Voices from the Couch

LIKE VICTIMS of psychoanalysis everywhere, Woody Allen's characters talk too much. Allen has, we're told by the many promotional articles or-chestrated to coincide with Manhattan's opening, spent an hour a day for the past 20 years talking to his analyst about his problems. It shows. From the low-key beginning--with Allen's voice dubbed over panoramas of the New York skyline--to the emotional crises towards the end, Manhattan is a movie of words. Its characters erect their troubles out loud, and try to tear them down in conversation.

The same disease ravaged Allen's last film, Interiors, and laid low his high-serious intentions. In Manhattan, it is less severe, and Allen's clever lines flow as copiously as ever, insuring that Manhattan is an entertaining movie. But the sheer wordiness of its characters keeps them from being engaging and distances them from any emotional contact with the audience. In farces like Sleeper or Love and Death, of course, no one expected the characters to reach out and seize viewers' hearts. But Allen has broadcast his intention to write serious comedies, or funny dramas. Judged by the standards of serious film he seems to invoke--namely, Bergman--Manhattan falls far short.

Its characters declare their problems bluntly to each other, instead of living them out or summing them up in an act. Bergman's characters can get away with stating their naked feelings because he elevates their conversations from daily life. When Allen uses these declarations to comic effect they work, but as serious character-building they don't. Diane Keaton's character--a pushy writer, neurotic like everyone else in the movie--declares, 'I come from Philadelphia, and I believe in God!" and Allen has scored both a laugh and and illumination of her character. She blurts, "I'm beautiful and I'm bright and I don't deserve this!" and he scores another laugh, but one that was not intended.

Mariel Hemingway as Allen's 17-year-old lover suffers the same verbal excess. When Allen tells her he has found another woman, she responds, "We have laughs together. We have good times. Your concerns are my concerns. We have good sex." The curtain of the drama rips to reveal a scriptwriter desperately hanging more significance on the lines than they can handle.

ALLEN'S TROUBLE with writing serious dialogue does not totally overwhelm Manhattan because much of his intellectual humor remains, and his cinematic direction--with the work of Gordon's Willis's camera--continues to develop in exciting ways. Manhattan is shot entirely in black and white. Along with careful application of gushy George Gershwin music at critical moments, the black and white suggests nothing more than Capra and corniness.

The neurosis and confusion in Manhattan's plot is thus both unexpected and disturbing. It is a story of love affairs nearly broken up, communication nearly established, people nearly honest with each other. If Allen was unfair to California in Annie Hall by depicting it as a doped-up land of sun and stylessness, he is doubly hard on his native city. The extensive location shooting in Manhattan--of the Museum of Modern Art, Rizzoli's Bookstore, Hayden Planetarium, even the Dalton School--may be the worst thing for the heartland's vision of New York City since the fiscal crisis. Oklahomans visiting the city will expect to see neurotic Woody Allens with 17-year-olds on their arms in every public place.

As in Allen's other recent films, he plays himself or a close approximation thereof, in Manhattan. But this short, balding little Jew has come a long way from the pitiful failure he played in Bananas. In Manhattan he's successful television writer who has no trouble meeting women. The new Allen is more fleshed out and believable than the old, but the troubles which the old might have hidden with quips are now revealed as deep crevasses in his personality. When Keaton tells him she is still in love with old flame Michael Murphy. Allen is reduced to shrugging his shoulders and spluttering, "Really? Really? Do you really mean that?"

In each Allen movie, Keaton's performances improve by an inch or two, but she still has miles to go before anyone can take her seriously as an actress. Try hard as she may she still sounds like she's reading lines. Murphy is little better. Hemingway does her best to make the role of a 17-year-old in love with a 42-year-old seem believable, and her scene breaking up with Allen strikes the most genuine emotional note in Manhattan.

WITH MANHATTAN, the media tell us, Allen enters a new phase of his career--intertwining the consummation of his humor in Annie Hall with the depth and seriousness of Interiors. If so, the Interiors strand nearly strangles Manhattan. Why are so many critics deaf to the poverty of the language in Interiors and parts of Manhattan? The direct study of personality in a society of encounter sessions and "meaningful relationships" threatens to scour all metaphors and imagery from both critics and artists.

Allen remains potent only when he weds his old instinct for incongruous humor to his new skill as a director. Several times in Manhattan he accomplishes this, points to promising possibilities in his use of language and the camera, and creates memorable images. Allen and Keaton wandering across the lunar surface in the planetarium, discussing their affair, hold our attention, but not the same couple silhouetted before an empty screen a la Bergman.

At a serious moment Allen can bring up the interesting point that New York's chic artist culture may create its own neuroses so it won't have time to worry about true problems, like death. But we forget that and remember instead Allen's head filling the screen next to an ape's skull. He rants about the decline of morality to Murphy, then points to the simian and says, "In a few years we'll be like him--and he was probably one of the beautiful people."