Manhattan

365 Films

Entry #152

Manhattan (1979)

Directed by Woody Allen

I know I said I was going to devote most of this blog to Vietnam war centered films for the time being but have you tried watching one of those recently?  I needed to take a break and with the release of Blue Jasmine, I thought it would be a good time to explore some of the earlier work of Woody Allen and what better place to start than two of his most overly-analyzed classics Annie Hall and now, Manhattan.  If you haven't been able to smell the over-powering whiff of desperation from this blog, I sincerely applaud your humane inclinations towards mercy.  Manhattan came at an interesting cross roads in Mr. Allen's career.  Where Annie Hall was a tremendous box office success and gobbled up all the major Academy Awards, the follow up to that film, Interiors produced only baffled and disappointed reactions from the Allen faithful up to that point.  Editor's note: I just watched Interiors for the first time last night and was pretty mesmerized by it but I can also completely understand the reputation it holds as perhaps one of Allen's least beloved films.  In one of Mr. Allen's boldest strokes, Manhattan doesn't seem like a corrective to Interiors but more of a melding of that films obsessions with   theatrical displays of adult behavior with the goofy romanticism of Annie Hall.  That said yearning comes occasionally in the form of the forty-two year old main character Isaac's relationship with a seventeen year old high school student does put an unfortunately creepy tinge on the proceedings.  Then again, even that bit of unpleasantness does quite a number on factoring out the highly idealized vision of Manhattan that the film creates.  The buildings and skylines may be gorgeously photogenic, (and the Gershwin score, as iconic as it is, is still incapable of being described through mere words) but within those cavernous streets and avenues are housed some of the most neurotic, twisted, and mentally unbalanced people one would ever hope to find.  It is ultimately the vision of Manhattan as a cinematic paradise that wins out and it is one that continues to inspire feelings of both nostalgia and a deep intense longing for a place that quite possibly never existed in the first place.  Mr. Allen seems to be suggesting (and it is a theme that has continued to obsess him ever since) that maybe we'll never find what we're looking for in this life but we can always find it in that infinitely beautiful cerebral headspace known as the movies.