Godot wrote: Wed Feb 06, 2019 5:34 am
bearcuborg wrote: Sun Jan 20, 2019 11:45 pm
Manhattan Murder Mystery is one of those movies I could play daily for background noise when I’m working.
Me, too! When I was in college, we watched
Purple Rose,
Radio Days, and
Hannah and Her Sisters in the background while we played Scrabble. Aside from the obvious references to cinema and the Central Park atmosphere, much of what I love about
Manhattan Murder Mystery is the way it reinforces marriage. It shows the warts of marital relationships, the temptations and arguments and pulling away from each other, but ultimately it shows the strength in magnetically winding those strands back around the core. It feels like I'm watching the characters from
Annie Hall, picking up the thread of their lives 25 years later (I know, that's not exactly an original take on the film). I love the scenes with Alda seducing Keaton and Huston seducing Allen, and both our main spouses finding the attention bemusing and flattering but not deterred from their constant thoughts about their relationship (and solving the mystery, of course). And it's spot-on with its mockery of marital dynamics - I laugh every time when Keaton wakes in the middle of the night suspecting her neighbors, and Woody tries to control her with "As your husband, I command you to go back to bed! I command you!" (paraphrasing) The foursome dinner in the NJ speak-easy (with Sopranos extras listening in on the morbid hypothesizing), with the shifting flirting and interplay among the couples, is wonderful. My favorite scene is the blackmail (or threatening) attempt by telephone, with Woody's friends timing their playing of tape recorded phrases on multiple players, as Keaton laughs and rolls her eyes; it feels partially scripted and then improvised and then the actors seem to barely suppress laughter at Woody's wild gestures.
Nice appreciation! I just revisited
Manhattan Murder Mystery for the nth time, a film that I used to love as a kid, decreased in my esteem during my 20s, and that I'm back in love with again. It's such a breezy follow-up to
Husbands and Wives and Allen's general output from the previous 15 years- works that, even when light and joyful, were usually also drenched in some strain of somber undertones (i.e.
The Purple Rose of Cairo's fantastical nature sourced in a sublimation for being trapped in a powerless state of reality-soiled oppression and malaise;
Broadway Danny Rose's stark look at how anti-karmic our world is, as Danny's humility is not reciprocated with validation for his good-naturedness, as well as the philosophical implications of people telling stories about a man in the past tense without truly knowing him- subtly treating the complex dignity and worth we wish to actualize as reduced to second-hand reminiscence).
Manhattan Murder Mystery, however, doesn't have a shred of pathos in its sardonic posturing towards disintegration of marital harmony (or the act of murder, for that matter). Allen and Keaton sit comfortably in their roles, even when they're fighting, recognizing discord, or entertaining flirtations with another. The commentary seems to suggest that if two people are actually a good match and possess similar morals, they can prevail through the arguments and that bouts of doubt will be trivial in the scheme of mutual respect and matured intimacy.
I don't think that it's a coincidence that this film comes after Allen's therapeutic, yet aggressive, regurgitation of his fallout with Farrow in
Husbands and Wives, having settled into his relationship with Soon-Yi and regained his ability to express confidence in relationships. The choice of Keaton to play his wife reads as a sigh of optimism, professing an embrace of trust, not only in romantic partnerships, but in long-term relationships between men and women of any kind, as Keaton is clearly the primary example from Allen's life of a woman who he can maintain affinity with despite the relationship evolving into something different (some may say
devolving into a lesser form of intimacy, but this film indicates Allen has gained a new skill in recontextualizing the linearity of social development away from binary states and towards additional options in the grey). I wonder if his journey with Farrow, and the associated existential processing, helped him to realize this key difference through comparison. Regardless of the specifics of any epiphanies, Keaton's inclusion only solidifies the softer tone that breathes possibility and security into relational tension. The film appears to be an externalization of Allen's refurbished faith in the opportunities of life, a tremendous feat after the trauma he'd been through. He continues to mock his own ingrained faulty characteristics that weigh down a relationship but also has hope that he can be flexible, (re)learn to trust his current partner by resigning some of these defective traits from time to time, and ultimately act the hero if push comes to shove. Or, if not in actuality, he can bring himself to do so bare, as himself, in the safe space of the movies. He hasn't been able to do that for some time*.
This film isn't Allen at his best, but it does mark a return to the ethereal spirit of his branded temperament, in which his neuroses and cheeky observances of human behavior can coexist in a controlled environment of the familiar for him. I've always felt that Allen's use of New York as a milieu reflects a self-conscious and authentic irony- for while this overwhelming city would destroy the psyche of someone so neurotic if foreign to them, Allen's comfortability with such intense conditions transforms a potentially fear-inducing environment into one of security and love. This incongruity of personality and social context invites evidence of our potential to reframe stimuli into consolation with resilience. The restoration of form alerts us that Allen is back to his old self, and under the climate of his oeuvre's progression and personal stressors outside of the film, this is an extremely significant and empowering statement, amusingly subtle by dulling itself from the loudness of the direct-previous entries in his body of work.
The film also contains two of my favorite WA moments -not including the tape recorder bit, though that's a good one! The first is the scene where Keaton and Allen become trapped in the elevator, which plays out like a compilation of every one of Allen's phobias coming to fruition at once in their respective, overlapping worst-case scenarios... the claustrophobia and fear of death are provoked, but then the body's emergence from above under those suffocating circumstances is just icing on the cake! Allen is laughing at himself by making everything he fears the most come true, and yet he prevails and stays alive and successfully completes the scene to return to a level of calm in the next frame. What is superficially a hysterical self-deprecating setpiece also functions as a therapeutic acknowledgement of his skillful adaptability and the impermanence of fear to control his emotional stability.
The other highlight is the
Lady From Shanghai gag at the end, which doubles down on its self-reflexivity to move beyond mere emulation into recycling the footage as reflected in the mirrors as the scene is literally copied! *Allen is clearly drawing a fantasy in this film, but instead of concealing himself in the clothing of expressionism or direct-Fellini or Bergman homages as he did during the troubling years during the demise of his marriage to Farrow, he allows himself to materialize from those protective layers he felt compelled to don during the last several traumatizing years.
Manhattan Murder Mystery is a fantasy, but one that rests nakedly in the realm of familiar spaces and with familiar supportive people again (in the actual cast and the representations of relationships in his life); Allen engaging in tacit exposure therapy, as he slides out of hiding ready to greet the world again... well halfway, like he used to do, and has always done.
For Allen, is there any other way? I think he sees life as a series of half-measures between real and imaginary, whether on a cosmic relationship with the unknown- conflicted between atheist certainty and agnostic recognition (and occasional acceptance in his later work) of enigmas in love, morality, death, etc. - or the corporeal navigations of interpersonal dynamics and needs, and how one oscillates between growth as communally shared and individually isolated, through a nonlinear pattern of social-emotional evolution that transcends the ideologically-promised mirages of 'improvement'. I think Allen sees these half-measures as the meaning of life, the meshing of contradictory ideas and moods that can be found even in the roots of his own comedy- combining his existential dread with humor, joking as a defense mechanism for anxiety- significantly without invalidating the honesty of that joke. All of this operates under a distinct tone in Woody Allen movies, one that he can only achieve with the magic of movies acting as a filter to glaze a version of Life with a spiritually-conscious glow of possibility. We can only ever get halfway, never fully 'there', never 'fixed' or omniscient or expunged of our angsts, doubts, and insecurities, but we can sometimes access a form of acceptance where fears and opportunities coalesce. Allen affirms and occasionally caresses this worldview of fatalistic compromises in his work, often in his more deceptively-airy films. Like this one.
