| United Artists 1979 | Runtime: 96 minutes | Rated R |
| Starring Woody Allen, Diane Keaton, Michael Murphy, Mariel Hemingway, Meryl Streep, Anne Byrne. | ||
| Written by Woody Allen and Marshall Brickman | Directed by Woody Allen | |
Woody Allen's "Manhattan" (1979) is one of the best-looking films ever made. Filmed in black and white letterbox format, its visuals of the city are simply mesmerizing (one shot that continues to stand out is the famous shot of Woody and Diane Keaton sitting on a bench by the river at dawn), thanks primarily to cinematographer Gordon Willis. "Manhattan" is as much a love letter to the city as it is a wonderful, charming romantic comedy.
The film itself involves two couples. One consists of Issac (Allen) and Tracy (Mariel Hemingway), a boyfriend-and-girlfriend couple. Tracy insists she loves Issac, but Issac is too concerned with their difference in age to commit (he is 42; she is 17). He urges Tracy not to get hung up on him and insists that she should be going out with kids her own age. Issac is also twice-divorced, and his second wife, Jill (Meryl Streep), who left him for another woman, is now writing a book about their breakup. He pleads with her not to write the book, complaining that everyone will know everything (he primarily doesn't want people knowing that he tried to run over both Jill and her lover with a car).
The other couple is Yale (Michael Murphy) and Emily (Anne Byrne), a married couple. They seem reasonably happy, until we find out that Yale has been having an affair with Mary (Diane Keaton). Issac is best friends with Yale, and insists that he get out of his extramarital relationship (he tells Tracy "I don't believe in extramarital relations, I think people should mate for life like pigeons or Catholics.").
Issac's opposition to Yale's affair grows even stronger when he meets Mary. She appears to him as a pseudo-intellectual who bashes the artists he loves (Gustav Mahler, Lenny Bruce, Ingmar Bergman, etc.) and seems to act like she is smarter than most everyone else. Issac is baffled by the fact that Yale is cheating on Emily with this "creep." That is until a few days later when Issac is attending a party and Mary just happens to be there. They begin to cordially chat, almost like the day they met never happened and they were meeting for the first time all over again. After the party they talk and walk around until dawn, at which point the most famous shot in the film occurs where Issac and Mary are sitting on a bench by the Hudson River (I think it's the Hudson River, anyway) while Issac describes how much he loves Manhattan.
This scene inspires a brief fling between Issac and Mary. During the course of the fling, Yale tells Mary that they should stop seeing each other. Mary is upset at this. At the same time, Issac tells Tracy that they should stop seeing each other. Tracy is very upset with Issac. All this romantic mayhem leads up to the end of the film when each character finally realizes who they really want.
It is interesting how Woody Allen never seems to overact, or to underact. He always seems pitch-perfect in every role he plays. Even in the intellectual roles, such as that of Issac in "Manhattan"--which Woody has said is nothing like him at all--he never misses a beat. He can play a smart character as well as he can play a dumb character, and both are handled with utmost comic precision.
"Manhattan" was Woody's first comedy after making the landmark "Annie Hall" in 1977 ("Interiors," directed by Woody in 1978, was a dark drama). However, Woody doesn't simply reprise himself in "Manhattan." He creates an entirely different kind of romantic comedy. He focuses on two couples in this film, and he also does more with the romance and the drama than is done in "Annie Hall." That isn't to say that there aren't some wonderful laughs in the film. There are many, like the scene where Woody tries to convince a bunch of artistic-types of the effectiveness of bricks and baseball bats over biting satire when it comes to getting rid of Nazis. The jokes are perfect and the romance is the same. "Manhattan" is Woody at his best.
Woody did get one thing wrong, though. In the scene where Mary is trashing artists she thinks are overrated, she mentions the great Swedish director Ingmar Bergman ("The Seventh Seal," "Wild Strawberries"). Issac speaks up, declaring "Bergman is the only genius in cinema today." I think that "Manhattan" proves that there was at least one more.
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