Movie Review: Manhattan (1979)

An intellectual romantic comedy, Manhattan is writer-director Woody Allen's love letter to his borough. Multiple overlapping romantic entanglements among a small group of friends provide rich reflections on a complex city. 

Twice-divorced 42 year old Isaac Davis (Allen) lives in Manhattan and works as a writer for a low-brow live-audience television show. His current girlfriend is 17 year old student Tracy (Mariel Hemingway), and she is more invested in their relationship. Isaac's best friend Yale (Michael Murphy), a teacher, is married but having an affair with writer and editor Mary (Diane Keaton). Isaac and Mary initially clash, but gradually build a friendship.

Isaac learns his ex-wife Jill (Meryl Streep, on the cusp of stardom), who is now in a lesbian relationship, is writing a tell-all book exposing the sordid details of their marriage. He also has a meltdown at work and is forced to look for a new apartment. Then Yale breaks off the affair with Mary and Tracy secures a student position in London, clearing the way for Isaac and Mary to start a serious relationship, but their previous liaisons will linger.

Filmed in wispy black and white, Manhattan opens with a montage of New York cityscapes and Isaac narrating various iterations of self-definition through his impressions of the city. Allen (who co-wrote the script with Marshall Brickman) identifies his main character through the prism of the town's strengths and frustrations, and the film proceeds to tightly focus on a small group of friends navigating emotional ups and downs.

Many hookups and breakups occur during the course of 96 minutes, but Manhattan's beauty resides in the cloud-like narrative progression. Allen weaves the stories into a seamless fabric devoid of melodrama, milestones noted almost in passing through engrossing scenes of dialogue, the city an ever-present backdrop observer.

Allen's trademark neurotic self-obsession here extends to almost all the main characters (Tracy is the most grounded), and a layer of deprecating self-awareness is added to the pulsing anxiety. Isaac admits his problems are small in the overall global context, but personal angst is potentially manageable while the world's crises are not. Both Isaac and Mary are seeing shrinks, although her shrink may need his own better therapist. 

The lovers carry their emotional luggage, accumulated from previous broken marriages, in plain sight, and honesty is close to the surface throughout. Isaac is blunt with Tracy that their relationship has a short shelf life, while both Yale and Mary are mindful their affair is ridiculous and doomed to fail, and yet they are caught in a web of illicit love.

The group of friends exist in an isolated bubble of upper middle class bourgeois writers seemingly oblivious to any other social constructs. With rapidfire elite cultural references to the likes of Flaubert, Freud, Zelda Fitzgerald, Noel Coward, August Strindberg, Fellini, and Bergman, Allen rides a fine line between humour and altogether alienating a large chunk of his audience.

But Manhattan ultimately draws down the curtain on 1970s portrayals of New York. The dangerous, dirty and downbeat city of the past cinematic decade is eased out, replaced with art galleries and museums, a safe Central Park, the Russian Tea Room, elite cocktail gatherings and the glorious Queensboro Bridge at sunrise. Inspired by the optimistic tunes of George Gershwin, the city is set to reinvent itself for a new decade, marked by the red heart of those who choose to love it.



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The Movies Of Woody Allen

All movies starring Woody Allen and reviewed on the Ace Black Movie Blog are linked below:

Annie Hall (1977, also Director)

Manhattan (1979, also Director)

Hannah And Her Sisters (1986, also Director)

Radio Days (1987, uncredited narrator, also Director)

Husbands And Wives (1992, also Director)

Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993, also Director)

To Rome With Love (2012, also Director)

Café Society (2016, uncredited narrator, also Director)

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The Movie Star Index is here.

Movie Review: Hannah And Her Sisters (1986)

A social comedy, Hannah And Her Sisters delves into middle class and middle age emotional crises, and represents one of Woody Allen's finest cinematic moments.

In New York City, Elliott (Michael Caine) is an investment banker married to Hannah (Mia Farrow), a once aspiring actress who has settled into a life of domestic bliss. Although he loves his wife, Elliott is also secretly lusting after Hannah's more free-spirited sister Lee (Barbara Hershey), who is currently in a relationship as the muse of conceited and reclusive artist Frederick (Max von Sydow).

Hannah's other sister Holly (Dianne Wiest) is a former drug addict, always asking Hannah for money and still dreaming in vain about making it as an actress. Hannah's ex-husband Mickey (Allen) is a television producer going through his latest health scare related to hearing loss. Elliott contrives an "accidental" on-the-street meeting with Lee and finally gathers up the courage to express his love, but he is torn between the thrill of an affair and the stability offered by Hannah. Meanwhile the relationship between the three sisters ebbs and flows with the passing seasons.

Directed and written by Allen, Hannah And Her Sisters features a collection of New Yorkers struggling with typical Allen issues over two years book-ended by the anarchic warmth of Thanksgiving family gatherings. Elliott is imagining the greener grass on Lee's side of the sistery fence, Lee herself is feeling stifled by the egotistical and older Frederick, Holly is pursuing a career that does not exist and hypochondriac Mickey is dealing with his latest health scare and concluding that a change in religion is in order.

Meanwhile Hannah's parents do not offer much in the way of guidance -- or maybe they do. Norma and Evan (Maureen O'Sullivan and Lloyd Nolan) are living out their years with plenty of fire and ice, bickering as much as they are reminiscing, their lives having consisted of conflict, tumult, betrayal and an abundance of love.

Only Hannah herself appears to want to chart a steady course, and pays the emotional price for it. She happily gave up an acting career in exchange for relative domestic bliss. Stable, steady, the rock for her family and her sisters, Hannah is accused of being too perfect, her advice too pragmatic. Both admired and resented for the resilience, organization and warmth she provides, Hannah is an example that is too obvious to emulate.

These are all of course first world problems of privileged New Yorkers, but there is no denying the affinity Allen has for all his characters. The dialogue is sharp, funny and rings relatively true. Allen laughs at the situations surrounding the characters, not at the people themselves. And the multiple story arcs do spring some lifelike and unexpected surprises, some apparent dead ends proving to be pathways and other promising opportunities only leading to cul-de-sacs.

The film is perfectly paced, the multiple stories balanced, Allen mastering the juggling act and never staying in one place for too long.

The cast is deep with talent and absolutely stellar, Allen's prominence attracting a star in every role, and they equitably share the screen time. Farrow, Hershey and Wiest have rarely been better, benefiting from Allen's genius in creating well-rounded female roles. Caine acts with sorrow-filled eyes, nailing the middle-aged man willing to risk stability at home to chase one more fling.

The cast also includes Daniel Stern, Carrie Fisher (as Holly's frenemy), Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Julie Kavner, J.T. Walsh, John Turturro, and Richard Jenkins, as well as Tony Roberts and Sam Waterston in uncredited roles.

Hannah And Her Sisters is sly social commentary in a perfect package, clever enough to tease out human foibles and warm enough to understand their essential nature.

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Movie Review: To Rome With Love (2012)

An episodic comedy romance with some fantasy elements, Woody Allen's To Rome With Love offers mild amusement but minimal substance through four unrelated vignettes.

American tourist Hayley (Alison Pill) meets and falls in love with Italian lawyer Michelangelo. When Hayley's parents Jerry and Phyllis (Allen and Judy Davis) arrive in Rome for a visit, Jerry, a recently retired opera producer, discovers that Michelangelo's father Giancarlo, a funeral home director, has a magnificent singing voice, but only when he is in the shower.

Young student architect Jack (Jesse Eisenberg) lives with his girlfriend Sally (Greta Gerwig). When Sally's alluring friend Monica (Ellen Page) comes for a visit, Jack can't help but fall in love with Monica's seemingly sophisticated charms. John Foy (Alec Baldwin), a successful architect revisiting Rome where he once lived, provides spectral advise to Jack. John and Jack may be the same person, 30 years apart.

Antonio and Milly are newlyweds from a rural town who have just relocated to Rome to start a new life and seek better jobs. Inadvertently separated, Antonio finds himself in the compromising company of vivacious prostitute Anna (Penelope Cruz); he has to pretend that Anna is Milly in front of his stuffy relatives. Meanwhile Milly stumbles onto a film set and allows herself to be seduced by famous Italian movie star actor Luca Salta.

Leopoldo (Robert Benigni) is an average office clerk with a mundane life. One day he wakes up and inexplicably finds himself an unlikely celebrity, with media and paparazzi hordes chasing after him with microphones and cameras and documenting his every move.

A flighty exercise in saluting the ethereal beauty of a city, To Rome With Love is almost astonishing in its lack of depth. While all four stories offer a benign level of enjoyment, the film is the equivalent of flipping through a glossy travel magazine; the articles are at best quick glance-through fluff, the pictures professional but also exceptionally familiar. The entire exercise is wholly forgettable moments after it ends.

While none of the stories carry any impact, a couple offer some marginal entertainment. Allen sporadically infuses a common theme of unexpected but non-threatening interventions altering the planned course of life, with the diversions from a charted course coming with both a smile and no explanation needed. The imaginative elements of the film work well, John Foy as a ghostly presence drifting in and out of Jack's life and Leopoldo's sudden detour into an alternate celebrity reality carrying some intrigue.

Antonio and Milly experiencing a chaotic start to their life in Rome appears to be a parable for the temptations of the big city, and is less successful. Least interesting of all is Allen inserting his typical neurotic New Yorker persona into the Roman context. The tiresome opera-singer-in-the-shower story starts out as not funny and is then stretched well past its breaking point.

To Rome With Love is Allen at his flimsiest, offering some old-world eye candy with a side of empty calories.

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Movie Review: Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993)

A Woody Allen dramatic comedy mystery, Manhattan Murder Mystery explores Hitchcock-light territory but ignores its own potential and defaults to Allen's traditional turf.

In New York City, married couple Carol and Larry Lipton (Diane Keaton and Allen) finally meet their next-door apartment neighbours Paul and Lilian House (Jerry Adler and Lynn Cohen), who appear to be a jovial and healthy elderly couple. The very next day Lilian drops dead apparently from a heart attack. Larry thinks nothing of it, but Carol finds it weird that Paul does not seem to be grieving much, and suspects foul play. Carol confides in her recently-divorced friend Ted (Alan Alda), and together they start an amateur investigation of Paul, including invading his apartment and tailing his movements.

Larry, a neurotic book editor, is horrified that his wife appears obsessed with spinning theories about a murder that may have never happened, but gradually he is sucked into the intrigue. Glamorous and available book author Marcia Fox (Anjelica Huston), one of Larry's clients, enters the fray and starts sharing her ideas as to what Paul may be up to. When Carol spots someone who resembles Lilian very much alive and staying at a seedy hotel, her suspicions kick into overdrive.

Directed and co-written by Allen, Manhattan Murder Mystery started life as an early draft of what became Annie Hall. Allen considered the story of a couple suspecting foul play too shallow, and not much had changed by 1993. Despite a prevalence of wit, Manhattan Murder Mystery is both over-complicated and under-developed. Allen tips his hat to Hitchcock's  Rear Window, Vertigo and Orson Welles' The Lady From Shanghai, but his own film is dominated by Larry's insecurity and a perfectly silly final act.

Despite a potential murder, apartment break-ins, dead bodies popping up everywhere, elevator break-downs and Ted lusting after Carol, most of the dialogue exchanges start and end with Larry's numerous anxieties about his life, his deficiencies and his stress points. Funny the first couple of times, staleness sets in by the time Larry and Carol have their umpteenth argument as he insists that they should let the whole matter drop while she breathlessly contends that the snooping should continue.

Meantime, a seemingly complex plot is being woven around the ever suspicious Mr. House, but Allen's script is not designed to flesh out a juicy conspiracy. Too busy with personal angst, the film hurriedly does the minimum possible to explain the actual plot, and rushes to a fairly ridiculous climax unbecoming of supposedly smart New Yorkers.

With the narrative focusing on relationships within a marriage and the stresses that accompany over-familiarity, the cast members are firmly in their domain and deliver fine performances. Allen and Keaton demonstrate a comfortable ease with each other, with Alan Alda and Anjelica Huston adding confident support and Jerry Adler riding the seam between friendly retiree and possible cold blooded killer.

Manhattan Murder Mystery is more about the inherently indisputable insecurities of an intelligent man rather than any attempts to crack a cryptic crime case.

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Movie Review: Husbands And Wives (1992)

Woody Allen delves into the soul of the institution of marriage through the lives of two couples. Husbands And Wives uncovers a complex web of dependence, resentment, longing and confusion.

A pair of middle-aged married couples are also best friends. At the start of a dinner outing, Jack and Sally (Sydney Pollack and Judy Davis) suddenly and nonchalantly announce that they are splitting up, shocking Gabe and Judy (Allen and Mia Farrow). Judy, an arts magazine editor, is particularly disturbed, and begins to question the strength of her marriage to Gabe. They have been drifting apart, can't agree on whether or not they want to have a child, and Gabe's position as a university professor of literature exposes him to plenty of temptation in the form of fawning young female students.

And indeed, Gabe starts spending time with Rain (Juliette Lewis), one of his students. She is independent, beautiful and thinks the world of him. Meanwhile, Jack enters into a relationship with the much younger Sam (Lysette Anthony), a health-obsessed aerobics teacher. Sally pretends to be enjoying life as a single woman, but in reality she is miserable. Judy eventually introduces Sally to Michael (Liam Neeson), a co-worker at the magazine, and they seem to hit it off, although Michael wants to progress the relationship faster than Sally is ready for. Judy actually harbours strong feelings for Michael, a further strain on her unraveling relationship with Gabe.

Allen, who directed and also wrote the screenplay, picks up on several difficult but pervasive themes. Both Jack and Gabe start relationships with younger women, as they get an ego boost by interacting with appreciative women who could almost be their daughters. Allen pushes further, exploring the limits of these cross-generational relationships. Sam's obsession with astrology and health begins to aggravate Jack, while Gabe gets a rude awakening with Rain's scalpel-like honesty in criticizing his work from the perspective of a more liberated era.

Both Sally and Judy are exceedingly difficult to please. Sally is a perfectionist who can never be fully complimentary about anything, and insists on picking away at any little item that does not fully satisfy her. Judy is used to getting her way with an understated victim act, turning most issues in her favour by magnifying the impact to her happiness yet rarely acknowledging the feelings of others. When Jack and Sally announce their split Judy is more upset than either of them, and when Gabe agrees to her request that they can try and have a child, she abruptly changes her mind with no acknowledgement of his attempt to please her.

Husbands And Wives pokes into many of the awkward issues faced by married couples, including reduced sexual activity, boredom, lack of attentiveness and the aggravation caused by over-familiarity. And yet the film also starts to find the strands that bind, the core strengths that can hold a relationship together despite all the buffeting. Accommodation, forgiveness and tolerance emerge as themes late in the movie, as one couple discover that the frustrations also comes with plenty of comforts.

Stylistically Husbands And Wives is all about the hand-held camera hovering right around the living rooms and bedrooms of adults talking through their crises. Most of the film consists of exceedingly long takes, the camera moving along with the actors from room to room as conversations intensify, heat-up, then cool down, only to re-ignite. The viewer is effectively invited into the homes and intimate lives of Jack, Sally, Gabe and Judy, for better or for worse.

The four central performances are good without being exceptional. There is a slight element of theatricality, and an absence of genuine deeply emotional tones, as Allen keeps the mood generally light and looks for hints of humour despite the serious topics. The characters speak directly to the camera at regular intervals, the fake interviews used as a mechanism to further elaborate on their thoughts and actions. It's a gimmicky technique that is not really needed in the context of the movie.

Husbands And Wives proved to be fiction echoing stranger fact for Allen, as around the time of its release his long-term real-life relationship with Farrow ended and he became romantically involved with the much younger Soon-Yi Previn, Farrow's adopted daughter. Men and women may never fully understand the forces of attraction and repulsion between them, only that the chemistry can become exceedingly messy.

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Movie Review: Annie Hall (1977)

A ground-breaking romantic comedy, Annie Hall set a genre standard that has rarely been matched. Woody Allen and Diane Keaton sparkle as the perfect example of opposites attracting each other, and both deliver career defining performances.

The film is narrated by Allen in the role of Alvy Singer. An insecure Jew born and raised in Brooklyn and now working as a stand-up comic in New York City, Singer recounts his on-again, off-again relationship with girlfriend and aspiring singer Annie Hall (Diane Keaton). Although they share little in common, Singer and Hall find a unique chemistry between regular bouts of sparring and bickering.

Twice divorced and turning forty, Singer is obsessed with issues of life and death, sensitive about being a Jew, condescending towards the views of others, and unapologetically pessimistic. Hall is cheerful, transparent, self effacing, and a demon driver. They argue about education, sex, smoking pot, life in New York, and social engagements, but nevertheless enjoy being together more than being apart, until the relationship appears to reach a dead end.

Allen populates Annie Hall with colourful characters in relatively small but memorable roles, including Tony Roberts as Alvy's only friend, Paul Simon as the main competition vying for Annie's attention, Carol Kane as Alvy's first wife and Shelley Duvall as a one-night stand. They drift in and out of the wobbly orbit being travelled by Alvy and Annie, adding touches of quirky humour.

Annie Hall is filled with daring touches of humour drawn from original film-making techniques, including Allen continuously breaking the fourth wall to address the audience, and a scene where sub-titles are used to convey what Alvy and Annie and really thinking, a totally separate conversation from their actual exchange of dialogue. Alvy and Annie in their present forms frequently drop in on episodes from their past, and one scene is entirely animated.

In another stylistic triumph, Annie Hall evokes the pace of real life thanks to Allen using long takes to allow scenes to develop and breathe, the camera of cinematographer Gordon Willis an unobtrusive and casual observer of unfolding human interaction, editor Ralph Rosenblum prominent due to his lack of activity. Characters stumble over their thoughts and sometimes over each other's words as they would if there were no cameras around, with the humour stemming from recognizable wit rather than cinematic sarcasm.

Annie Hall's influence extended beyond the screen and helped shape the cultural landscape of the mid to late 1970s. Keaton's wardrobe ignited a radical fashion trend and Allen's commentary on life and death framed societal engagement. At the core of the movie are two compellingly irresistible characters: despite their up and down relationship, they would have been most welcome guests at any dinner party.

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