Interiors

by Nick Lohr

In the 2001 film, In The Bedroom, Sissy Spacek plays Ruth Fowler, a mother grieving her murdered son. While visiting his grave, she speaks with her priest and the two discuss the pain, the sensation of losing a child. Ruth is a music teacher. She equates the feeling of loss  to “Like a rest in music. No sound but so loud.” After watching Interiors, I kept coming back to this quote when trying to describe the experience. It is a quiet film, painfully so. Amidst the soft tones of the visual design, lack of musical score, the still camera, and intense conversations lies a burning, quiet rage. Sandwiched between two of his most-acclaimed films of the 1970s, Annie Hall and Manhattan, Interiors is a broad departure from most of the movies by Woody Allen, let alone the distinction commonly made between his early comedies and later work. A movie like Annie Hall dealt with dramatic themes like love and loss in a more mature way than Sleeper, for example, while still veering towards the fantastic. It was, at its heart, a comedy with dramatic moments. By contrast, Interiors is a stark drama, devoid of any comedic goal, closely examining the lives of a family in a crisis. It is a very precise film, exacting and crushing in its approach.

Three sisters are left to pick up the pieces after their father announces he’s leaving their mother for, what he calls, a “trial separation.” Their mother, Eve, has suffered with mental illness for quite some time. She’s unstable, often hysterical. In an attempt to bring order to her life, she spends her time meticulously decorating the interiors of her home. The crux of the film centers on the siblings and their attempts to cope with their marriages, inner-struggles, and the family’s tumult— specifically their mother’s issues. Renata, a poet, has been struck with writer’s block as she grapples with fears of her own mortality. Joey, the father’s favorite, has all the ambition and emotion of a great artist, without the necessary talent to express it. Flyn, the lightest of the bunch, is an actress of soaps and day-time movies. Not just a departure from Woody’s previous work in terms of tone, it’s also a detour from his style as a filmmaker. The movie is made of long, ponderous shots. The camera remains frozen, like the rest of the artfully placed decor, as characters move in and out of the frame. The art design is full of muted tones, icy grays, beiges, and whites. Everything from the sets to the wardrobe is devoid of any vibrant color. Reflected in these cold, obsessively arranged rooms in which the film transpires, is the mother’s grip on the lives of the others. They dress, no doubt subconsciously, to appease her. Everything fits into the world she’s arranged.

Many were caught off-guard by Allen’s sudden dramatic dalliance. I’ve often quoted from Vincent Canby’s reviews of Woody’s films in the New York Times and it’s obvious he was a fan of his work. For Interiors, however, Canby felt he’d traded his artistic strengths to mimic his cinematic heroes with lesser success. “It’s almost as if Mr. Allen had set out to make someone else’s movie, say a film in the manner of Mr. Bergman, without having any grasp of the material, or first-hand, gut feelings about the characters,” he writes. “They seem like other people’s characters, known only through other people’s art.” Bert Cardullo, a Professor of Media and Communication wrote in the collection, The Films of Woody Allen: Critical Essays, the film “represents a feeble attempt to escape from his authentic self.” In the book Woody Allen on Woody Allen, the filmmaker discusses such reactions to the film. “People were annoyed at me— their lovable comic figure— for having the pretension to try something like this.” It wasn’t all doom and gloom for the movie. Another long-time fan of Allen, Roger Ebert, saw promise. “Allen, whose comedies have been among the cheerful tonics of recent years, is astonishingly assured in his first drama,” he writes. “Allen treats these themes in scenes that have an elegant economy of expression.” In addition to garnering four nominations at the 1978 Academy Awards (two for Allen’s writing and direction), the film was also quite popular for the post-Annie Hall crowd.

Allen was met with no resistance from the studio when he pitched the somber story. “Arthur Krim was the head of United Artists at that time,” says Allen. “He just said, ‘You’ve made some funny films, and now you feel like you want to try something else. You’ve earned it. Go ahead!’” In an interview for the Chicago Sun-Times, Allen describes the opening run of the film:

“I just came past the theater, on Third Avenue,” he said, settling into the corner of a large sofa. “The lines were still there. ‘Annie Hall’ set the house record at the theater, but ‘Interiors’ has broken Annie’s record all three weeks. Amazing. I was willing to accept the fact that even if the film turned out well nobody would come to see it, because it was serious and people expected comedies from me. So we opened it very simply, simple ads, one small theater, and now it’s doing all this business.”

Despite a number of positive reviews, nominations, and the initial buzz surrounding the movie, Allen considers it “a mixed critical success” in the States. “This was the first time that I came up with a significant amount of negative press.” Time has been more favorable to Interiors, distanced from the context of coming on the heels of a movie like Annie Hall. Left Field Cinema aptly describes it as an overlooked gem. “Interiors was what I wanted to do and the best I could do at the time,” explains Allen. “I wanted to start to work in dramatic films a little bit. I didn’t want to work in them most of the time, but I wanted it to be part of my production.”

The virtues of the film are easily extolled— “It is cool, contemplative, intricately structured, a flawless miniature, with a pale beauty of its own,” writes Neil Sinyard in The Films of Woody Allen. The cinematography is starkly beautiful, achieving a cold stillness that still manages to draw in the viewer. The acting, as well, stands out from Geraldine Page, the unstable matriarch (for which she earned an Oscar nomination), to Diane Keaton. The last time Woody Allen’s lens was focused on her she was the vibrant Annie Hall. The first glimpse of her in Interiors shows a ragged woman, unsure of herself, her talent, her purpose in the universe, putting a hand to the window of her mother’s house as if trapped inside like a prisoner. If ever two films could show her range as an actress it’s stacking Annie Hall alongside this picture.

The characters of the film, however, are almost unanimously unlikeable, save for Joey’s boyfriend ably played by Sam Waterson and Pearl, the father’s bold, red-robed new love interest. Renata’s plight is relatable but she’s selfish and her talent as a writer is never displayed in the film— one must take the movie’s word for it. Joey is a character I could relate to on many levels— especially her frustration of having emotions yet doubting the ability to express them artistically. However, I don’t share her bitterness, her cruelty towards others. It was frustrating to see a character like Joey, and my sympathy for her, dashed away because she treats people so terribly. Allen was attempting to convey an overwhelming bleakness and in that he succeeds. There is a burdensome feeling of dread as Eve spirals further into darkness and the rest of the family is along for the ride. I expected to hate this film after hearing things about it over the years as Woody’s failed attempt to play it straight. But there’s real talent at play here, thoughtful filmmaking and storytelling. It’s staggering how a film, that’s essentially people in barren rooms talking in hushed voices, can feel so powerful.