Keaton on Film
PODHORETZ, JOHN
Keaton on Film A 'vivid performer' and versatile actress. by John Podhoretz Diane Keaton has been a major presence in the movies for 35 years now. She is remarkable not only for her longevity as a...
...It's unlikely anyone would mention Diane Keaton, even though she's universally beloved, because there's something not-quite-actressy about her...
...Her co-star in Marvin's Room was Meryl Streep, the only other American actress who can wear the two masks of Janus with equal authority...
...neurotic spouse of Woody Allen's best friend in the hilarious Play It Again, Sam, and then essaying the naive WASP who falls for Mafia heir Michael Corleone in the Best Picture Ever Made (I refuse to mention the movie's name, because if you don't know it already, you should be ashamed of yourself...
...There's a running gag in the new Because I Said So in which Keaton repeatedly drops, falls into, or smashes her face into a newly frosted cake...
...The cake bit isn't really that funny, largely because Because I Said So has been directed with staggering incompetence by a has-been hipster named Michael Lehmann (who can't decide whether the three romances he shows us in the movie take place over the course of two weeks or two years, with the result that much of what we're seeing makes no emotional or dramatic sense...
...She's less a Sophie Portnoy and more a crazily peppy tour guide at a theme park, and while Keaton's take on the Mommy Monster isn't entirely believable, it's still immensely entertaining...
...Keaton blew Streep off the screen...
...She rather seems to crave it...
...Throughout her singular career, Keaton has gone years without doing anything of note, or even doing less than noteworthy work—as happened when she seemed to fade into the woodwork as the supportive spouse of Steve Martin's Father of the Bride in two soporific films...
...As the meddling mother of three grown daughters, Keaton's character imposes her will on her offspring not through anger and rage but with overzealous enthusiasm...
...She is the least pretentious performer imaginable...
...She commands attention effortlessly but without a hint of Streep's intimidating grandeur or Nicole Kidman's ice-cold grandiosity...
...There aren't many sexagenarians who can handle the physical demands of slapstick, but Keaton is as good at it as she was in her mid-20s...
...She is remarkable not only for her longevity as a star—she is the name above the title in the new comedy Because I Said So, which opened on February 2—but for her ability to perform with equal intensity in both comedies and dramas...
...It was in a single year, 1972, that she emerged as a comic and dramatic actress to reckon with—first playing the deliciously John Podhoretz, a columnist for the NewYork Post, is The Weekly Standard's movie critic...
...Back in 1973, in Sleeper, she and Woody Allen did an amazing pas de deux of slapstick and vaudeville double-talk as they attempted to hijack the nose of a dead fascist dictator in the middle of a cloning procedure (don't ask...
...And then, suddenly, she'll emerge from obscurity with two barrels blazing as she did in 1972 and 1977...
...Keaton is at her best playing women who are fools for love— women who give everything of themselves and never really get anywhere near enough back...
...Keaton is among the most vivid performers the cinema has ever produced...
...Keaton shows us not just the suffering caused by love but the utter, crazed joy of it, too...
...Now if you were to ask 100 people who is the greatest living film actress, chances are 90 would say Streep, while the other 10 votes would be scattered among various Swanks and Kidmans and Blanchetts...
...It's a kind of truth no other American actress has ever come close to embodying, and it's a significant accomplishment in the annals of cinema...
...She doesn't do accents...
...She does not fear looking ridiculous...
...In 1996, for example, she was utterly delightful as one of the dumped women in The First Wives Club (she was the Connecticut matron who "supervised" the washing of her husband's shorts) and utterly devastating as a self-sacrificing daughter suffering silently with cancer in Marvin's Room...
...She giggles the same way in a comedy or a drama...
...That sort of self-sacrifice is usually the stuff of tear-jerking melodrama...
...That was in 1977, when she also offered a heartbreaking portrait of a lonely teacher of deaf children whose desperate promiscuity Because I Said So Directed by Michael Lehmann leads to her murder in Looking for Mr...
...She doesn't labor to make you forget you're watching Diane Keaton...
...But Keaton throws herself into the slapstick with total abandon, as she does every other aspect of Because I Said So, an unholy mess of a picture that is nonetheless irresistible because of her...
...And yet a great film actress is exactly what she is, and not only because she is in very august company as the star of movies produced in four successive decades...
...She doesn't wear transfiguring makeup...
...Only five years later, she gave one of the indelible screen performances as the stammering, shimmering title character, the emblem of 1970s American womanhood, in Annie Hall...
...Goodbar...
Vol. 12 • February 2007 • No. 21
