My opinion of the movie Manhattan, directed by and starring Woody Allen, resembles my opinion of most modern art: oddly, and interestingly constructed, but nonetheless strange, disturbing, and a bit lacking in some intangible way. The movie follows Allen’s character Isaac, a two-time divorcee in New York City, as he finds love and finds himself in the city he adores.
Seems innocent and cliché enough. But he finds love with a girl less than half his age. And he finds himself by dating his best friend’s mistress. Yes, formulaic. No, not completely awful. Yes, a bit awful.
From the beginning, the main focus was more on the city than the characters. The film itself starts out describing the main character, Isaac through the context of the city, as he narrates, “He adored New York. He idolized it all out of proportion.” Not only does Isaac idolize it all out of proportion, but Allen, as the director, idolizes it “all out of proportion.”
Often, the camera forgets to film the people’s faces in favor of New York’s distinctive skyline, or the Brooklyn bridge, or a tree in Central Park. Which, of course is so much more important than showing the emotional reasons behind the relationship between a seventeen-year-old girl and a forty-two-year-old man, the most vital role in the ultimate outcome of Isaac’s journey to self-understanding. The picturesque scenery does give a certain vibe to the piece, but it does not give the same emotional connection as a real portrayal of human relationships would.
Moreover, the characters’ problems have no depth. Mary, a woman knowingly seeing a married man, knows she can do better, and is not sure of her feelings for him. Yet, she does not do anything to fix her problems for the longest time. And, when she does, she ends up returning to her original mess of a relationship. It simply makes no sense.
The city’s portrayal in black and white contrasts the attempted colorful mash-ups of characters in this film, and works to visually and psychologically intrigue the viewer. And the music, the music of George Gershwin, deemed at the opening the music of the city, not of the people, plays throughout, sometimes reflecting the state of the people, but more often reflecting the state of New York City.
It makes you wonder: is this a movie about romance between people, or a romance of a city?
I think of it, as Allen probably thinks of it himself, as mostly the latter.
The human characters simply do not measure up to the great character of the setting—of New York itself.
Like with Monet, from far away you see the lily pads, in this film you see the great city—its like you are breathing in the polluted city air for yourself. However, upon closer inspection, you realize all that great looking piece of art is a bunch of random brushstrokes, hitting each other in random places and making absolutely no sense whatsoever. And in this movie, the brush strokes could have been a bit straighter.
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