For this installment of PopFilter versus the classics, we present 1979’s Manhattan, co-written, directed, and staring Woody Allen. It also stars Diane Keaton, Meryl Streep, and Muriel Hemmingway. Now, pretty much any film student or any pretentious butt-munch at the independent coffee house loves to speak at length about the genius of Woody Allen, given the opportunity. And I tell ya, Manhattan is quintessential Allen. Its misanthropic perspective of New York and its inhabitants is so good and so real that I never want to see it again.

     This movie is from the golden age of cinema. A time when directors were trying out new shooting and lighting techniques and were trying to tell different kinds of stories, ones that deviated from the fair-tale, feel-good model of the epics who featured noble characters who lived large lives. Manhattan is a great example of this deviation; it is the antithesis of the romantic comedy. The plot isn’t special, in fact it’s the opposite of special. It’s really nothing out of the ordinary. Its normal people living normal lives that do sometimes do shitty/stupid things and in the end the characters are no happier or fulfilled than then they were when the movie started.

     It centers on Woody Allen’s character Isaac Davis, a squinty, neurotic 42 year-old who cannot seem to make a real connection with the women in his world. On its surface, it’s a story about how selfish and stupid people can be in love, they want what they can’t have and don’t want what they do have. If you go beneath that you get a feel for the core of this New Yorker specimen that needs with the intensity of starvation coupled with the fact he or she has no idea how to satisfy that need. The only character in the whole movie who has any claim to innocence is Muriel Hemmingway, Isaac’s 17-year-old girlfriend. I know that’s weird, being abject pedophilia and all, but, shit, just go with it. It has a point. She is the only person in the movie not tainted by her experience with life’s disappointments and heartbreak. And because of that she comes off as a wide-eyed, intelligent person who seems to have her shit together a lot more than any of the adults in the film. She is nonjudgmental and loves without the fear of rejection, having never known that feeling before. Isaac pushes her away, under the guise of wanting her to experience life because she is just a kid, but really she bores him, and more to the point he has fallen for Diane Keaton’s character, an equally neurotic woman, Mary Wilkie, who is kind of an asshole. She tries to legitimize herself as an intellectual by making an opera out of the ordinary, whether she is historicizing her torrid relationship with her ex-husband, (who turns out to be the “inconceivable” guy from the Princess Bride, I mean come on, she described his as a sex god, it’s pretty fucking funny, now that I think about it,) dropping $10 words into conversations about art and the female orgasm, and over using the word “genius” as an adjective. Isaac tells her at one point, “Boy, you know a lot of geniuses. You should meet a few stupid people, you really might learn something.” But her life is a god damn mess. She keeps affirming things to herself that she is a beautiful intelligent person who is from Philadelphia where people aren’t shitty, but really, she isn’t convincing anyone. She keeps making the same self-destructive decisions that have led her to heartbreak. She’s no Snow White or Scarlett O’Hara. She’s just Mary Wilkie.

However the real star of the movie is New York borough of Manhattan . The whole reason directors started telling a story like this is because they thought it would be much more interesting to tell the story of people as they are; that perfection is boring. People don’t have perfectly scripted conversations where one person starts speaking, stops, and then the next person talks. When people talk, they interrupt and talk all over each other. This movie’s treatment of the city of New York is the same as its treatment of its characters. It is non-glamorous and authentic. It shows you New York through the eyes of someone that is immersed in it. The opening sequence is a voice over of Isaac trying to write the first chapter of his book playing over different shots from around the city. Isaac is talking about how much he loves the New York; how he couldn’t live anywhere else, even with all its filth and degeneracy. And believe you me, New York had plenty of that shit in the late 70s early 80s, it was a veritable shit hole. There are shots of this city as it is, with its people, piles of trash, congestion, architecture and skyline. This movie it is what it is, and it is what it isn’t.-SR