Zelig

Every year since 1982, Woody Allen has directed and released a feature film. Being so prolific affords him the opportunity to brush-off failures and move on to the next project while also giving him plenty of chances to hit a home-run. Out of this annual grind, Allen fans get gems like Hannah & Her Sisters, Match Point, and Midnight in Paris. They’re also privy to films like A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy which seem hastily done, slapped together as a result of a Woody’s compulsion to always be working. A film like Zelig, however, benefits greatly from the longer incubation time it was given. Unlike most of his films, Zelig took three years to complete. “It took a long time to put together,” says the director. “It was hard, all of us labored to make that documentary look like a documentary,” Allen explains in the 2002 movie, Woody Allen: A Life in Film. The creative process for Zelig is unlike any other film in his catalogue, comprised mostly of Allen-generated material made to mimic portions of found footage from old news reels. “I wrote the script first,” explains Allen. “Then I looked around at millions of feet of documentary and I changed my script with the new discoveries. And this went on for a couple of years. I had people who’d go and research for me. People from the editing department would find it and we’d look at it, for hours.” The result is a filmmaking marvel for Allen, a technical achievement in documentary pastiche that signals a creative renaissance for Woody that’ll carry him through the rest of the 1980s.

Zelig is a mock-documentary, told as a straight-faced account of a man in the 1920s named Leonard Zelig who had the remarkable ability to change his appearance and persona based on the people around him. Throughout the “old” footage, the film is intercut with modern-day interviews from Zelig experts and scholars discussing his life and greater sociological and philosophical meaning behind his shapeshifting malady. Early in life, Leonard is a medical oddity— examined, prodded, and ultimately exploited for profit by his sister and her husband. It isn’t until he falls in love with his doctor, Eudora Fletcher, that he’s able to uncover the cause of his transformations. Ultimately it’s his desire to fit in, to be accepted, that drives him to subconsciously adapt to his surroundings.

“What interested me was the kind of person that I felt was ubiquitous. The kind of person who assimilated into every group because he or she wanted to be liked,” says Woody. With his goofy chameleon, Allen taps into a larger condition of the human psyche— our desire to belong, to be accepted, to be loved. “Many people have their integrity,” the filmmaker explains in Woody Allen on Woody Allen. “but many many others lack this quality and they become who they’re with. If they’re with people who advocate a certain opinion, they agree.” It’s something we’re all likely guilty of at some point in our lives, adjusting how we present ourselves or an opinion depending on those around us. If somebody loves a film or book, for example, plenty of people might mitigate their response if they absolutely hated it. In order to avoid causing trouble or a possibly awkward social enchanter, many simply adapt. “When we extrapolate this what you wind up with is fascism,” says Woody regarding the final act of the film. Zelig goes missing and later resurfaces amidst the Nazis in pre-WWII Germany. “Because that’s who those people were— they gave up everything, they gave up all their own feelings to be led by this hypnotic leader. When you give up your own personality just to be liked, to avoid making waves, that’s what tyranny thrives on.” There’s a remarkable essay, “Approaching Woody Allen’s Zelig Through The Lens of Cultural Theory” which dismantles and interprets the film’s conceit of a transforming man by comparing it to various other works and literary theories. In comparing Zelig’s plight to that of Gregor Samsa, the protagonist of Franz Kafka’s “Metamorphosis”, similarities arise.

The blurriness between the lines of insect-hood and human-hood on which Kafka constructs his character in Metamorphosis, resembles Allen’s Zelig, whose position may be interpreted as if he is between reptile-hood (as the press puts it) and human-hood. Samsa’s metamorphosis may be interpreted within the limits of literary text in two ways; as a psychotic human being or as a former human being: An insect. On the other hand, Zelig is human, whose unfinished transformation is debated among both society and medical experts.

While the form of the mockumentary is not something invented by Allen, he manages to construct a complete world, unique to his brand of filmmaking, that is so convincing and unflinching in conveying the conceit it adds new depth to the genre. In the same breath he offers praise for the film, Woody, always his worst critic, sheds light on its greatest weakness. “I think that was one of my more successful movies. It was a movie that, I think, the content was over-shadowed by the technical work.” It’s a fair criticism and certainly one levied against it during its 1983 premiere. “Zelig was, in some quarters, regarded as a one-joke technical novelty,” writes Peter Bradshaw for The Guardian. Indeed the sentimental love-story between Leonard and Eudora doesn’t feel as potent against the strength of the cinematic techniques employed by cinematographer Gordon Willis. Ebert went so far as to call it an “antiseptic experimentation.” But, like many Woody Allen movies, time has been kind to Zelig, as its themes and filmmaking prowess are re-discovered and appreciated by a new generation of movie-watchers. “In 2011, it looks like a masterpiece: a brilliant, even passionate historical pastiche, a superbly pregnant meditation on American society and individuality, and an eerie fantasy that will live in your dreams,” writes Bradshaw. It’s incredible to go back to Zelig and see it reveling in its ability to transplant Woody Allen amidst famous footage of Adolf Hitler, Pope Pius, and others and completely sell the lie. Willis and Allen are accomplishing the same feat filmmakers like Robert Zemekis will achieve in Forrest Gump more than a decade later. “The director—long before the computer technologies which make such transformations far easier—has also created a marvel of cinematic magic, cooking up a sense of reality for his imaginary movie by inserting Allen’s image into various historical photographs and old film clips,” writes Douglas Messerli for the International Cinema Review. “Using, at times, the very cameras of older eras, at other times scratching and crinkling their film, Allen and his crew wondrously recreate a believable world.” Likewise, Zelig may not be as well-known a mockumentary as a movie like This Is Spinal Tap but it’s difficult to find a greater inspiration for that film’s structure.

While Zelig’s condition is an exaggerated personification of a common part of human existence, there’s another interpretation one simply can’t avoid when talking about Woody Allen. Throughout his career, critics have often cited Allen’s films as reflections of his personal life, his views, and experiences. Woody, of course, refutes the claims. But there’s an obvious line to be drawn between the filmmaker and Zelig’s ability. “By this time [in 1983], if you were following Woody, you never knew what was going to come next, what tone it would take, what shape it would take,” says critic Leonard Maltin in the 2011 film, Woody Allen: A Documentary. “And who would think that the same man who brought us Broadway Danny Rose would give us Zelig?” Mirroring his character’s ability to change his appearance, Woody has managed to change his style time and time again, becoming a cinematic chameleon of his own. “When movies learned how to talk, the best American filmmakers did not exactly lose their voices but they were forced to disguise them,” writes Vincent Canby of the New York Times. “The art and the eccentricities of D.W. Griffith and Erich von Stroheim could not be easily accommodated by the structure of the talking-picture studios.” Yet Woody is different. “He is unique. One would have to go back to the silents to find any other American filmmaker who has so successfully – and over such an extended period of time – attended to his own obsessions,” Canby continues.

Just as he went from making strictly funny movies to comedy-dramas with Annie Hall to chamber-dramas like Interiors and movies as left-field as Stardust Memories and Zelig, Allen continually adapts to his muse. Whether the film is a message to his audience that he won’t be pigeonholed into being any one kind of filmmaker is doubtful. His ability to transform and defy expectations, however, bears an uncanny resemblance to his titular character. Jesse Hassenger at the A.V. Club writes, “Allen’s delightfully uneasy relationship with his identity as an intellectual also comes through when Zelig begins to reveal his own personality, and provides a welcoming credo: “Though his taste is described by many as lowbrow,” the narrator reports, ‘it is his own.’” As much can be said of Allen as a filmmaker who, despite rave reviews or otherwise, continues to make the films he wants.

A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy

The beginning of the 1980s mark a strange time in Woody’s filmography. Behind him are a series of zany comedies ramping up to a string of artistic hits like Annie Hall and Manhattan. Allen kicks off the decade with Stardust Memories, interpreted by many as a proclamation that he intends to create the movies he wants and won’t be subject to the whims of his audience. Up until now, his films have always carried a certain level of ambition. Even those operating on a smaller, more intimate scale such as Interiors, are packed with such an artistic avidity they appear as more than simply what is in the frame. All the more reason A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy feels out-of-place in the greater timeline of Woody’s career. It lands on the screen with a soft, inoffensive thud, lacking the ambition even his early comedies contained.

“I made two pictures at once,” says Woody. While work began on his upcoming mockumentary, Zelig, the writer/director had some extra time on his hands. “While they were budgeting [Zelig] and doing all the preproduction work, I had nothing to do and I thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be fun to do just some little tiny summer picture?’” This is the first indication of the film’s place within Woody’s body of work. It is a film made between films. It is a side-project, done as a distraction, a light-hearted dalliance to keep busy while the real work gets underway.

A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy is a period piece, a pastoral weekend getaway set in the early 1900s. “I wanted to do for the country what I’d done for New York in Manhattan,” says Woody on the film’s rural setting. Leopold is an older man, a renowned professor, philosopher, and author. He’s taking his young fiancée Ariel, played by Mia Farrow, for a trip on the eve of their nuptials to his cousin Andrew’s country home. Andrew (Woody) is a burned-out broker who has taken refuge in the country with his wife Adrian to tinker on his inventions which include a flying bicycle (something straight out of pre-Wright Bros. news reel footage) and a spherical lantern he thinks can communicate with the Other Side. Along for the ride are Andrew’s best friend, Dr. Maxwell, a clinical casanova, and his sex-crazed nurse Dulcy. Throughout the weekend, the couples are confronted by conflicting personalities, tender hearts, burgeoning romances, and the re-kindling of old flames. Maxwell is struck by Ariel’s beauty and instantly falls in love with her. He spends most of the film pining for her, even threatening to end his life if he can’t be with her. Meanwhile, Andrew and his wife Adrian struggle with their marriage, particularly its lack of intimacy. The arrival of Ariel, coincidentally a former girlfriend of Andrew’s, adds unwanted stress. There’s sneaking around, secret rendezvous, and a whole lot of people getting swept up in the passionate heat of summer nights. It’s certainly fertile ground for sexy, even dangerous, intrigue but it’s delivered in such a light-hearted, almost whispy manner that the effect of the storytelling is as weak as curtains in a breeze.

“This all sounds very charming and whimsical, and it is almost paralyzingly so,” writes critic Roger Ebert. “A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy is so low-key, so sweet and offhand and slight, there are times when it hardly even seems happy to be a movie. I am not quite sure what Allen had in mind when he conceived this material.” This seems to be the greatest failing of the film that, for all of its intricacies regarding the workings of the human heart, it’s neutered by bland delivery. “The tone of the film is whimsical rather than witty. One is charmed more than amused by Andrew’s inventions,” writes Neil Sinyard. Perhaps it is the result of being a film made between larger projects. “I wrote the script in two weeks,” says Woody. “Just this simple story, like a day-in-the-country for fun.” The brevity shows. Dialogue feels like mostly recycled bits from previous Allen films, delivered haphazardly. “Ferrer’s [the actor playing Leopold] is the only performance that seems to have a feeling for the turn of the century period and style. The others seem like contemporary Manahattan-ites unaccountably caught in a time warp,” writes Sinyard. It’s worth noting this was Woody’s first of many films working with Mia Farrow and his sole Razzie Award nomination which was given for Ms. Farrow’s performance. The film is not completely without merit. Leopold is a consistently funny wet blanket and Julie Hagerty’s doe-eyed performance is the unsung hero of the bunch. Most will remember her as Elaine Dickinson from Airplane!. “The relations are obviously quite complicated, but they’re also the source of much of the films humor,” writes John Gilpatrick of John Likes Movies. “EVERYONE in the film has an ulterior motive; they all claim at various points to be going for a walk, but none of these six just goes for a walk. Watching Leopold and Maxwell (who loathe each other) accidentally meet while waiting to sleep with the other’s partner is gold.”

Surely, such a comedy of manners gives way to a few worthwhile moments. It’s just a shame to see it mired down in banality. Even more frustrating is knowing the potential behind the actors and filmmakers. From Mia Farrow, Tony Roberts who has done wonderful things with Allen in the past, and even Woody himself who seems unsure of himself as simply part of an ensemble cast. “I had the feeling during the film that Woody Allen was soft-pedaling his talent, was sitting on his comic gift, was trying to be somebody that he is not — and that, even if he were, would not be half as wonderful a piece of work as the real Woody Allen,” writes Ebert. The problems with the film extend beyond simply Allen being unsure of himself. There are a surprising number of filmmaking gaffes throughout. For example, Maxwell waits by a nearby brook at midnight for a moonlit tryst with Ariel. Having followed from the house, Andrew enters the scene from the left, proclaiming he’s come to stop this because he loves Ariel. Shortly after, Ariel appears from the right, even though she and Andrew are supposedly coming from the same location— the house. It’s little things like this that make the film feel rushed, as lazy as the film’s title which reads like the project’s code name.

Woody seems to miss the point of the film’s criticisms. “People don’t like me in costume,” he says. “They think that there’s a quality about me that’s very contemporary, very New York, and very urban. So that was one strike against it.” It would be unfair of critics to malign the content of the film because it is not something they wish it were. However, the film is a step back in terms of writing and filmmaking technique that’s already been so exquisitely done in films like Manhattan. Likewise, the film does not showcase Allen and his penchant for creating great female characters. Ariel is marrying Leopold for fear she’ll get old and nobody will want her anymore, Adrian is frigid toward her husband because she cheated on him, and Dulcy’s take on what it means to be a “modern woman” is to be nothing more than promiscuous. It all feels a little shallow in the wake of an Annie Hall. Critics Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat get closest to explaining this ebb and flow between Woody and expectations of him as an artist in their review for Spirituality & Practice. “A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy is another cinematic valentine from Woody Allen to his impatient audience who seem to want him to return to his earlier zany days. In a recent interview Norman Mailer said: “You can never understand a writer until you find his private little vanity and mine has always been that I will frustrate expectations.” That sounds just like Woody Allen!”

Stardust Memories

Coming off the one-two punch of Annie Hall and Manhattan, I can’t imagine how difficult it must be to follow-up such films with something as polarizing as Stardust Memories. It is a jarring film, due not only to the ongoing parade of strange characters, fragmented editing, and imaginative detours, but also the common interpretation that this was Allen’s personal response to stardom. Woody plays Sandy Bates, an award-winning filmmaker who found fame with a series of early comedies and is met with resistance to his recent serious films. “Doesn’t he realize he has the greatest gift anyone could ever ask for— the gift of laughter!” opines a critic in an early scene. But Sandy has no interest in being funny. “They can’t make me,” he says. “I look around and all I see is suffering.” This is the film that coined the phrase Allen critics, including myself, are guilty of over-using by referring to his “early funny movies” as several characters tell Sandy just how much they miss them. He reluctantly agrees to attend a weekend seminar celebrating his film career, while flashbacks of his previous relationships mingle with the happenings of the festival. Sandy’s imagination is the driving-force of the picture as his mind continues to unravel, recalling visions of his childhood performing magic tricks for the family, his complicated but heated relationship with the troubled Dorrie, flirtations with the caring but spoken-for Daisy, and his tumultuous times with Isobel. “What I wanted to show, as I do in so many of my films, was man’s relationship to his mortality,” says Allen in his career-spanning interview with Stig Bjorkman, Woody Allen on Woody Allen.

Early in the film, Sandy’s cook nearly burns down the apartment while preparing rabbit for dinner. His gaze locks onto the dead rabbit. “And then the rest of the film takes place in his mind,” Woody explains. With the majority of the film occupying the mind of a character, the film is free to play with the constructs of time and place. In addition, it lends the picture some interpretive wiggle-room as one is left to consider if these are Sandy’s accurate recollections, his wishes of what might’ve been, or something else entirely. After a series of vignettes, exploring his relationships with three women, scenes from his films, and the weekend away, Sandy is shot by a fan only to return and accept a posthumous award in-person before the festival crowd. As I said, it is a jarring film, difficult to digest and complex in its execution. “It took six months to shoot. It was a complicated film to do, because it was extremely well-orchestrated,” says Allen. “It was just a hard film to do.”

There’s no doubt balancing these many threads must be difficult, but Allen manages to pull-off such a daring form of storytelling with style, though I challenge anyone to find a review of the film that doesn’t mention Allen’s visual influences like Fellini’s 8 1/2. “By the time I made Stardust Memories, I felt that the medium was more in my control,” he says. When reading anything about the film, it quickly becomes apparent that many critics and viewers were put-off by Allen’s portrayal of fame and fans. Throughout Stardust Memories, Sandy is constantly accosted by strange-faced admirers badgering him for autographs, help with charities and causes, to look at some headshots, read a script, or lend money. One crazed fan breaks into his hotel room, waiting in bed with hash brownies and offers of empty sex while another shoots him because he’s his “biggest fan.” Even more upsetting is the way many characters speak directly to the camera, we see the world through Sandy’s eyes, as they hurl praise at the viewer like some kind of doting Hannibal Lector. Many feel it is Allen’s way of expressing disdain for fans and critics alike. However, he asserts otherwise.

“I can understand that certain segments of the population would do that. But I would think differently of the more educated critics and the more sophisticated audience. They confuse the character you play with who you are. I’ve never been the character I’ve played. There are some simulate traits, but it’s not me,” says Woody. Such reception is the filmmaker’s greatest lament regarding the picture. The similarities between Sandy and Woody are easy to find— apart from the names being so alike. Both film careers mirror one another, even scenes from Sandy’s fake films shown during the festival look like something straight out of Allen’s filmography. “One marvelous sequence, in which police with dogs pursue Sidney Finkelstein’s escaped “hostility” – a massive, hairy beast briefly glimpsed assaulting Sidney’s mother – looks like a long-cherished idea too outrageous to fit even the loose structure of a Take the Money and Run,” writes Nick Roddick in his 1980 review for the Times Literary Supplement.

The arguments over whether or not this was Allen’s expression of his frustrations as a celebrity are missing the point, particularly getting bogged down in Woody’s instance to the contrary. I follow the same philosophy as John Greco of Twenty-four Frames that, “As a rule one should believe the art and not the artist.” Whether I believe Allen’s assertion that this was entirely fiction and similarities are pure coincidence doesn’t change the content of the film. Furthermore, I’m going to take anything he says with a degree of skepticism because what Woody has to say, as an artist, is in the film itself and what’s said outside of it is of less importance for my particular reading and enjoyment of it. If anything, I think the failures of the film lie less in whether or not it’s autobiographical and more in the way it conveys the greater theme of mortality.

Sandy is often questioning his purpose in life. He’s had success but it, like all of existence, is fleeting. His films will be gone one day as will everything from Shakespeare to all matter in the universe. However, for all his questioning, the film doesn’t take enough of a step toward offering a satisfying intellectual resolution. “It’s the first Woody Allen film in which impotence has become the situation rather than the problem,” writes Roger Ebert. “It needs some larger idea, some sort of organizing force, to pull together all these scenes of bitching and moaning, and make them lead somewhere.” There is a scene, late in the film where Sandy takes stock of a good moment. His favorite record is playing, his beautiful girlfriend is there, the weather is just right, and he simply enjoys it. Maybe that’s enough, he wonders. One can’t help all of those who are suffering but if they can manage to be a moral person, live an honest life, and appreciate the good times, maybe that’s the best thing we’ve got. The scene is effective in conveying an idea he’ll return to in films like Whatever Works, the notion that we’re here and yes there is suffering but maybe the little good moments are enough to get us through life. The issue with these themes and methods in Stardust Memories is they’ve have been done in previous Allen films with greater success.

Critic Janet Maslin for The New York Times:

Sandy has a great deal in common with other characters Mr. Allen has played, most notably Alvy Singer of ”Annie Hall,” but the character this time seems imbued with an intentional weariness. So many scenes here serve as pale echoes of ”Annie Hall” that the effect is overpoweringly sad. As Alvy chased lobsters around his kitchen, Sandy chases a pigeon. Sandy gets sick to his stomach under stress, just as Alvy did. His confidant about his troubles with women is Tony Roberts once again, and when the film students speak up, they’re photographed in a style that recalls Alvy’s grade-school classmates in their schoolroom. And Sandy is still asking the same big questions Alvy asked, about what life is for and whether it’s possible to love anyone. He’s still not getting any answers.

Likewise, an artist coming to grips with the fact that their work will not grant them the kind of eternal life they really seek has already been portrayed so brilliantly by Diane Keaton in Interiors. “I would trade that Oscar for one more second of life,” Sandy says after being shot. Art not saving the artist is a common theme for Allen. It seems strange I could follow up these issues by saying Stardust Memories is actually one of my favorite Woody Allen films. Amidst all of Sandy’s existential concerns are some really great lines that are funny in a purely Woody Allen way. (“It’s crazy, the town is jammed. I don’t know, is the Pope in town, or some other show business figure?”) It also continues his trend of writing thoughtful, believable, female characters for the screen. It’s a masterfully-crafted film that manages to juggle a complex, non-linear story. Most striking, however, is the photography of Gordon Willis. Like Manhattan, there are a number of shots that really take the viewer by surprise with how dense they are— just absolutely packed with character. I’d much rather see an artist try something bold like this film, even if every element is not a complete success. Many artists balk at experimenting like this for fear of failure. For Woody, doing so many films has given him the wonderful freedom to fail. “I’ve tried very hard to make my films into a non-event. I just want to work, that’s all,” he says. “Just put the film out for people to see, just keep grinding them out. I hope I’ll have a long and healthy life, that I can keep working all the time, and that I can look back in old age and say, ‘I made fifty movies and some of them were excellent and some of them were not so good and some were funny.’” I would not include Stardust Memories in the “not so good” category because, for me, it’s always represented a successful experimentation. It dares to try. “Stardust Memories is one of those purgatorial artistic journeys,” writes Neil Sinyard in The Films of Woody Allen. “It seemed to represent the culmination for Allen of his cinema of self-revelation.” Like the scene Sandy notices is a purely good moment in his life, Stardust Memories is full of good things that you shouldn’t let pass by unnoticed.

Manhattan

Manhattan is a return to the form that granted Allen his biggest hit with Annie Hall. It’s a film that grapples with serious issues like relationships, failure, and “the decay of contemporary culture” in a more mature way than his earliest work but manages to avoid being mired in misery thanks to comedic and nostalgic beats that lend the film a lighter touch. There is an airiness to the film, despite some of the more dramatic moments, that strikes me every time I watch it. Marshall Brickman, who co-wrote Annie Hall, returns to help pen the script. Diane Keaton, another Allen regular, is back in full-force as the strong-minded yet neurotic Mary. The unseen star of the film, however, is cinematographer Gordon Willis, back again with some of the most beautiful photography in any of Woody’s films. During the first weeks at the box office for Interiors, Woody was already working on this picture. In an interview for the Chicago Sun Times, Roger Ebert asked, “What’s the new movie about?” To which Allen replied, “Oh, my same old themes,” he said, counting them off on his fingers. “Difficulties with relationships. Trouble sustaining a marriage. The decline of American culture. The terrible influence of television. The bane of drugs and fast food. The inability of people to take control of their lives.” A pause. “It’s a comedy,” he explained.”

Isaac is a comedy writer for a television show. He’s twice-divorced, currently dating a young yet precocious girl named Tracy. His ex-wife is raising their son with another woman while writing a tell-all book about their failed marriage. His best friend, Yale, is having an affair with a beautiful but abrasive journalist named Mary. In a fit of self-righteous self-destruction, Isaac quits his job to start working on a novel. Relationships ebb and flow, feelings change, and hearts are torn. It’s all set against one of the greatest cinematic backdrops of all-time– Manhattan. “The film’s real love story, the true romance though, is the one between Woody and his town,” writes John Greco of Twenty-Four Frames. “The opening montage of black and white shots are love letters to the one consistent lover in his life photographed on a canvas so lustrous as to make the entire borough look like one of the great wonders of the world.” Whenever I watch this movie, I’m consistently in awe of three things: the cinematography, the music, and the performance of Mariel Hemingway. Writing for Cinelogue, Jonathan Henderson had this to say about the look of the film:

This was Allen’s first film in widescreen and black & white, and he seems to have taken the change seriously. He consistently shoots farther back, composing his characters as subjects in a wider context. That context is most frequently the city itself, and just as Allen’s writing attempts to dig into the psyches of his characters, his camera attempts to dig into the city. There are some stunning frames, perhaps most noticeably the shot of Mary and Isaac staring out over the water towards a bridge, as well as the interior of Isaac’s apartment, with its spiral staircase on the far right and the couch on the far left, separated by a sea of blackness. The planetarium scene is another highlight that has Allen and Willis masterfully tracing these shadow characters in thin light.

Indeed, the film is full of iconic shots that beg the camera to linger a little longer. As I wrote in my post about Annie Hall, I lived my high school years with a poster for that movie up on my wall. When I went to college, a Manhattan poster came along, displaying the iconic shot of Isaac and Mary, sitting on a bench, looking out at the Brooklyn Bridge. As Isaac and Mary sit there, Isaac waxes poetic about the city, “It’s really just such a knock-out,” he says. The same could be said for shots like these, they are breathtaking, intensified by the music of George Gershwin.

In an interview for French television, Woody Allen spoke of the use of Gershwin’s music in Manhattan. “That music will always smell of New York,” he said. If the story is about, as he suggests, “What’s happening to American culture— relationships between human beings becoming harder and harder to have because we’re living in a culture that’s ruined by fast food and television and bad music and drugs” then the combined use of black and white photography and the music of Gershwin gives the film a timeless, nostalgic quality, contrasting with the theme of a decaying contemporary culture. Manhattan is an idealized, nostalgic version of the city. The streets are sparse, the black and white gives everything a very clean look, there’s no crime. It’s a take on the town Woody wishes were true. “New York used to be such a great city,” he says. “And it has to fight every day for its survival.” Ironically, the character raised entirely in such a morally-bankrupt culture, Tracy, is the only one with a true moral center.

“I’m 42 and she’s 17. I’m older than her father,” Isaac tells Yale about Tracy over dinner. The relationship between Isaac and Tracy, mathematically, shouldn’t work but the on-screen dynamic between Allen and Mariel Hemingway, acting beyond her years, gives the couple heart and an air of believability. Diane Keaton is on-point, as usual, in her portrayal of Mary but Hemingway’s performance is the biggest surprise and, as a result, stands out. She’s the lone innocent amidst the older characters in the film as they fumble over each other, having affairs, and hurting one another. Near the end of the film, Isaac confides, “I think I really missed a good bet when I let Tracy go. I was thinking about this at home last week and, I think, of all the women I’ve known over the last years, when I actually am honest with myself I think I had the most relaxed times, you know, the nicest times with her.” Their relationship feels oddly natural, strangely comfortable in spite of their age difference and it’s all due to Hemingway’s portrayal. It’s still difficult to get through their break-up scene without feeling her heartbreak. It is potent and moving.

As much as I’ve loved Manhattan over the years, I’m surprised to read so often how disappointed Allen was with the finished film. “In the case of Manhattan I was so disappointed that I didn’t want to open it,” he says in the book Woody Allen on Woody Allen. “I wanted to ask United Artists not to release it. I wanted to offer them to make one free movie, if they would just throw it away.” This isn’t uncommon for the director, however, as he’s unhappy with many of his films after working on them for so long. “Only on The Purple Rose of Cairo. That’s the closest I’ve come to a feeling of satisfaction,” he says. Considering it’s one of his most-praised films, it begs the question of whether Allen can trust his instincts in many cases regarding the quality of his work. What he views as a disappointment, more often than not, is hailed by fans and critics. The year Manhattan was released, for example, Woody found himself on the cover of Time magazine being declared a comic genius. When he read their review, “I thought it would be nice but I didn’t think it would be that flattering to the point I was embarrassed.”

Excerpt from Time Magazine:

The film should not come as a complete surprise to anyone who has been paying attention to Allen’s doings lately. This is the movie that Annie Hall hinted at and to which last year’s Interiors, flawed as it was, seems to have served as a necessary prelude. It is even possible to perceive some of its themes in Allen’s work ever since he began making movies on his own in 1969 (Take the Money and Run was the first pure Woody). It could be argued that the difference between Manhattan and its predecessors is chiefly one of degree and control. But Allen has made so many changes that these differences now add up to nothing less than a transcendence.

What the piece in Time says is true. With each film, Woody continues to mature as a filmmaker, playing with similar themes but iterating on them to greater and greater effect. He’s honed his comedic timing to such a point that injecting humor into a dramatic scene doesn’t disturb the emotional impact. Likewise, his flair for creating lifelike relationships that resonate with audiences such as Isaac and Tracy and his penchant for stunning camera-work continues to grow. If Manhattan falters anywhere it is with its inability to successfully convey the larger themes Woody so emphatically espouses. There are shades of a cultural or moral decline as reflected in the flippant and damaging approach so many of the people in this film take to relationships (Mary can’t plan her life four weeks in advance) but it’s the weakest aspect of the film. For example, near the end of the film Isaac makes a list of things that make life worth living. He lists things such as the music he loves, his favorite food and art, and Tracy’s face. Speaking to The Guardian, many years later, Allen admits, “I made a list at the end of the movie of the things that made life worth living, and I got a letter from a lady saying, ‘You didn’t mention your child.’ Because I had a child in the movie with Meryl Streep, a young boy. And you know I’d mentioned Louis Armstrong and Marlon Brando, and I figured, so, I didn’t mention my child, so what? I mentioned things that were meaningful. It was only when I had children, over a decade later, that I realized what an egregious blunder that was.” It’s not so big an issue that it ruins the message of that moment but an oversight nonetheless that Isaac fails to list his son, with whom a relationship has been built up throughout the film. The film’s strengths, however, lie in exploring the intimate intricacies with others, apart from the context of the culture at large. The up and down relationship that forms between Isaac and Mary as well as the heartbreak with Tracy are two of the most-powerful parts of the film. The ending leaves us, like another classic black and white film, Casablanca, wanting more, perhaps slightly dissatisfied as it doesn’t offer a traditional Hollywood ending, but nonetheless content– even hopeful.