A vulgar comparison, perhaps, but it’s possible to think of writer/director Woody Allen as a later Jerry Lewis. As with the usually denigrated Lewis, Allen's film persona is a paranoid who finds the world he knows conspiring to put him in the worst light. The bumbling Everyman, where social ineptitude is first nature, a superpower that benefits no one. As with, Lewis, Allen’s characters are variations on a theme of failure, bad posture, poor self-esteem, is someone so lacking in finesse, agility, or aptitude in the well-heeled that most attempts to emulate sophisticated manners are inevitably catastrophic. This theme runs throughout all of Allen's films, with a central preoccupation with sex. Allen rarely gets any, and when he does, it never comes off as the instruction manuals or the Playboy philosophy promised. Allen presents himself as a victim of the sexual revolution's propaganda, he is Norman Mailer’s “ prisoner of sex” someone furiously trying to make his relationships with women adhere to a set of rose-hued promises.
Allen’s themes are deeper than
what one could extrapolate from Jerry Lewis and Allen, long our favored conspicuously
intellectual filmmaker, expanded his theme into a murkier tableau. Manhattan, comedy, is something of a treatise on what's
wrong with modern man: a lack of moral certitude, the silence of God and man's
attempt to fill the void with his own concepts, the meaninglessness of
language, the obsession with surface. and the lack of spiritual reflection. All
these strands, culled from the books of Tolstoy Sartre. Burroughs, and
especially the films of Bergman, are all touched on during the film. Luckily,
Allen, the writer and director, has developed a perfectly coherent visual style
and a sense of dialogue that makes the film less foreboding than it sounds.
The story revolves around someone
named Isaac Davis (Allen), a high paid writer of a trendy TV comedy who quits
his job so he can work on a novel exposing the spiritual vacuity of the
denizens of Manhattan. He is divorced from his bisexual wife, who left him for
another woman, and who is writing a memoir that reveals the touchiest aspects
of their relationships. Davis has taken up with a seventeen-year-old girl named
Tracy (Mariel Hemingway), a bright teenager who loves Davis but whose love he
rejects in the interest of a writer named Mary (Diane Keaton). who is currently
dating his best friend. the already-married Yale (Michael) Murphy), on the sly.
Davis waits for the two to break up before he makes his move. Mary and Davis
finally get together, Davis breaks the relationship with Tracy but, after two
weeks, Mary and Yale are seeing each other again. leaving Davis in the cold.
Davis rushes. to catch Tracy, on her way to England to attend school, and the
two rekindle their relationship. That, fundamentally, is the plot from
beginning to end. Though the particulars don't promise much at first, Allen's
Memorex ear for dialogue makes Manhattan one of the better serio-comic films in
years. The characters are well-educated professionals, mostly writers, who walk
around New York City's haunts Central Park, Greenwich Village. uptown publisher
parties-rattling off vague utterances that sound nice, but which evaporate under
close inspection. At a pro-ERA benefit, Davis listens to a novelist who tells
the theme behind his new book to an audience of enthralled listeners.
"This woman has never had an
orgasm," says the writer, "she suffers from the quintessential
emptiness of the age. She meets a man who is all essence. They make love. She
has an orgasm. and then she dies." "I had an orgasm once," pipes
in a comely but vacant-eyed blonde, "but my analyst told me it was the
wrong kind…." "That's never
happened to me," says a bemused Davis, "even the worst one I ever had
was right on the money."
Manhattan is the best made
of all of Allen's films, and may establish a standard by which his future ms
will be judged. Gone is the distressingly artificial intellectualism of the
previous Interiors a film so text bookish that it was inseparable in content
from any recent Bergman offering. The camera shots are spare and well-framed.
basically, a series of medium close-up static shots that uses the screen as a
kind of stage and allows the actors maximum leeway for effective facial
expressions The cast is generally superb. but the biggest surprise is the young
Hemingway, whose portrayal of a bright teen is remarkably unforced and natural.
The black and white photography by Gordon Willis leaves something to be
desired. though. The texture is too stylized, unnatural and washed-out in
vocation of grays that have the resolution of a newspaper photo. Likewise.
Allen's use of Gershwin archly-romantic music, intended no doubt as an ironic
counterpart. is too much. The music doesn't underscore or suggest irony. but
rather points to it. The film's point is clear enough without the ironic
counterpoint the music might provide. The material is strong enough.
