In Manhattan, Woody Allen shows a weak, but tender, side of masculinity.
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The ending of “Manhattan” has haunted me since the first time I saw it, and I’ve seen it many times. It is the only movie that I intentionally watch more than once.
Earlier Woody Allen has broken-up with Mariel Hemingway in a touching scene at a lunch counter where he maturely tells her that he is too old for her and that she should be with boys closer to her age. She cries silently at this rejection after she has given him everything he asked for.
At the time Allen is emotionally strong, having another girl friend to support his ego, probably Diane Keaton. Then Keaton dumps him and he is alone and lonely. He lies on a couch with a tape recorder thinking of reasons not to kill himself and comes up with one, the Marx Brothers.
In desperation he leaves his apartment and runs to Hemingway’s building to beg her to resume their love affair and to stop her from traveling to England where she has a marvelous opportunity to study with a theater company.
The scene powerfully depicts male weakness dramatically compared to the strength of women, even girls. Hemingway says that she can’t change her plans at the last minute and that it will be only six months before she returns. He says that she will meet lots of boys there and they will try to win her affection, endangering their relationship. Finally, she tells the pathetic Allen, “You just have to trust people.”
As the movie ends and Hemingway leaves the lobby of her apartment building for the waiting car that will take her to the airport and to England. The camera then focuses on Allen whose expression reflects the realization that he is the weakling, a pathetic loser, and the teenage girl is his moral superior.
It is an unbelievably brave, self-deprecating moment in a movie that would become a classic.
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Photo: Manhattan/YouTube
At the time of its release in 1979, no less than Andrew Sarris of the “Village Voice” called Woody Allen’s “Manhattan” the “one truly great American film of the 1970s,” and he specifically referred to the Allen’s self-deprecating conclusion as to what capped its greatness. Until then, Allen always presented himself as a sympathetic loser. In “Manhattan” he offered up a darker and more authentic side to his nerd persona, that of the presumptuous New York intellectual who is a little too confident that somebody as smart and professionally successful as himself can always get whom he wants. “Manhattan,” thus,… Read more »