While making his 2011 documentary on Woody Allen, filmmaker Robert Weide invited the acclaimed writer-director to name three “movie star crushes” he had harbored as a youngster or in adulthood.
“Rita Hayworth. Vivien Leigh. Ava Gardner,” Allen said, pausing between each name but reeling them off quickly enough to indicate that he did not need to give the matter much thought.
Of course, any longtime watcher of Allen’s films will have their own answer to that question: “Diane Keaton. Diane Keaton. Diane Keaton.”
Her appeal is indisputable. Keaton—who died on October 11 at the age of 79—was, for a time, the personal companion and, for a substantially lengthier period of time, the artistic muse of Allen. He seemed to delight in coming up with ways to show off her slightly loopy, playfully bantering, and surprisingly grounded personality. She played a wearisome feminist circa 2173 in the sci-fi sendup Sleeper (1973), a plausible stand-in for numerous heroines of Russian literature in the farce Love and Death (1975), and, of course, a scattered modern young woman in the classic comedy of romantic failure and flailing, Annie Hall (1975)—each a film from Allen’s classic period in which Keaton contributed her abundant intelligence, charm, and off-centered-ness.
Yet Allen’s subsequent castings of Keaton suggest that he perceived a sadness and even an emptiness in his favorite actress that was obscured by her outward daffiness in the crowd-pleasing Annie Hall and other films. In the deliberately humorless drama Interiors (1978), Allen cast Keaton as Renata, a poetess who vacillates between existential glumness over the state of the world and run-of-the-mill despondency over the state of her unhappy marriage. Renata only seems well-adjusted when viewed in comparison to her sister Joey (Mary Beth Hurt), an aimless sad sack, and her mother Eve (Geraldine Page), who is written as virtually a charity case: Eve is left by her husband for reasons of sheer selfishness, and, in the absence of the martial relationship that gave meaning to her life, becomes suicidal. It is a great film, but it always struck me as revealing that Allen, just a year after Annie Hall, declined to cast Keaton as another Annie Hall.
In some ways, Keaton is portrayed in even starker terms in 1979’s Manhattan, the matchless romantic comedy that co-starred Allen, Mariel Hemingway, Michael Murphy, and Meryl Streep. Here, Keaton plays Mary Wilkie, a single woman who had none of Annie Hall’s loopiness but ample reserves of astringency, sarcasm, and meanness. Sophisticated cinephiles may remember the character for her scoffing at the assertions of others in her circle of New York wits: At one point, she savages a photography exhibition for being derivative of Diane Arbus, and at another, she gladly contributes names for her “Academy of the Overrated,” whose honorees including Isak Dinesen, Norman Mailer, and Vincent van Gogh—whose surname she mispronounces with confidence. She is also a working writer; she reviews a book of Tolstoy’s letters, and types away at a well-paying novelization.
Of course, Mary Wilkie is deeply unhappy: She participates in an adulterous relationship with a married man (Murphy), and when that affair crumbles, she double-downs on a romance she has been carrying on with Allen’s character, a recently canned TV writer named Isaac Davis. Decades ago, when I first saw Manhattan, I felt Mary Wilkie embodied a certain chic cosmopolitanism—what could be more fun, I reckoned, than flitting around a big city while rattling off opinions about art, movies, and literature—but today I find the character lonely and adrift. She even alludes to an earlier, more contented version of herself when she says, apropos of nothing, “I’m just from Philadelphia, you know? I mean, we believe in God.” In a prescient touch, Mary Wilkie seems more attached to her annoying dog than any human being—a cardinal sin for Allen, who has expressed a welcome antipathy towards pets.
Yes, at the end of Annie Hall, Annie is said to be cohabitating with some fellow, and in the final scenes in Manhattan, Mary expresses abiding affection for her former lover (the Murphy character). But if romantic comedies often conspire to definitively bring their characters together (like Cary Grant and Irene Dunne in The Awful Truth), Keaton’s characters are failures in this regard: There is no reason to assume that the latest relationships of Annie or Mary will prove more enduring than the ones they have already run through; Isaac, for his part, predicts that Mary’s resumed affair will last four weeks, which sounds charitable.
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Of course, we know that, in real life, Diane Keaton never recited the marital vows. Let us hope that she found satisfaction in the raising of her two adopted children. But the melancholy take on the single life in Annie Hall and Manhattan ought not to be discounted; these are not cinematic versions of The Mary Tyler Moore Show in which a single woman “makes it after all.” In the sublimely rueful last shot of Annie Hall, are we to believe that Annie is better off for shaking hands with Allen’s character—the one guy who truly loved her—and walking away forevermore?
I have always been struck by the final two roles Allen wrote for Keaton. In 1987’s Radio Days, Keaton was given an uncommonly sublime cameo as a nightclub singer who performs Cole Porter’s “You’d Be So Nice to Come Home To”—a song that functions as a wish for a companion with whom to share a life. “You’d be so nice, you’d be paradise,” she sings, “to come home to and love.” But Keaton declined the satisfactions of marriage. Is it too much to imagine that Allen was trying to prod his old friend to settle down by casting her, in 1993, as his on-screen spouse in Manhattan Murder Mystery? They were really good together! Other movies, too, saw her possibilities as a wife, a helpmate, a soul destined to be with another: Reds, even Father of the Bride.
I mourn Diane Keaton, but I am also sad for her.
