The Reluctant Film Art of Woody Allen (39 page)

The suspicious death of neighbor Lillian House (Lynn Cohen) gives Carols unengaged attention something on which to focus, and she begins to believe that Lillians husband has killed her. Carol is joined in this intrigue not by Larry (who initially construes her obsession with the neighbor’s death as an overreaction to watching
Double Indemnity)
but by Ted (Alan Alda), a recently divorced family friend who sees this private investigation as an opportunity to spend time alone with her. “Maybe were just two people with hyperactive imaginations whose lives need a shot of adrenaline or something,” Carol tells Ted as they stake out a hotel, unaware that Larry is simultaneously having a distinctly flirtatious meeting with Marcia Fox (Angelica Huston), an author whose books he edits. Recognizing how much ground he’s losing to the togetherness fostered by Carol and Ted’s sleuthing (“If you’re gonna have an affair with the guy,” Larry scolds her, “you don’t need a murder to do it”), he reluctantly joins her on stakeouts. Just as she’d explained
Last Year at Marienbad when
they first met, Carol explains to him why this murder plot is so important to them: “It’s like this tantalizing plum that’s been dropped in our laps. Life is such a dull routine, and here we are, right … we’re on the threshold of a genuine mystery.”

The mystery that screenwriters Allen and Marshall Brickman contrived for the film fulfills the genre’s demands: it is conventionally intricate, acceptably imaginative, passably involving, and is also somewhat beside the point. Characteristically, Allen is more interested in imitating previous movie versions of his plot than the plot itself. Consequently, Allen and Brickman’s script’s debt to murder mysteries such as
Double Indemnity
and
The Lady from Shanghai
is acknowledged by the fact that those two films are being screened in the theater that is conveniently owned by the murder plotter, Paul House (Jerry Adler). Orson Welles’ film also feeds suitably melodramatic lines to House’s murderer, Mrs. Dalton (Marge Redmond), as she dispatches him. The mystery, as David Ansen argued, “is just Allen’s fanciful pretext for making another movie about relationships.”
¹⁰
The “plum” is obviously less significant than the portion of the anatomy into which Carol describes it dropping, the film repeatedly insisting—as Larry does—on the pursuit of the murder plot as a sublimated form of erotic adventure. Carol finally loses interest in the whodunit less because Marcia, a fan of murder mysteries, surpasses her ability to enter the mind of a murderer and outflank it than because Marcia has captured Ted’s attention, rendering the pursuit completely unerotic for Carol and thus completely uncaptivating. In other words, Carol is finally no more interested in a murder plot for its own sake than is Woody Allen, seeing it, as he does, as nothing more than a self-consciously embraced antidote to the “dull routine” of life, as a pretext for the playing out of other agendas. “I wanted to use the murder,” Allen told Anthony DeCurtis, “strictly as a vehicle to give the audience pleasure rather than make any kind of philosophical point with it.”
¹¹
For Allen, as for Carol, the mystery in
Manhattan Murder Mystery
transparently represents the desire to affirm the concept that “something other than what you see with your eyes and your senses is possible” rather than that idea’s dramatic confirmation.

Inspired by a novel she’s read called
Murder in Manhattan,
Marcia precipitates the finale by devising a scheme to trap House in which Larry, Carol, and Ted join. That plot involves putting House’s young mistress through a bogus play audition, for which Larry is obliged to “write lines that don’t mean anything.” Once the trap has been sprung, Larry’s temerity in confronting House after he has kidnapped Carol causes her to see her husband with new eyes (“Larry, you were surprisingly brave,” she gushes), his transformation from condo complaisance neatly resolving the tensions in their marriage. The film ends with the happily reunited couple disappearing together into the glass-enclosed entrance of their Upper East Side condominium building as the doorman securely closes the perfectly polished doors behind them.

It’s probably easy to be too influenced by Allen’s misgivings about making this film, by his assertion years before he began drafting it that “I could be very funny in a comedy mystery and it would be enormously entertaining in a totally escapist way for an audience.” Making such a film, he continued, would be to indulge his propensity toward producing “light entertainment,” catering to his greater comfort in working with “the shallower stuff.” At the time of that interview Allen added, “But I can’t bring myself to do that.”
¹²
By 1993, in the midst of his public flagellation, he could.

Given his personal excruciations and dislocations of 1992-1993 so jarringly evoked in
Daily News
headlines and in the decentered cinematic style of
Husbands and Wives,
it’s not surprising that Allen’s next film would resort to an antithetical cinematic mode, to the stability of an idea he’d lived with for a long time—a murder plot having been part of the original script he and Brickman wrote for
Annie Hall
¹³
—and to the familiar presence of the actress who had collaborated so substantially with him in the “light entertainment” films responsible for his early success.
¹⁴
Since Allen never intended
Manhattan Murder Mystery
to be anything other than “a trivial picture,” “a little thing done for fun. Like a little dessert or something,”
¹⁵
it’s not so much the film’s “light entertainment” quality as its utter dependency upon generic determinants which compromises
Manhattan Murder Mystery’s
comedic attempt to “get you airborne.” Given that all of the films Allen has produced since
Husbands and Wives—Manhattan Murder Mystery Bullets Over Broadway, Mighty Aphrodite, Everyone Says I Love You, Deconstructing Harry, Celebrity,
and
Sweet and Lowdown
—seek similarly to create comedy through the mixing of movie and literary genres, its worth considering some of the pitfalls Allen can encounter when he resolves to make films reflecting taking pleasure in life rather than interrogating it for signs of ultimate meaning. In other words, having written so many passages of resonant dramatic dialogue over the years, Allen found the task of “writing lines that don’t mean anything” effectively distracting from the Mia media miasma but ultimately unfulfilling.

Allen has never made any concerted attempt to explain what for him constitutes “light entertainment,” though his description of the New Orleans jazz he plays with his band (“There’s nothing between you and the pure playing—there’s no cerebral element at all”
¹⁶
) approaches definition. His apparent assumption that its qualities are self-evident allows him to categorically distinguish
Manhattan Murder Mystery
from the other films he made during that period on the ground that “it wasn’t ambitious enough for me.”
¹⁷
However, in dialogue with Bjorkman, Allen did characterize the sources of pleasure he finds in filmmaking, his description evoking the production not of his serious movies like
Crimes and Misdemeanors
or
Husbands and Wives
but of “light entertainment” films such as
Manhattan Murder Mystery Mighty Aphrodite,
and
Everyone Says I Love You
. Recalling his childhood awareness of the disparity between the life he lived in Brooklyn and that of the characters in the films he went to see, Allen admitted that he had never overcome his amazement that “there are people whose lives are different and happy like in the movies.” It follows that filmmaking for Allen has always been inseparable from “the sense of wanting to control reality,

to be able to write a scenario for reality and make things come out the way you want it. Because what the writer does—the filmmaker or the writer—you create a world that you would like to live in. You like the people you create. You like what they wear, where they live, how they talk, and it gives you a chance for some months to live in that world. And those people move to beautiful music, and you’re in that world. So in my films I just feel there’s always a pervasive feeling of the greatness of idealized life or fantasy versus the unpleasantness of reality.
¹⁸

The “greatness of idealized life or fantasy” is a perfect description of the textures of three of Allen’s 1993-1996 films and one which effectively demarcates the risks these movies run. In their zeal to project affirmative, self-consciously idealized or “movieized” visions of actuality, Allen’s films face two hazards: trivializing the conflicts they dramatize in the name of comedy or generic resolution,
¹⁹
and forgetting that that their renderings of the world
are
idealizations. Arguably the least effective of these comedies,
Manhattan Murder Mystery
proved least able to evade these two hazards.

Sam B. Girgus’s fine study of Allen’s work,
The Films of Woody Allen,
traces, among other things, the progressive development of women protagonists in Allen’s films, arguing that in
Hannah and Her Sisters
Allen “finally completed his
Manhattan
project of making a great movie about women.
Hannah and Her Sisters
is their movie in a way that
Manhattan
never quite becomes the possession of the women in it.”
²⁰
In these terms,
Manhattan Murder Mystery
seems something of a regression to the early Allen comedies in which male domination—the unequivocal centrality of the Allen protagonist—was a critically unexamined given, the female lead’s character and the plot being largely determined by her desirability and availability to him. Carol’s ambition to open a Manhattan restaurant surfaces occasionally in
Murder Mystery
but the movie’s genre-dictated conclusion leaves the element of Carols desire to find fulfilling work for herself unresolved, with her ambition silently subsumed into the endings felicitous renewal of her marriage to Larry. Larry’s rescue of Carol in House’s theater may similarly reflect how reverently this film is adhering to conventions of the genre to which Allen—the screenwriter/ director of such sympathetic and substantial portraits of women as
Interiors, Another Woman,
and
Alice
—committed himself in taking on this project.
²¹
It’s nonetheless discomfiting to watch Carol, whose insistence that reality
can
imitate murder mysteries initially animates the film’s plot, become marginalized in the final third of the movie. The reduction of her role to that of female- who-needs-to-be-rescued pays excessive obeisance to the Nick and Nora Charles model of gender relations, which previous Allen films have dramatically contested. The ending, in fact, implies that, as in
The Thin Man,
it is the male protagonist’s passivity, languor, and dependency upon the comforts of his opulent existence which need redeeming through a confrontation with extremity, the conclusion subordinating Carols search for rejuvenation to Larry’s need to reaffirm himself through an act of Hollywoodesque heroism. Adam Gopnik characterized this element of Larry effectively: “Now, when [Allen] seems to want to return, Zelig-like, to his former likeableness, as he does in
Manhattan Murder Mystery,
he no longer seems quite himself. He appears sexless and deracinated—a nervous man in his fifties, isolated in his apartment.
²²

As for the issue of idealization, no one ever suggested that Woody Allen’s movies offer an objective representation of New York City.
Manhattan
can be interpreted as dramatically exploiting the tension between surface and substance—between Isaac Davis’s idealized projections of New York and the adulterate hearts of its inhabitants; Gershwin’s melodies underlying the gorgeous Gordon Willis cinematographic images of the city embody a “grand actuality of the reconciled” which the residents’ lives and souls never remotely approach. Arguably, it’s when Allen uncritically indulges his Isaac-like propensity to romanticize the city that his films begin misfiring.
Manhattan Murder Mystery
conveys little awareness of the consistently blandished representation of setting which characterizes it, and the fact that there’s less going on in this film than in most of Allen’s other movies makes the viewer more than usually conscious of the process of idealization to which New York has been cinematically subjected. From Bobby Short’s opening titles performance of “I Happen to Like New York” on the soundtrack, the city’s virtues are either assumed or are visually exaggerated. Except for the scene in the Waldron Hotel with its blue powder along the hallway baseboards and English as a second language front desk employees,
Manhattan Murder Mystery,
in emulation of 1930s- 1940s Hollywood murder/comedies, restricts itself to opulent New York neighborhoods, restaurants (Elaine’s,‘21’), and residences.
²³
Of course, Allen’s New York is
always
markedly less-populated than the real-life city of twelve million inhabitants: when, for instance, Mickey Sachs in
Hannah and Her Sisters
dances joyfully down Fifth Avenue in broad daylight after having been given a clean bill of health at the Guggenheim Pavilion of Mount Sinai Hospital, he has the entire block completely to himself. But, even granting Allen’s habitual Manhattan-enhancing proclivities, having Carol stand in the middle of an uptown street for nearly a minute describing a clue to Ted and getting honked out of the way of vehicular traffic by only a single car exceeds all credibility. Even by Allen’s highly subjective criteria, the Manhattan of
Manhattan Murder Mystery
is too much an artistically overdetermined Bobby Short valentine to the city, too much a place constructed out of images of New York borrowed from sophisticated 1940s Hollywood comedies.
²⁴
Pauline Kael’s captious comment on
Hannah and Her Sisters
seems still more applicable to
Manhattan Murder Mystery:
Allen “uses style to blot out the rest of New York City.”
²⁵