Manhattan (1979)
A review of Woody Allen’s 1979 Film Manhattan.
Y’all, I tried really hard to separate the art from the artists, especially because the movie is shot beautifully and the black-and-white nature of it is just beautiful. But I could not get with this film. I watched this after a couple of months since seeing A Rainy Day in New York, which I also found quite lackluster despite me waiting literally years to actually purchase a copy to see. I should’ve just watched it on Prime, but, alas, I didn’t know it was free on there.
Manhattan was free on Prime, I was bored this day, and so I just pulled it up and started watching as the background noise of sorts.
I was compelled by the fact it was from 1979, as well as how it had young Meryl Streep in it, it was set in 1970s NYC, and it was about writers. Those were the core three reasons I watched it and I had never heard of the movie before, so here I was on the couch watching it. And oh man, I had a lot of feelings about this film. Let’s dive straight into it.
Content / Cinematic Elements
I’m going to start with the positive parts of this film, because, well, the negatives are pretty bad in my opinion. The movie is really pretty, there’s a ton of nice shots and blocking scattered about of people gathering in NYC, of the buildings, one of either the Manhattan or Brooklyn Bridge (I honestly can’t tell which is which from the angle that he shot it at) and two of the characters on a bench in the foreground.
I thought those were nice touches, as well as the cinematography as a whole. The black-and-white adds a nostalgia touch to it, and there weren’t any points where I was like hmm at the shadows. The lighting was well done to keep people’s faces well-lit as well as their surroundings. The interior sets (e.g. the apartments) were also decorated quite nicely in my humble opinion.
Now…that’s all I liked about the movie. The cinematography was gorgeous, but the plot itself was quite tragic. Our main character, played by Woody Allen, is a 42-year old divorced man dating a seventeen year old. That’s the first very wrong thing in this movie.
We have a very much older man engaging in what is technically pedophilia, and, at one point of the movie, he describes about how she comes from a broken household. That’s not very comforting to hear, since now we know this girl is likely seeking validation from a man that is presumably around the same age as her father.
It’s even more disturbing once you take a step back and look at who Woody Allen is as a person. This is a brilliantly directed film, that’s for sure, but Allen is known for writing films in which he inserts a part of himself into the narrative.
His main character in this film is a comedy writer dating a seventeen year old. Allen had a career as a comedian in NYC, particularly around Greenwich Village, and also had a major scandal around molesting a seven year old—one who also happened to be his adopted daughter. At the end of the day, I can’t applaud the cheating and affairs that’s the side story of this film, nor can I say I approve of the main relationship being romanticized and justified.
I personally love that the main character’s ex-wife is played by Meryl Streep, she’s now a lesbian after divorcing him, and she’s writing a hit book about their marriage. Get it girl! Although I do wonder about the concept of ownership over a relationship’s story; like yeah, I’d write about a relationship and sneak in little details, but I’d never straight up expose the person like that. It’s interesting to see people in real life and on the screen that do that.
Overall Thoughts
I’ll say watch it if you want to see a beautiful black and white film and representations of NYC in the late seventies. Ignore the plot. It might end up infuriating you beyond repair.
