Also fits this series:
“We’ll always have Woody”: A look at Woody Allen films
Also in the series:
Films including Diane Keaton, an exemplar of Baby Boomer leading
actresses
*Two notes: First, the
subhead portion “Days of Clintons Past” does not mean to imply anything about
my opinion of Hillary Clinton as she is a public figure today, whether
regarding her possible run for the White House in 2016 or otherwise. Second, my original plan was to stick
with my general approach of reviewing Allen films in strict chronological
order, and (regarding pending work) to cover Husbands and Wives (1992) first, which would theoretically make at
least the first of its three parts the first in my 1990s series. But due
to logistical challenges, a review of Manhattan
Murder Mystery gets posted first.
[Edits 5/23/14.]
[Edits 5/23/14.]
##
This film could be said to
provide a bookend to Allen’s film career, in the following way: it represented
the first co-starring role he gave Diane Keaton since 1979 and Manhattan, and thus it
also represented a return to partnering with Keaton (if very briefly) after his
professional relationship with Mia Farrow
collapsed amid the notorious family issues that welled up in later 1992.
Also, cowriter Marshall Brickman—who notably worked with him on Sleeper, Annie Hall, and Manhattan—was involved with Allen on this
script, because apparently it had been started between the two writers (in or
by the mid-1970s) in preparation for the project that became Annie Hall (1977) (or it was a separate
project that started before it). Then, in about 1992, Allen got out the old MMM script, which represented (per
Allen) a fairly large amount of work by Brickman, and in 1992 Allen opted to get
it prepared to be shootable as his next project (different comments by Allen in
Eric Lax, Conversations with Woody Allen
[Knopf, 2007], e.g., pp. 29 and 94, are a little confusing as to whether Brickman was
substantively involved in 1992 or not; possibly
not).
Lastly, MMM was (as far as I can tell) Allen’s last film with the relatively
simple producing “banner” he had benefited from, for his films, since about
1969: producers/agents Jack Rollins and Charles H. Jaffe, usually with more-specific-project-focused
aid from producer Robert Greenhut. The possible/speculated-on (or research/source-based)
reasons for this might be worth looking into, but I won’t do that here.
The film has a place-thematic homecoming flavor; and it’s more casual
in craft
As a return to a film
celebratory of Manhattan in some way, MMM
is also notable in Allen’s career, and it charms me for this reason (not that
I’m a New Yorker), because some of its scenes, vividly photo’d in handheld way
by Carlo Di Palma, I can readily imagine
being at. (For instance, the Greenwich Village scenes remind me of places there
that I’ve been; and other aspects of the New York scene in MMM, with camera from off the sidewalk, remind me of my few
peregrinations over the years in Manhattan.)
The film even starts, under the
titles, with a cabaret-type song celebratory of New York (if with some occasionally
mildly ironic lyrics).
So, in a sense, this film is a
sort of homecoming and reminder of past glories for Allen. But by comparison to
the films of his “major phase” (see my “Director’s dossier” on him for a list of his works; and see my review of his Manhattan [1979]), it seems rather slovenly, both visually
and in bits of the performances. The handheld camera work seems at times a
little sloppy for Allen by comparison with the best of the Gordon Willis work and
earlier Di Palma work for him. (But actually, this represents, relatively speaking,
a cleaning-up of what he did in Husbands
and Wives, which we will look at in due time.)
Allen uses his form of cultural
allusion—in this case, early on in MMM,
his character Larry Lipton (a book editor at Harper’s) making noise about
wanting to see a Bob Hope movie on TV, the night he and his wife get home from
attending a hockey game (at which his wife, Keaton’s character Carol Lipton, has
shown undisguised boredom). Allen in Lax (p. 133) indicates he wanted to show
these characters were average people—which may, incidentally, help explain why he
considers this film and the immediately preceding Husbands and Wives (1992), in 2005 (Lax, pp. 254-55), to be among
the very few in his huge oeuvre that “came off.” We can guess he may think this
because, along with whatever other virtues they have, they show “real people”
in a sort of casually realistic way.
Dialogue situations in MMM can also sometimes be sloppy. The
plot of the story seems simple, and the comedy (especially between Keaton and
Allen as two anxiously interacting spouses dealing with a mystery) can work
quite well. But some of the dialogue seems overly worked, either because of
undisciplined writing and/or directing, or because of possible improvisation. (This
though, even if Keaton gets to sound too much like a “nervous nelly,” she’s
still usually entertaining.)
One co-star, Alan Alda, is
here as Ted (somewhat similar in flavor to Lester of Crimes and Misdemeanors), a playwright who becomes very helpful to
Carol in talking over the murder mystery before her husband Larry is solidly on
her side with this. Another co-star, Anjelica Huston, is here as a literary
writer whom Larry, as book editor, is mentoring in a way; apropos of Larry’s
and Carol’s extracurricular activity of dealing with the murder in their
apartment building, she offers especially probing theories on how and why the murder
took place.
As is typical for Allen, there
are some eddies of paranoia about possible marital infidelity, this time from Larry
to Carol vis-à-vis Ted and from Carol to Larry vis-à-vis the Anjelica character,
but it’s pretty harmless stuff in the context of this playful film.
Jerry Adler is effective
as Paul House, the poker-faced neighbor whose wife has died, who it turns out
has been murdered. Lynn Cohen is his wife, Lillian.
Zach Braff has his, I believe,
first film role here (and a brief appearance), as Larry and Carol’s son, home from college or some such
thing.
In the film’s climax, there is an
allusion (in a showy visual sequence) to Welles’ The Lady from Shanghai (1947), in (in MMM’s current-world context) an old movie theater that Paul House
has been renovating and wants to sell. This climax is, basically, only a little more
artful, and no more or less casually done, than the rest of the film.
##
Bottom line: if you’re expecting a well-crafted work on the order
of Allen’s “major phase,” you’ll be a bit disappointed. But it’s still a
diverting film, and photographically (in terms of the colors of New York
conveyed, leave aside the handheld aspect) quite nice.
