Manhattan

An adult male actively pursues and dates a teenage girl, foreshadowing Woody Allen's own pursuit of and marriage to his adopted teenage daughter years later. As if the creepy adult-teen romance isn't enough to cause you to vomit, Allen's sniveling and pathetic whining will irritate you to no end. Throw in a heavy dose of manipulation, codependency, and mansplaining, this film becomes a swamp of patriarchal nonsense. It gets worse. Allen then "falls in love" with his married best friend's mistress played by Diane Keaton. How bad is her life that Keaton's character moves in with this dope? To top it all off, after Keaton's character dumps Allen to return to her married former lover, Allen sets out to rekindle his relationship with, you guessed it, the teenage girl. Disgusting, gross, and shockingly acceptable in 1979, 1989, 1999, and 2009.

Manhattan is one of those movies that can't possibly stand the test of time, so if you're renting it for the first time now, you're guaranteed not to like it. In fact, you're practically guaranteed to wonder how it ever got made and nominated for Best Screenplay at the Academy Awards. Woody Allen wears his usual three hats (actor, writer, and director) in this black-and-white romantic drama. He's a resident of the great city trying to navigate through his troubled love life. He's admittedly middle-aged, but he's dating a minor, Mariel Hemingway. He falls for his best friend's girlfriend, Diane Keaton, and breaks Mariel's heart. And if things aren't complicated enough, his lesbian ex-wife, Meryl Streep, is writing a book about their terrible marriage. If this sounds like a winner to you, good luck and happy watching. It's very 1979, and it's just hard to take it seriously given today's modern attitudes about many of the subjects.

From a technical standpoint, this film is top-notch - the acting is brilliant, the cinematography is beautiful, and the George Gershwin soundtrack is excellent. But the content of the film is another thing. Basically, Woody Allen comes across as an egomaniacal creep who writes parts for himself in order to make him look like he's God's gift to women (there are so many references to his sexual prowess one could start a group drinking game based off it). And anybody with even a beginner's understanding of adolescent psychological development knows that men who pursue teenage girls are sick and sadistic bastards who find joy in ruining promising young lives. So my summary is: Like the film for its craft, but loathe the creator for his statement.

It seems Woody Allen wanted to denounce the pseudo-intellectualism, yet Manhattan is overly arrogant, like its ultra verbose dialogues, based on almost ridiculous, pedant and excluding accumulations of art references. The viewer finds himself enduring this long and boring movie, oozing self-sufficiency, which script boils down to a succession of scenes more boring one from another. The different angles don't work, or with difficulty: it is sometimes funny but it is too sporadic, the drama lacks stakes; only the romance aspect manages not too badly, and still, it is far from excellent. If there was anything to save, it would be the stylish cinematography with some well thought-out shots, but it's just not enough to make Manhattan a good film.

You really have to be a Woody Allen fan to appreciate this '79 film that explores contemporary personal relationships in the Big Apple. The film's script is so huge as to approach infinity. Allen drones on and on and on and on about nothing in particular. Occasionally, the script conveys some tepid humor, but mostly it is just tedious. Ostensibly, "Manhattan" is a tribute to NYC. But, since the film was written and directed by Woody Allen, and since the plot revolves around Allen's character, my impression is that the film was meant more as Woody Allen's tribute to himself. In a major support role, Diane Keaton is good. And, at times, the B&W photography is engaging. However, more often than not, especially in interior shots, the camera just sits there, while actors parade in front of it. The Gershwin music was nice, but I could have wished for more of it, to help pass the time while watching a diffident Allen mouth his nearly limitless lines.