Fall 2014 #12: Manhattan (1979) - Woody Allen

Final stretch! Down to the last five movies on the list. I know this is my Fall 2014 Movie Bucketlist but it’s never too late to immerse yourself in classic cinema!

So I’m starting to learn what makes a good well-rounded Moviecation List. Each one needs a Hitchcock film, a Studio Ghibli film, maybe a Coen brothers or a Tarantino, a silent film, a horror movie, a Best Picture winner. And of course a Woody Allen film. I chose Manhattan because it was on Netflix when I made the list but as fate would have it, it got deleted before I got to it.

Also it has 19 Academy Award Nominee Meryl Fucking Streep!

I actually assumed this movie would be an Annie Hall-style love story with Woody Allen and Meryl Streep. Turns out Meryl plays his bisexual (or possibly lesbian) ex-wife and Manhattan is a love story between Woody Allen and Diane Keaton… or so we think.

Of course it starts with him dating a 17-year-old high schooler so the whole film is shrouded in a kind of uncomfortable feeling, similar to the one you get when you see Woody Allen promoting monogamy.

Anyway so the film has that sort of “Here’s real, complicated people living their real, complicated lives, so screw conventional storytelling” that I actually love and think very few writers are able to pull off. It’s bordering on satire while also portraying authentic situations. The only person I think who is pulling that off today is Lena Dunham.

Feel like a line from Girls? It’s because we’re the protagonists of our own stories! A lot of people hate that “Here are some deeply flawed characters who are aimlessly navigating their sometimes boring lives.” I don’t care, I love it.

So the film is objectively no Annie Hall. It doesn’t have the complicated timeline that makes for one of the coolest love stories in cinema. But Manhattan is full of messed-up people trying to figure out what they want.

One major difference I did notice from Annie Hall is Manhattan’s reliance on music, as well as sequences of driving. I want to say the music made the film a little more sappy, with the repetition of Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue elevating the story to capture the majesty of New York City. Even the black and white sort of seemed to be a reference to a period of higher culture, acknowledging a city in decline.

The driving I took to be an understanding of the characters constantly being in motion, sometimes stuck, but always navigating the complicated network of roads in the largest city in America.

The film had its boring moments as well as its poignant moments, about love and growing old, and I definitely enjoyed watching it.

Fall 2014 #4: Breakfast At Tiffany’s (1961) - Blake Edwards

This may be the second time in my life that I’ve been tricked into thinking a movie is about breakfast when it’s really not. I mean… at least this time a character actually does EAT breakfast, and to give the movie’s credit it IS at Tiffany’s.

I guess I don’t know why I thought this was some weird movie where Audrey Hepburn throws elaborate breakfast parties, and I assumed her character’s name was Tiffany because I know nothing about jewelry.

Instead I got to see an amazing love story between Holly Golightly (played by Audrey Hepburn) and Paul Varjak (played by George Peppard). 

Holly Golightly is the eccentric socialite that embodies New York City in all of its classiness, elegance, and uncontainable energy. She regularly throws parties, knows all of New York’s richest men, and makes $100 a week by unknowingly exchanging coded information between an incarcerated mobster and his lawyer (which I’m assuming in 1961 is enough to afford a nice one bedroom apartment in Manhattan).

But Holly is not all that she seems, and the film gives off the idea that Paul is introduced as a means of rescuing her from her past and her own self-destructive future. I loved seeing Audrey as the independent woman, but somewhere along the way, Paul’s love for her becomes the only thing that’s going to save her from herself, and I don’t know how I feel about that.

I mean he REALLY loves her.

And the more Holly begins to be consumed by her past and her obsession with acquiring a rich husband, the more Paul becomes the “male protagonist” destined to save the damsel in distress. For example.

I had seen this gif here a million times, and I always thought, “Cool, what a nice feminist speech about how women are not objects to be owned by the men that love them.”

But Paul does rescue her from herself, and he does prove that her belonging to him is the best thing for her, because it means she will be loved and respected. It’s a weird dichotomy that I don’t know exactly how to interpret, the line between a woman needing a man’s love to complete her and a woman having the ability to decide that the man who loves and respects her is where she should be because she deserves to be loved and respected. 

Either way, Breakfast at Tiffany’s won two Oscars, for Best Score and Best Song. It’s a classic in every sense (despite the negative depiction of women and the offensive caricature of Japanese Americans). Also, Audrey has gone on the record saying it was one of her most challenging roles, since she was an introvert trying to play an extrovert. It’s also important to note that Truman Capote, who wrote the novella on which the film is loosely based, demanded that Marilyn Monroe be cast as Holly Golightly, but Paramount refused.