The majestic buildings, the gravity-defying bridges, the beautiful imagery of New York City in black-and-white pulsating to the rhythm of George Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue" like fireworks of emotions, this is Manhattan, a town with a soul. Whether dangerous, insomniac, intellectual or streetwise, New York is again the perfect arena for the eternal battle between brains and passions, dreams and reality, hope and disillusions, indispensable for some minds in quest of inspiration.
Woody Allen is one of these minds, Isaac, the character he plays, too, but Isaac mirrors more of Allen's personality than any other character he played. It's the medium of Woody's soul allowing him to say that "Bergman is the only genius of Cinema" and to express his contempt toward "pseudo-intellectual" stuff, like an alibi against his detractors. But Woody doesn't deny his flaws, his character represents the struggle of a soul trying to embody Manhattan's incarnation of the American Dream, but as he stutters in the opening line, unable to pass 'Chapter One', he can't find inspiration. His friend Yale (Michael Murphy) says he's got a "Freudian" relationship with New York, it's more than that, it's Oedipian because he knows he's in love with this city, but is incapable to make himself worthy of that love. But Manhattan is more than a movie about love; it's about the strange effect of love in mature people. And Isaac, like Woody is mature
age-wise of course.
Isaac is 42, and he realizes it's an interesting age where his mind became his greatest asset, and since he evolves in an artistic milieu, he's clearly in his advantage. Through "Manhattan" and Gershwin's music, it's the whole intellectual and artistic underground world of New York that lets its soul implode, it's to New York what Saint-Germain was to Paris in the existentialist 50's. But in the 70's, New York became the center of the underground culture, of sexual liberation, of the whole questioning of the American heritage without the idealism of the late 60's or the pessimism of the post-Nixon era. Everything is debatable, war, marriage, orgasms and nothing is to be taken for granted. The film was made in 1979, just before the 80's would provide their depressing cynicism and flamboyant superficiality, not sure Isaac could have quited his job of screenwriter for TV programs to fulfill his dream of writing a book in the 80's, (a coincidence that he finally works on TV in "Hannah and Her Sisters"?)
Aware or not that the days of his sex appeal are numbered, Isaac seems to have a way with women and to enjoy that, too. He had two wives, and now he's dating Tracy a 17-year old high school girl (Mariel Hemingway), but he has a crush on Mary, Diane Keaton, Yale's mistress. The way he handles the two relationships is a masterstroke of clever writing and realism. In the beginning, he finds Mary not only too pompous, but calls her a pseudo- intellectual, unaware that he behaves the same way when he's with Tracy, becoming the typical neurotic Allen-guy. Love is a field of paradoxes, Isaac embodies the hypocritical break-up excuse, when the one who breaks says: "You deserve better" (meaning the opposite of course) and Mary who doesn't want to wreck a marriage feels hurt when Yale breaks up with her. Allen's directing never 'accuses', we feel this strange chemistry going between Mary and Isaac, in a romantic moment where they're in the dark planetarium, they're about to kiss, but Isaac retracts, because he's still with Tracy, what Mary understands. These subtle, yet delicate moments elevate "Manhattan" above anything we saw before, and even after.
An on the top of these moments, there's the image of Mariel Hemingway's eyes tearing when she realizes he didn't love her and he's making a whole pointless speech while her heart is broken. Hemingway, who deserved her Oscar nomination for that role, is genuinely sweet, tender and natural in what probably is the most difficult role of the film, because she has no monologues, she's doesn't belong to that tormented world, all she sees is that she cares for Isaac and she's in love with him, something that Isaac fails to consider. Allen is a genius in the way he portrays sentimental relationships and how we're more eager to love people we idealize than those who idealize us, and how we tend to lie to ourselves, just to satisfy our egos more than our hearts. An interesting subplot involves a book written by Isaac's ex-wife, played by Meryl Streep and in a scene where Mary, Yale and his wife finally read some excerpts, they all laugh at him. And as viewers, we know that Tracy wouldn't have laughed.
"Manhattan"'s ending is as sweet and realistic as it could get, people who lied to themselves reveal their true feelings, and Isaac realized that his heart was kept as hostage of a sort of sentimental blackmail between his girlfriend and his best friend. "Manhattan" is the realization of a man who loved intellectuality and intellectualized love, at the end, when he's lost everything, his job, his girl, out of false impulses. He finds himself the remedy for the pain, in one of the most memorable scenes of Allen's filmography when he records all the things that makes life worth living: Groucho Marx, Flaubert's "Sentimental Education", Bergman, Brando and as we expect, it ends with
Tracy. The film's ending is a mix of "Casablanca" and "City Lights" and Allen tries to find the perfect note to convince Tracy to come back to him, all it will take him is some patience and a "little faith in people".
Tracy's concluding lines confirm that "brain is the most overrated organ", and how ironic that it comes from Woody Allen, in what remains one of his greatest films, so sweet, intelligent and witty that I guess I would nominate his scripts as one of the things that make my life worth living.
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