Manhattan
Another review of a movie I’ve wanted to see for a while…
Manhattan- A Review By Chris Damitio
Again, a movie I thought I knew something about but was completely off on. Manhattan is a sort of cynical and sort of sweet exploration of what love is in the adult world. Woody Allen is a sort of anti-hero who judges the world around him while committing indiscretions of his own.
The film starts with Isaac (Woody Allen) and his 17 year old girlfriend (Muriel Hemingway) having dinner with his best friend Yale and his wife of 12 years. Soon we learn that Yale is having an affair with Mary, a writer and that Isaac’s ex wife left him for another woman. Their son lives with the women.
Yale justifies his past affairs as inconsequential and Isaac condemns infidelity. Yale says his current affair is more serious. Isaac and his young girlfriend meet her at a gallery. Isaac’s girlfriend loves him but he can’t take her serious because of her age despite her obvious maturity and depth. It is she who is the heroin of the film.
Yale ends the affair, Isaac becomes involved with Mary, and casts his girlfriend away. Yale and Mary become involved again and cast Yale’s wife and Isaac aside. Isaac realizes that he made a mistake and tries to reconcile with his girlfriend, but she is on her way to London. She will return in six months and says to him that six months is not that long if they love each other and that he shouldn’t worry because everyone gets corrupted. He smiles and the movie ends.
If anything, Isaac’s callousness in ending his relationship is preferable to lying about an affair. And yet, none of them are innocent, except the one who hasn’t had time to be corrupted yet. One has to wonder if the pain he caused her was not the first stage of the end of her innocence.
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3 Responses “Manhattan”
Great movie. But Tracy says, “NOT everyone gets corrupted.”
Ah…that makes me like her even more…
Thanks.
Here’s a great review of Manhattan by the late libertarian economist, political philosopher, historian and activist Murray Rothbard, from 1979 (p. 5 et. seq.):
http://www.mises.org/journals/lf/1979/1979_05-06.pdf
In the fall of 1981 while in college, I fell hard for the music of George Gershwin thanks to my roommate’s LP of the terrific Manhattan soundtrack. I think I caught the movie while on Christmas break thereafter, on cable. While on spring break several months later, I met Rothbard at a dinner in Manhattan at which he spoke (having met him also while in high school, at a Cato Institute seminar Dartmouth), and discussed the effect his review of Manhattan had on me as a young cultural historian (masquerading in those years, as it happened, as an economics major). Since he and I shared with Woody Allen a passion for old 1920s/1930s pop culture – W.C. Fields, the Marx Brothers, Gershwin and Dixieland jazz, for merest starters – we found much common ground.