The Talkies/Manhattan

...One may, however, forgive Time's headline writers their excesses, for in truth Manhattan possesses quite a few charms...

...Most of all, Isaac is a romantic...

...The conclusion starts off with more dictation: "Idea for a short story...

...It's true that similar fault could be found with Fields, Keaton, and the brothers Marx...

...Not for the first time, the critics have gotten carried away...

...We are witnessing, meanwhile, the perfect solution-lovely shots of the city, to a background of Rhapsody in Blue\ Isaac's perception of things is established and the stage is splendidly set...

...But autobiographical art raises puzzling questions: Is Manhattan a record of Allen's own personal growth, or has his growth as a filmmaker enabled him to create a fuller character...

...X has to get the O'Neill book finished, Y is supposed to review the new book on Virginia Woolf, Z has finished reviewing the Tolstoy letters and is working on that novelization...

...ttan again...

...But the most appealing character is Allen's...

...the third would make more sense if the film under review were Eyes of Laura Mars...

...Your self-esteem," he tells Mary, "is a notch below Kafka's...

...It commences with Isaac's voice trying out, and discarding, openings for his novel, a work in praise of New York...

...The film concerns, moreover, a highly rarefied class of Manhattan-ites, and has nothing to say about those who ride the subway or live above 96th Street...

...As Isaac goes on talking, he realizes there is another action he wants to take, and he rushes off to try...

...Mostly he just lays them out-making shallow fun of them (Love and Death), sounding horribly pompous (Interiors), or using them as a smoke screen (Manhattan...

...It presents almost the identical situation, and cast, as Play It Again, Sam and Annie Hall, his two other personal films...

...the film's black-and-white idealization of New York and lush Gershwin score mirror his point of view...

...THE TALKIES MANHATTAN by Ben Yagoda Woody Allen's Manhattan, wherein Isaac (Allen) leaves 17-year-old Tracy (Mariel Hemingway) for Mary (Diane Keaton), who eventually leaves him to return to his friend Yale (Michael Murphy), has been hailed on Time's cover as evidence that Allen is A Comic Genius and on the New York Times Magazine's cover as proof that he has Matured...

...Similarly, while Manhattan has been hailed as a brilliant commentary . on New York, its treatment of the city consists mainly of references, visual or verbal...

...They have also tended, by some curious process, to read their own thoughts about the current malaise into the film...

...But only New Yorkers are likely to get the point, and most of them will be too busy playing How-many-locations-did-you-spot...

...And Tracy, who seems at first to be a mere plot mechanism, emerges as a figure with surprising shading...

...Occasionally this method imparts information: that Isaac and Yale are the kind of people who hang out at Elaine's, and Tracy the kind of kid who lives in Gramercy Park and goes to Dal ton...

...Thus Keaton and Allen have fashioned in Mary Wilke a character of considerable subtlety and depth...

...She dissembles, repeats herself, poses, and shows off, yet we end up caring for her...

...but lesser claims were made for them...

...People in Manhattan are constantly creating these neurotic problems for themselves that keep them from dealing with more terrifying problems of the universe...

...This clumsy statement, we realize, is the point of the film, but cleverly and humorously distanced by the tape device...

...This comic individualism is not dishonest laugh-getting -in Annie Hall he played a comedian and here he is a comedy writer-and it is indeed funny...

...Yet it is a little unsatisfying and it makes the film quite lopsided...

...As yet, Allen lacks the capacity to integrate Important Ideas into his films...

...He acts on his beliefs, too- withholding his love from his best friend's girl friend, quitting his high-paying TV job to write a novel, even trying to run over the woman his wife left him for-and suffers the inevitable consequences...

...In fact, the intellectual content of the film too often amounts to a kind of high-culture name-dropping...

...Similar acclaim has followed...

...He has spared Isaac the hornier-than-thou depression that marked previous manifestations of his persona, and replaced it with a remarkable unity and complexity of character...

...Schwarz...

...Manhattan is of a piece-no gratuitous gags or fantasy sequences here -and suggests that Woody Allen will soon lose his reliance on verbal wit and begin to make satisfying comedies about people other than himself...

...She has the insensitivity of youth, remarking that some face-lifted TV personality should just "age naturally...

...And once again, by far the most humor comes straight from the mouth of Allen's character...

...Thus to one of them it "demonstrates how broad cultural collapse influences personal deficiency...

...Mariel Hemingway's excellent performance almost made me forget to wonder what her parents were thinking all those nights she spent at Isaac's house...

...and to a third it is about "a time and place where fashion probably blights more lives than booze, drugs, radioactive fallout and saturated animal fat.'' The first two statements are simply fatuous...

...But she can come up with a striking emotional truth as well: As Isaac makes his break, she wonders aloud why, if he's the one who wants to leave, he keeps making the advantage seem to be hers...

...Consider the way he has framed the film...

...If it contains the same elements as Allen's previous films, they are here more refined...

...The confrontation that follows is as pure a dramatic and cinematic moment as the "mature" Woody Allen has achieved, and is enough, at the very least, to make me look forward to seeing Manhattan again...

...to notice...

...Ben Yagoda is a free-lance writer living in New York...

...to a second it is "about the predicament of contemporary man...

...He is quite the kind of fellow, in fact, that one imagines Woody Allen to be: funny, engaging, vulnerable...

...Manhattan shows Woody Allen still to have a limited range as a realistic filmmaker...

...It is as if Truffaut continually chose a new name and occupation for his alter ego, Antoine Doinel (whose latest appearance, in Love on the Run, makes for an instructive comparison with Manhattan), but gave each Doinel film the same plot...

...The characters mention a dozen New York benchmarks (Shakespeare in the Park, the Op-Ed Page), and scenes are shot at two dozen more (Zabar's, F.A.O...

...Isaac Davis is, in any event, a step in the right direction...