never looking so stunning, filled with
cultural landmarks and significant locations, offering a Who’s Who of what to
see there, caught in a moment in time, like a time capsule, or a metaphor for
contemporary culture, accentuating all the things Allen loves about his exalted
city. Opening to the lush sounds of
Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue,” Rhapsody
in blue - George Gershwin - Gary Graffman, New York Philharmonic - Zubin
Metha (16:37), including luminously romanticized shots of the city, the
skylight at dawn, a silhouette of the Empire State Building, the neon lights of
Broadway, all framed in an idealized montage of a perfect city, Allen in
voiceover as writer Isaac Davis narrates the opening lines as if typing out the
first draft of a 40’s pulp fiction crime novel, where he’s a Raymond Chandler
tough guy in a noirish story describing the gritty pulse of New York City
through expressive language, but finds it difficult to choose the right words,
stopping and starting again several times before finally getting it right,
elegantly setting the tone for what’s to come, where Allen has a history of
romanticizing New York City in films, again idealizing his favorite city with
familiar city streets, Manhattan - Woody Allen (HD)
Opening Scene (3:09), “New York was his town and it always would be.” In contrast, next to this glorious backdrop,
the citizens who call this place home are themselves flawed and plagued by
ordinary, everyday problems, caught up in their own tawdry melodramatic
betrayals and personal issues. To start
out with, Isaac’s best friend is Yale Pollock (Michael Murphy), married for over a decade to Emily (Ann Byrne
Hoffman, the first wife of Dustin Hoffman), yet he’s caught up in an affair
with Mary Wilke (Diane Keaton), a bright and attractive but somewhat flaky
personality, while Isaac, annoyed that his ex-wife Jill (Meryl Streep), who
left him for another woman, is writing a tell-all book about their marriage
falling apart, while he’s dating an attractive 17-year old high school student
Tracy (Mariel Hemingway), mature beyond her years, both seemingly happy, though
he’s obviously using her, yet deep down he thinks she’s too young, never really
taking her seriously. Nonetheless, their
time onscreen together is positively charming, where despite his omnipresent
litany of neverending neuroses, Allen has rarely been seen this happy and
relaxed before, an essential component to why this film is so revered, as it’s
perhaps closest to his authentic self.
Throughout the film it’s clear we are part of Allen’s world,
awash with stunning Gershwin melodies, while the pathetic counterpoint to the
city’s romanticized perfection is the deceitful affliction of the feeble-minded
humans residing there, suggesting humans sabotage their own personal happiness,
filling the screen with writers and intellectuals, all supposedly working on
books, each one viewed as selfish to the core, overly self-absorbed and
emotionally naive, where their morally tangled lives are founded on enormous
personal transgressions that are breezily swept away with the greatest of ease,
with each relationship built upon a series of betrayals, where one of Allen’s
self-confessed intellectual anxieties (raised near the end of the film as an
idea for a short story) is creating unnecessary neurotic problems that prevent
his characters from dealing with life’s more important issues, finding
amusement in their sheer ineptitude.
Because humor is so ingrained into the fabric of the film, one excuses
the misogynistic leanings, as duplicitous characters falling from grace are at
the heart of the film, providing a near mythical landscape of what amounts to a
gargantuan distance between heaven and earth.
In this film, romantic attachments fall apart, love never lasts, the
exact opposite of the typical 30’s Hollywood musical with Fred Astaire, as
exemplified by Yale’s marriage to Emily, which Isaac thought was air tight and
would never crumble. But everything
touched by the hand of humans eventually falls apart, thereby leaving their own
ephemeral imprint or legacy. When Yale
breaks up with Mary, it opens the door for Isaac to step in, where their
initial meeting is disastrous, at emotional and artistic extremes, yet he can’t
get her out of his head, thinking perhaps she’s the voice of maturity that he’s
looking for, despite her swooning mood changes that are epic, both caricatures
of changeable artistic temperaments, exposing the pretentiousness of New York
intellectuals as culture snobs, rehashing their relationship in Annie Hall
(1977). Part of the fun of this film is
watching Allen’s continual self-obsession, which he mocks with sarcastic humor,
yet he can’t disguise a constant need for attention, which seems to be the
standard operating position of male characters in Woody Allen movies, who
delude themselves by forgiving their own flaws, but not in others, having
little time to sympathize with the rest of the world, as they’re too busy
thinking of themselves. There are plenty
of digs at his own character and the inflated view of himself, with Yale
attacking his moral self-righteous attitudes, “You think you’re God,” claiming
moral superiority, always presuming he’s right, to which Isaac coyly responds,
“Well, I gotta model myself after someone.”
But ex-wife Jill gets the motherload of targeted barbs, with his friend
Yale (rubbing it in) reading aloud from her memoir, scathingly accurate, so
piercingly true that one can’t help laughing in approval, as this is the epitome
of self-deprecating humor, “He was given to fits of rage, Jewish liberal
paranoia, male chauvinism, self-righteous misanthropy, and nihilistic moods of
despair. He had complaints about life
but never any solutions. He longed to be
an artist but balked at the necessary sacrifices. In his most private moments, he spoke of his
fear of death, which he elevated to tragic heights when in fact it was mere
narcissism.” Not sure Allen has ever
been more accurately described in one of his own films, continually inviting
ethical scrutiny, reading like it’s straight from the hallowed halls of heaven,
or from psychiatric notes, yet dripping with veracity.
After this game of musical chairs, with Yale returning to
Mary, claiming he never stopped loving her, willing to sacrifice his marriage
for her (while buying himself a flashy Porsche sports car to help ease the
pain), Isaac has a revelatory moment of honesty, like how stupid he was to
throw away what he had with Tracy, who despite being 25 years younger displays
more emotional maturity than he ever does, yet he always kept her at a
distance, never really accepting her for who she was, now viewed as innocence
personified, remaining one of the most gorgeously appealing characters in any
Woody Allen film, just 16 when filming, so open and vulnerable, untainted from
cynicism, very much like who she is in real life, where her screen persona
represented her own, even-keeled and wise beyond her years, very reserved and
grown-up (coming from a family with deep-seeded emotional turmoil, with the
public glamorizing the Hemingway misfortunes with suicide and depression),
becoming a shining star in Allen’s universe of misfits, where he was fortunate
to discover her at the height of her beauty and stardom. She famously rejected Allen’s advances after
the film was completed, showing a surprising independence, where she is the
antithesis to his moral fallibility, where her virtuosity only makes her stand
out even more in the universe of his films, nominated for Best Supporting
Actress, but losing to Meryl Streep in KRAMER VS. KRAMER (1979), who was more
of a lead character, countering Dustin Hoffman who won for Best Actor. Allen and co-writer Marshall Brickman were
nominated for Best Original Screenplay, but lost to the writer of BREAKING AWAY
(1979). In the abyss of his personal
rejection, Isaac lies on the sofa and recounts into a tape recorder those
things that make life worth living, each very carefully thought out, “Groucho
Marx, Willie Mays, the 2nd movement of the Jupiter Symphony, Louis Armstrong’s Potato Head Blues, Swedish movies, Sentimental Education by Gustave Flaubert, Marlon Brando, Frank
Sinatra, those incredible apples and pears by Paul Cézanne, the crabs at Sam
Wo’s, and Tracy’s face.” The pause
afterwards says it all, as he’s internalizing what a shmuck he was to give up
on her for someone his own age but so emotionally unstable, whose anxiety level
mirrored his own, subject to catastrophic mood swings, while Tracy is as
well-grounded a human being as exists opposite his own, and he ignored her,
like something Jean-Pierre Léaud’s adolescent Antoine Doinel would do in
Truffaut’s series of autobiographical encounters in Introduction
to The Adventures of Antoine Doinel.
Attempting to call her by phone, but the line is busy, he instead runs
through the streets of the city in an extended sequence accentuating the city
streets that he adores, bookended by the “Rhapsody in Blue” music of Gershwin,
blending together the loves of his life, creating a seamless encounter that may
as well be with fate, testing his luck once again, thwarted by a 6-month
adventure that she’s about to embark upon to study in London’s Academy of Music
and Dramatic Arts that he actually encouraged, thinking it would do her a world
of good. Running up against his own
advice, he begs her to stay, not wanting to lose that essence about her that he
likes, hoping it will never change, but she reassures him “not everybody gets
corrupted,” and all the plans have already been made by her family, suggesting
6-months isn’t so long, concluding with the kind of line Billy Wilder might
have written, “You have to have a little faith in people.” Gobsmacked and completely befuddled, he can
only offer a wry smile, like that magical Chaplin moment at the end of CITY
LIGHTS (1931), where he can’t weasel his way out of this one, caught like a
deer in the headlights, perhaps seeing himself for the very first time, as the
curtain drops, Manhattan (1979) Ending (HD) YouTube
(8:00), offering a few final shots of the city skyline, with Gershwin’s Embraceable
You playing over the end credits.
Strangely, of all the Allen films, this one holds up better and feels
more contemporary than all the others.
Post Note
In hindsight, one may re-examine the film after the very
public fallout of the Woody Allen/Mia Farrow breakup, where sexual assault
allegations were made against Allen by his seven-year old daughter Dylan Farrow
in 1992, claiming Allen sexually molested her in Farrow’s Connecticut home, though
Allen has always denied the accusation.
The Connecticut State’s Attorney investigated the allegation and
contended there *was* probable cause for a criminal case but did not press
charges, claiming the effected child was too emotionally fragile, while the
Connecticut State Police referred Dylan to the Child Sexual Abuse Clinic
of Yale–New Haven Hospital who concluded that Woody Allen had not
sexually abused Dylan, and the New York Department of Social Services found “no
credible evidence” to support the allegation, though it was never demonstrated
conclusively that it had not happened.
Nonetheless, Dylan’s brother, Ronan Farrow, now a journalist, has
publicly supported his sister, where the incident has become embroiled in the
#MeToo movement’s insistence that victims must be listened to. Adding to the controversy, Allen (at the age
of age 56) began having an affair with Farrow’s adopted daughter Soon-Yi Previn
(essentially his step-daughter, though he and Farrow were never married) when
she was a senior in high school, graduating in June 1991, with a sexual
relationship allegedly beginning December 1991.
While there is some controversy surrounding Soon-Yi’s actual birth date,
it is generally recognized as October 8, 1970, making her 21 years of age, eventually
marrying Allen in 1997. Lesser known to
the public, just a few years before making this film, Allen (at the age of 42)
previously dated a 17-year old high school student named Stacey Nelkin who was
attending public magnet school Stuyvesant High (17 was and remains the legal
age of consent in New York). He likely
had her in mind while writing this film.
In the custody turmoil, Farrow labeled Allen a child molester and a
sexual predator, charges that were initially ignored, but resurfaced again when
Allen was awarded a lifetime achievement award at the Academy Awards in 2014,
with Dylan Farrow (now age 28) repeating her allegations in an open letter to The New York Times, writing another to The Los Angeles Times in December 2017,
again reiterating her allegations. This
time, however, there was public fallout from the #MeToo and Time’s Up
movements, affecting Allen’s ability to work again in the industry, with Amazon
Studios backing out of a 4-movie distribution deal in April 2019, cutting ties
with him all together, and no new films have been distributed since the release
of Wonder
Wheel (2017). This history brings to
mind suggestions that Allen is a sexual predator, with many finding Allen’s
behavior in this film, combined with his history, as enough proof, featuring
Allen as a grown man developing sexual and romantic inclinations with a high
school student. Her parents and their
reactions are never considered, as they are not part of the self-obsessed
delusion that the Allen character represents.
Does this history effectively alter one’s appreciation for the
film? For some it not only could, but it
does (Woody
Allen Is Both a Genius and a Predator ... - Alternet.org). Not so much for me, now in his mid 80’s,
Allen poses no risk to anyone (though his children may feel otherwise), where this
may arguably be Allen’s best film, as it’s presented essentially as a fantasy,
cleverly funny, at times hilarious, offering a swooning romanticization of both
the city and its inhabitants, using a lush Gershwin musical score as a
backdrop, poking fun at the inherent flaws of human fallibility, becoming a
gloriously visualized operatic work, where humans never live up to their
potential, becoming an idealized dream versus reality, Beauty and the Beast fable, with humans (the beasts) still learning
how to make their way in a cold and indifferent modern world.
