Part Three: Diane Keaton to Charlotte Rampling

Diane Keaton
Play it Again Sam (1972), Sleeper (1973), Love and Death (1975), Annie Hall (1977), Interiors (1978), Manhattan (1979), Radio Days (1987), Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993)

Diane Keaton played different types of people in different types of Woody Allen films, while always seeming herself. Even in her first scene of her first film with Allen, 1972’s Play It Again, Sam (not directed but written by Allen, based on his play, which Keaton acted in), she flashes her inimitable smile, a soft one that’s also self-deprecating, while sharing jokes with him about their neuroses. In her next five Allen films she played a poet in a slapstick science-fiction future (Sleeper); a brainy, lusty heiress in his Russian literature spoof (Love and Death); the eccentric, neurotic, immortal Annie Hall; a tormented author in one of Allen’s stoic Bergmanesque dramas (Interiors); and a brash urban intellectual with a chaotic life (Manhattan). In each case except Interiors, she plays Allen’s love interest, yet her character is always as memorable as his.

Those five films, from 1972 to 1979, represent Allen’s move from straight-up silly comedies to the more romance-centered comedy/dramas that became his stock-and-trade, and the template that many romantic comedies have followed since. Keaton starred in his films at the very time that his style was maturing, and can easily be seen as an important part of that maturation. To say she was growing as an actress as his films were growing in depth may be true, but the statement has a note of condescension to it. More accurate is to point out the important role her acting played in the development of his filmmaking.

In his early comedies, she’s playing the straight-man; deadpan, but capable of drawing laughs from her expressions and the timing of her lines. As Allen’s films change, her characters become more developed, building her memorable way of reacting to Allen’s jokes, with a knowing look or sometimes by not reacting at all, into a way of projecting multiple emotions at once. In Annie Hall, Manhattan and even the more dour Interiors, she makes emotional outbursts, tears and smiles all part of the same action. There’s a scene in Manhattan where she bounces between an argument with her married lover (Michael Murphy) and answering routine phone calls, even handling the dog, in one motion. It suggests the way people really act, where drama is part of daily life, not a series of big moments.

Annie Hall was Allen’s turning-point movie, which makes Keaton’s Annie Hall a turning-point character (also an Oscar-winning one). Allen has said he wrote the role specifically for her. He gave her the last name Keaton was born with. More important is what viewers see, the way Annie Hall’s eccentric behavior and inner conflicts are projected by Keaton in her face, body and speech. She puts us there with Allen, adoring her more with each encounter. Even the most casual watcher of romantic comedies since Annie Hall could tell that the female half of many movie couples follows the prototype set by Keaton as Hall. Try to think of a hit romantic comedy where the woman’s “quirkiness” isn’t foregrounded.

Keaton made two returns to Allen’s film world. Both have a sweetness that’s a testament to the heartwarming presence Keaton has in Allen’s overall filmography. In the nostalgic Radio Days (1987), her role is as singer only, but her song (“You’d Be So Nice to Come Home To”) plays in its entirety, and has an emotional pull that speaks to the characters’ circumstances.

Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993) was even sweeter, a light mystery film, an homage to film noir, that also ‘rhymes’ with Annie Hall in interesting ways. Co-written with Marshall Brickman, who co-wrote Annie Hall, the film was sort of spun from a murder-mystery plot that was part of Annie Hall early on, when that film had a different name and hadn’t yet been skillfully, historically, edited. In Manhattan Murder Mystery, as in so many Allen films, both main characters are pursuing the notion of other lives they could have lived. Here they do it like they’re dipping their feet in water. Keaton’s scenes with Alan Alda, playing a longtime friend who always had a crush on her, are particularly affecting, because the characters have history together and the actors show it in their ease around each other. Their camaraderie is different than that of Allen and Keaton. That contrast is significant, woven into the film’s jokes.

History is evident between the Keaton and Allen’s characters, too. The resonance with viewers comes from both the actors’ comfort with each other and our associations with them as a couple. There’s a scene in Manhattan Murder Mystery where Keaton’s character wonders whether their life has become too stagnant. Have they become “just another dull aging couple…a pair of comfortable old shoes”? If you look at it from the right angle, it’s easy to imagine this as an alternate future for Annie Hall and Alvy Singer.

Dave Heaton

Juliette Lewis
Husbands and Wives (1992)

Husbands and Wives is a meta masterpiece of what is perhaps Woody Allen’s most treasured themes: Men acrobatically stabbing themselves in the heart with their own raging, woebegone erections.

Throughout the film, men wildly gesticulate, fumble and burst, “I’m confused! I’m upset!” All of this erotic confusion is smothered in intellectual airs thick enough to choke a horse. Allen’s Gabe is a Columbia writing professor who pivots on his podium so that his smarmy bespectacled eyes are trained on the glimmering ingénue, played this particular round with a sharp twist and off-kilter charm by then 19-year-old Juliette Lewis, just a few years before her star-making turn as natural born killer, Mallory Knox.

Lewis’ TK readily sees through Allen. As Allen flirts with Lewis over a story she wrote for his class, she calls him to task: “Why are you asking me so many questions?” He fumbles, exposed. “The writing was very intense.”

Countering all of the typical Allen tricks, she refutes the idea that you need to live an exotic life in order to write anything worth reading. He presses her about the “worldliness” in her work. “It’s just a trick. You don’t have to know,” she says and tells him about writing a story about Paris when she was ten, even though she had never been to Paris.

Allen pulls no punches and doesn’t attempt to disguise that he plays cad to Lewis’ ingénue. Instead, he organizes a ping-pong match between the two of them and then uses a mockumentary-style fourth-wall confessions full of jump cuts that brutally expose how painfully aware Gabe is of his faults.

Struggle as he might, intellectualism can’t save Gabe. After all, acute awareness of being a jerk doesn’t make you any less of a jerk. (Perhaps, Allen seems to be saying, it makes you a bigger jerk.) Later, Gabe talks about other professors who are notorious for seducing students. “This goes on,” he says, “Cause it’s a cinch.”

Allen’s cast of stock characters usually contains two ingénue types: the all-accepting adoring and the rebellious Lolita that serves him his comeuppance. Rain defies Gabe’s expectations by beginning at the former then turning into the latter.

In class, Rain blushes and coos, “Your affirmation means more to me than anybody’s.” Then later, she criticizes the manuscript Gabe gave her to read. His only copy, she then loses it in the back of a cab—perhaps, she muses, she lost it on purpose on a subconscious level because she is, after all, competing with him. When Rain challenges his attitudes in the manuscript, he recoils in horror and calls her a “twenty-year-old twit.”

Lewis’ Rain is an Upper West Side Lolita that embodies both types: she is submissive in that she is literally his student and lives with her parents, but she has also already indulged in a series of affairs with older men. “What am I doing with these older men?” she wonders aloud, while recounting her series of affairs—including her analyst—for Gabe. About her affairs with older men, Rain muses: “In the end, I felt I was kind of symbol of lost youth or unfilled dreams,” Rain muses. “Or am I being too dramatic? Of course, Gabe, wonders the same. As was Allen in 1992, whose personal life lead the New York Times to begin the review of the film with, “WELL, what about the movie?”

Tara Murtha

Elaine May and Radha Mitchell

Elaine May
Small Time Crooks (2000)

“She has always been a brilliantly funny woman, who’s been evasive over the years”, Woody Allen says of May in Stig Bjorkman’s invaluable book-length interview Woody Allen on Woody Allen. Recounting how he coaxed her out of her relative invisibility throughout the ’90s to appear in 2000’s Small Time Crooks, Allen notes that May agreed to do the film two days after being sent the script, a transaction that took place with surprising ease, especially considering that she had years before turned down an offer for a part in his early feature Take The Money and Run. A highly respected actress, writer, playwright, comedienne and, at least for a while, director, May’s career in Hollywood is one of the more tumultuous of the last 40 years, scoring initial hits with comedies like 1971’s A New Leaf (as writer, director and performer), 1972’s The Heartbreak Kid (as director) and 1978’s Heaven Can Wait (as co-writer) before hitting the career-wounding project of a lifetime as director of 1987’s notorious bomb Ishtar.

Though the film was far from her first troubled production (her original epic-length cut of A New Leaf was radically altered by the studio for release), or even her first near-ostracism from Hollywood (1976’s ambitious Cassavetes-esque drama Mikey and Nicky briefly killed her reputation went it ridiculously over budget and over schedule before tanking at the box office; only Warren Beatty’s insistence on bringing her aboard Heaven Can Wait won her back some credibility), Ishtar proved so disgraceful that May has yet to step behind the camera again in all of the years since.

The fear that May’s entire career would come to be defined by Ishtar’s failure appeared to be somewhat unfounded when 1998’s Primary Colors (helmed by former comedy partner Mike Nichols) won her an Academy Award nomination for screenwriting, but the infrequency of her activity since Ishtar nevertheless indicated that the fallout from the film had taken a toll. Given the circumstances, it would be reasonable to expect her first performance in a major film since the ’70s might be laced with some combination of bitterness, hesitation or regret, but in Small Time Crooks, May ends up providing the comic highlight of an already very funny film.

As May Sloane, the ditzy relative of Allen and Tracey Ullman’s inadvertently successful class-challenged couple dealing with the ups and downs of sudden wealth, May plays her unflappably literal-minded dimwit with a note-perfect mixture of deadpan conviction and daffy sweetness. If it’s the former quality that makes her performance so hilarious (when told to make small talk about the weather at a swanky Manhattan soiree, she languishes party guests with forecasts straight out of a television news broadcast), it’s the latter that helps deepen both her own character and the film’s somewhat deceptively light comedy, as well. As Ullman’s desire for refinement finds her growing apart from her uncouth husband and falling into the trap of slimy social climber Hugh Grant, Allen finds himself taking friendly solace in May’s sheer inability to even fake pretension.

Finally imparting the sound, if unconventional, wisdom that “there’s more to life than turkey meatballs”, even as she feels more at home joining Allen in late night marathons of Chinese food and Cagney movies than in Ullman’s new swanky surroundings, May nevertheless becomes the bridge between the two character’s individual forms of insanity, bringing them both back down to earth even when her own head is stuck in the clouds.

Ten years on, Small Time Crooks remains the now 78-year-old Elaine May’s final cinematic turn to date in any capacity. If she is indeed now in retirement, her performance here stands as a quietly triumphant farewell to an industry and a medium with which she has had a decidedly rocky relationship. Even more so, though, it’s a belated entry into Allen’s peerless canon of great female performances, and so it feels like something closer to a gift.

Jer Fairall

Radha Mitchell
Melinda and Melinda (2004)

Woody Allen’s post-millennium career has been met with much derision, but it has also seen it’s share of critical acclaim. Along with the (slight) critical bomb that was Small Time Crooks, Allen’s exercise in tragicomedy, Melinda and Melinda, was met with substandard press and a healthy dose of HBO re-runs. However, the saving grace of the film was the miraculous two-faced female lead played by Mitchell as the titular Melinda, a beautiful crossover character taking on both the qualities of a patented Allen stress-ridden train wreck and a Carole Lombard-style throwback of a heroine.

Why Allen chose to enter a relationship of the two thematic subjects he has been championing since the dawn of his career is an interesting prospect, and the fact that he brought along Mitchell to portray both of his simplistic yet complex notions is an incredible gift to the relatively unknown (at least to the public-at-large) actress. It’s almost as if Allen had trouble deciding which direction he wanted this film to go, upon initial writing of the script, and ended up seamlessly writing the two into one of his better latter day scripts. After a dedicated look inside each of Allen’s characters, Mitchell’s performance of Melinda is compelling, and can only lead one to wonder in what sequence this film was shot. Being forced to play two completely different roles within the schematics of one tightly manned ship is a testament to Mitchell’s diversity as a performer. She applied a steady approach to acting both roles, and stitched them together with a unique compositional thread of detailed internal character analysis.

Had Mitchell not delivered in spades, its hard to say whether this film would have had the same effect. After all, the shallow comedy of Will Ferrell and Steve Carrell, and the mediocre-at-best acting performance of Amanda Peet gave Mitchell very little to work with. An interesting dynamic to her role within Melinda is her approach to working with two ensemble casts. Anyone who has ever acted or spent time working with people in a dynamic, creative environment, knows the trials and tribulations of working with a large cast, and the challenge of really feeding off of one’s peers.

As Allen gets older, people pigeonhole him into the Annie Hall and Manhattan territory, but as Roger Ebert so brilliantly pointed out in his review of Melinda and Melinda “I cannot escape the suspicion that if Woody had never made a previous film, if each new one was Woody’s Sundance debut, it would get a better reception. His reputation is not a dead shark but an albatross, which with admirable economy Allen has arranged for the critics to carry around their own necks.”

While many found Melinda and Melinda — and quite a few of Allen’s later films – disposable, Mitchell’s performance is one to be duly noted as an intriguing character in one of the bigger periods of stylistic experimentation of Allen’s career.

John Bohannan

Emily Mortimer and Samantha Morton

Emily Mortimer
Match Point (2005)

Match Point presents us with the question: can you reconcile both lust, and greed? Can we have whatever we want all the time, and get away with it? Chris Wilton (Jonathan Rhys Meyers), like Ian and Terry from Cassandra’s Dream, is one of Woody Allen’s doomed London social climbers. Bored with being a tennis instructor for the idle and wealthy, he’s pursued by a student’s sister, Chloe Hewett (Mortimer), a willowy, suave young heiress. The attractive other half of Matthew Goode’s aquiline, aristocratic Tom Hewett. The Hewett children represent the happy, uncomplicated rich of London. Life is a series of public events and perfunctory milestones, and the great challenge is not to be bored by it all.

Chloe sees potential in Chris as an attractive husband, and hones in on him like a heat-seeking missile. Chris is flattered, but not as attracted to Chloe at first. The allure of her wealth and sophistication, however, proves too powerful to resist. As a far as personal style goes, Mortimer flits in and out of the movie as a lithe and graceful figure. Her only intense moment is when she’s pursuing Chris, fairly relentlessly. You wonder; where does that depth of motivation, in a person so aristocratic and nonchalant, come from?

As the woman being married for her money and being cheated on with Scarlett Johanssen’s neurotic sexpot, Nola Rice, Mortimer’s role could have almost been that of a cipher. However, because she’s Emily Mortimer and an actress of terrific range, versatility, and understated grace, she instead turns this role into the representation of reluctant moral conviction. Chloe, her wealth, her rich and happy family, are all the things that Chris stands to loose if his affair with Nola is discovered. So he makes the most appropriate, monstrous decision: to keep his way of life.

Yet all throughout, Chloe has the air of quiet confidence. There’s a notable scene set in The Tate Modern, where Chris runs into Nola again after her relationship with Tom has ended. There’s a palpable sexual charge between them, and anyone can sense it, even Chloe who politely comes over to say hello. Whether she thinks she should be concerned, we’re not quite sure, but she realizes her position and she knows Chris owes everything to her family. It’s a plot almost out of the Henry James novel, The Golden Bowl, where the young and naïve Maggie Verver isn’t as naïve as we come to realize, especially in regard to her straying husband and his sultry mistress.

At the end of Match Point, we’re left to wonder who’s the winner. Chris has his wife, his wealth, but at what cost? He looks out at the expansive window of his loft studio overlooking the Thames, “It would be fitting if I were apprehended… and punished. At least there would be some small sign of justice, some small measure of hope for the possibility of meaning. It’s what Sophocles said, ‘To never have been born may be the greatest boon of all.'”

Farisa Khalid

Samantha Morton
Sweet and Lowdown (1999)

For a director who has spent his career championing the notion of verbal comedy, the idea of a mute, British female lead came out of left field for Woody Allen. Although his admiration for the silent-film era stars such as Buster Keaton is palpable, for him to create the completely silent roll of Hattie, played by Morton, is the first of many latter career challenges that Allen would take on.

An obvious method exercise in the expression of non-verbal feelings, Morton’s silent innocence is what helps bring to life the character that Allen wrote for her. Had she been a bitter, stern woman — the vibrant expressions, from shyness to ecstatic admiration of Sean Penn’s character as Emmet Ray — that may have been played off as trivial and unconvincing. Upon close observation, her facial expressions, specifically during the moments where Hattie admires Ray, are those reflected by other characters throughout the film — such as the audience’s reaction during the small-town talent show scam, and during the bustling’ club scenes. Setting a tone with a facial expression is no easy task, yet Morton performs a lasting emotional landscape over the course of Sweet and Lowdown.

Working with two strong, confident male figures such as Penn and Allen and an inimitable is no small feat. Even among a sort of machismo notion of the male musician and old school hegemonic morale, Morton’s character of Hattie finds her confidence throughout the film through the advancement of her body language. In the beginning, when Ray is about to make his trek to Hollywood, he spends his time talking down to her, and Hattie’s body language is slack, while as things progress, her body stands postured and confident. In the end it’s Morton’s character that comes off as a stronger individual, and plays a testament to Allen’s complex latter day female characters (i.e., Match Point, Husbands and Wives, etc), and an outstanding performance from Samantha Morton.

There’s a real depth of understanding between Allen and Morton. As Woody ages, his stylistic element seems to thrive on minimalism, and Morton’s character has subtle variations throughout the film. Instead of the bombastic dialogue and ideals of Allen’s earlier career, he embraces the true ambition of an actress not only from a great dialogue standpoint, but as a presence on the screen — an area Morton certainly doesn’t lack in. While many find their favoritism leaning towards the roles of Diane Keaton and Mia Farrow, they sometimes forget that Allen knows better than anyone how to choose a female lead — whether that female lead is an obvious favorite or a role that comes into fruition with time, much like Hattie.

Sweet and Lowdown was extremely formative in Morton’s career as an actress, and it led her down a fruitful path of credible independent cinema. Landing career-defining roles in the mind-expanding Synecdoche, New York and the oddball sensation Mister Lonely, Morton has shown her diversity and ability to grow into nearly any role on the big screen.

John Bohannan

Geraldine Page and Charlotte Rampling

Geraldine Page
Interiors (1978)

The cold heart at the centre of Allen’s coldest film, Page’s bravura turn as Eve, a suicidal mother to three troubled daughters, stands among the very greatest performances in Woody Allen’s oeuvre. Indeed, this most extraordinary of actresses – she was nominated for eight Academy Awards over her decades-long career – was never better than she was in this role.

An aging interior decorator whose artistic identity has been built around the precision of her vision for spaces – but whose austere sense of detail and colour scheme (variations on beige and taupe) mimics her lack of emotional warmth – Page’s character has grown depressive and desperate and burdensome to her children. When her somewhat pompous and wildly self-centered husband suddenly leaves her for the vibrant and (instructively) red-dressed Pearl (Maureen Stapleton), she shatters. Indeed, she shatters rather like those bright red glass candle holders that she knocks over in the very scene where Arthur breaks the news to her that he will be re-marrying with Pearl.

Page’s disintegration is brilliantly conceived, and it’s devastating. She disappears from the film for what feels like ages following Pearl’s arrival on the scene, only to return looking more desolate and faded than ever. And yet, for all of our pity, there is very little to actually like about Page’s Eve. For my money, it’s the fact that Page allows us to dislike her character as much as she does which only deepens the effect her anguish has upon us. We feel bad about her situation, but we don’t want her around, either. It’s harrowing, and among Allen’s most powerful creations. In Page’s hands, a difficult, pitiful character is utterly humanized.

Though she would reach great heights again with The Trip to Bountiful a few years later – and she would be awarded the Academy Award for her work in that difficult, but often lovely, film – Interiors remains, for me, her most indelible later work. There is something about her bearing, her counter-intuitive straight-backed approach to playing a depressive, that remains with you long after the film has ended. There’s a bizarre sense of confidence underlying this broken woman, a vestige of the once indomitable interior designer she had been in her youth. Page’s Eve is pushy, tough, and yet completely, it would seem, powerless to arrest the chain of events that are moving ever closer to her oblivion. Her final surrender to the sea, in what is certainly the most nightmarish image in the whole of Allen’s career, completely relies on the complexity of character that she has presented us. Her deliberate march into the freezing deep is calculated, final, and irrevocable — a decisive act of authority from a woman who has seen so much of it stripped away.

Stuart Henderson

Charlotte Rampling
Stardust Memories (1980)

The look. That predatory, feline look, somehow as much sex as hostility all coiled up in her face, her eyes, her perfumed gaze. Charlotte Rampling, in one of the most complex roles Allen ever wrote, was simply note perfect as Dorrie in Stardust Memories. A dark, troubled beauty, and ingénue for Sandy, the neurotic genius played by Allen, she is the flame that draws in the moth. Simultaneously she is an abstraction, an imagined ideal of stormy sexuality and psychological turmoil that Sandy (and, perhaps the real-life Allen too) believes teases out the brilliance in the artist. She is that classic trope: the suicidal, hysterical, darkly inspiring muse that the artist needs in order to produce good work, but yet cannot hold for too long. Rampling, with limited screen time and few lines of dialogue, manages to seduce and beguile as she simply becomes the embodiment of that kind of dangerous beauty. What undisclosed pain does she endure, what secrets does she protect behind her lithium-addled facade?

We get hints of her awful past, of course – there are numerous not-very-subtle suggestions that she has been sexually abused by her father – but when she has her final breakdown, narrated in an edgy series of jump cuts as she faces the camera, spilling out random bits of story, emotion, apprehension, we know for certain that she will never be at peace until she is free from Sandy and his perverse need to revel in her illness. Rampling, as the black sun at the center of this most autobiographical of Allen’s films, fills up what could have been merely a metaphor for a disturbed woman with humanity, mystery, and a dreamy sensuality. In the famous scene when Sandy recalls his one true moment of happiness, all we see is her face, her eyes downcast as she lies on the floor casually reading a newspaper. Then, almost furtively, she glances up, at you. She holds the look. It contains multitudes.

Allen once said that his ideal dinner companions would be Rampling and Franz Kafka, which tells us something of his affection for her, though he would never use her again in any of his films. (Kafka, however, he’d return to again and again.) While she would go on to star in a variety of excellent movies, bringing her indefinable air of sophistication and enigma to each role, for my money she didn’t match her work in Stardust Memories until her turn in the spooky and powerfully sexual 2003 film Swimming Pool. That film provided a bit of a boost to her image which she has carried through among the most productive periods in her career. Still every bit as fascinating onscreen today as in 1979, Rampling remains an indelible beauty and an incomparable actor.

Stuart Henderson