Romanticism with a stink

I'm at the age when Manhattan provokes the response J. Hoberman confessed to feeling on its first run: admiration and contempt. While I can accept that every character except Mariel Hemingway is an asshole, I'm not sure Woody Allen can. His ambivalence towards his own creations almost de-stabilizes what he puts on screen. I've softened on this film, but I still don't know what the hell J-Ho's talking about in passages like this: "Allen's visual rhetoric was equal to his writing." The dialogue just ping-pongs, and thanks to Gordon Willis' gorgeous compositions the characters remain not just static, but frozen, like those dreaded moths caught in screens about which Annie Hall's Alvy Singer complained when he went to the country (well, if you consider Long Island "the country"). No scene exemplifies this more cringingly than the one in which Allen's Isaac Davis fights with best friend Yale (a blank Michael Murphy) in a college classroom: Yale hurls one bit of psychoanalytic twaddle after another while Allen ripostes with increasing desperation (with friends like Murphy it's best to talk to yourself). This isn't "character development," it's autocracy -- the Allen character always comes off smarter than anyone onscreen; but even then he lets the audience off the hook by undercutting his cynicism with the mooncalf innocence of Mariel Hemingway, who urges him at the film's end to have more faith in people. Out of the wisdom of babes, etc.

Surely Allen sensed that in 1979 this hoariest of literary cliches would seem more loathsome in a city that only recently defaulted on loans, survived a blackout, and was about to be convulsed by the AIDS epidemic. Allen is intelligent enough to illuminate the contradictions in his vision, but not nearly nuanced enough as a writer or director to deconstruct them, not in the way that a Jean Renoir, Robert Altman, or (hell) Paul Mazursky might have. At worst Manhattan is comfortable with being merely a lively daguerrotype of NYC life in the year when New Wave broke. That it goes far -- much farther than most comedies would in the sterile eighties -- but stops short of offending speaks to Manhattan-as-a-subculture's sense of its increasing cultural marginalization; you would think that, having nothing to lose, Allen would pull no punches. New York would never again be so sure of its grasp on the popular imagination, despite the fact that this grasp depended on a Gershwin-themed past that no longer existed (let's not forget Woody's own attitude towards punk when he made his stand-in grimace when Dianne Wiest insists on taking him to CBGB's; the eighties were almost as sterile for Allen aesthetically as they were for Hollywood). The other boogieman around the corner -- a grinning, impressive non-entity named Ronald Reagan -- would inspire a counter-insurgency devoted to boxing the ears of perceived liberal avatars like Allen.

However, I can't say enough about Diane Keaton here. In only the second real character performance of her career (ignore the frozen-food rendition of Ingmar Bergman that was Interiors the previous year), she's at home with the contradictions that Allen, Murphy, and Allen and co-writer Marshall Brickman's script can't embody. Hyper-intelligent, verging on shrill, capable of surprising warmth, Keaton incarnates every country boy's idea of what a City Girl must be like. More than her epochal work in Annie Hall, this is the performance for which the Academy should have honored Keaton with an Oscar. She bridges the distance between the sourness of Allen's conceptions and the romanticism of Willis' cinematography and Ira Gershwin's music.