Diane Keaton’s wit and honesty taught us that ageing and uncertainty aren’t weaknesses, they are part of what makes us human and graceful, observes Sreehari Nair.
IMAGE: Diane Keaton shows her hands after placing them on fresh cement during a ceremony at the TCL Chinese theatre in Los Angeles, August 11, 2022. Photograph: Mario Anzuoni/File Photo/Reuters
For close to 55 years, Diane Keaton made neurosis seem sexy and witty on the screen.
This is how she did it.
She would run every situation and every piece of dialogue past her innocence, past her slightly awkward build and feelings of body dysmorphia, past her dread and her electric alertness.
This is how she did it, how she found layers not explicitly present in the script.
While movie stars are forgiven their tendency to go solo and play at the top of their bent, Keaton the star could illuminate the grace notes inside a sweeping aria.
With a cock of the head, a double take, a quick bit of self-deprecation and sometimes a Bronx cheer, she brought us close to those supranormal moments that mark our otherwise ordinary lives.
When this ditzy genius slapped her temple and hummed ‘La-di-da, La-di-da‘, it was less a tribute to her cuteness than a pause for our common humanity.
In a movie culture that rewards conventionality, where it pays to lay everything out in a diagrammed manner, Diane Keaton made us all adamant for doubt.
IMAGE: Diane Keaton in Manhattan Murder Mystery.
The news of Keaton’s death came to me in spurts, as a series of premonitions and coincidences.
Four weeks ago, after I had said goodbye to my grandmother (a bow-legged Hercules, if ever there was one), I did something that I am apt to do when blue beyond words.
Like an old hand going through his cellar for his ‘remedy’ (the premium Cognac, the swift beer, the cheap moonshine), I went for my stack of Woody Allen movies.
I prefer Woody’s early comedies to his metaphysical musings, and there are those high-concept funnies that I keep going back to, but now I wanted something else.
Not something ‘deep’, but I craved a comforter and a magnifier, a movie that revealed a shade of sadness beneath its charming surface. And so I reached for Manhattan Murder Mystery, which I have come to designate as not just Woody Allen’s most under-rated work but also his most perfectly modulated one.
IMAGE: Diane Keaton in Shoot the Moon.
Manhattan Murder Mystery concerns a few weeks in the life of Larry (Woody) and Carol (Keaton), an ageing couple getting by on a steady regimen of culture and refinement.
The story takes off when this bicker-and-giggle duo, between attending a hockey game (which she endures through rolled eyes) and a Wagner opera (which he tolerates with the aid of some WW2 jokes), discovers that their next-door Manhattan neighbour has succumbed to a coronary.
The deceased woman is one half of another ageing couple whom Larry and Carol had ‘just met the other night’, and the surprise of the passing is compounded by the husband’s relaxed smile and his continuing geniality (Jerry Adler underplays superbly as Paul House, the monster hiding behind his stamp collection and his brown paper bags).
Manhattan Murder Mystery was planned as a quickie, a light-footed mixture of bedroom farce and thriller, a distraction for Woody, then locked in a bitter legal battle with Mia Farrow.
It was all going to plan, until Diane Keaton arrived as Carol and upped the stakes.
Keaton expands the scope of what was meant to be a minor Woody Allen picture and gives it the shock of recognition, this sense of a world being interpreted by a highly individualistic eye.
She never denies us our awareness, that we are watching one of cinema’s most beloved comedy pairs in action.
Yet she also brings a certain slackness to the conversations, lets the chemistry tail off just a tad, and all those slight cracks become the silver-screen’s equivalent of the boredom that eventually comes to dominate any long marriage.
To see Woody’s trusted co-improviser break the rhythms of his wisecracking is to recap the many milestones of their historic partnership and see them in a new light.
IMAGE: Diane Keaton in Annie Hall.
In Annie Hall, Keaton’s Annie pauses to ask Woody’s Alvy, “Do you love me?” and he assuages her nerves with a clincher for the ages.
“Love is too weak a word for the way I feel,” replies Woody, with the South Street Bridge as his witness. “I lurve you. I loave you. I luff you.”
16 years later, when Keaton catches Woody’s character off-guard with a ‘Larry, do you still find me attractive?’ it seems both an invocation of a beautiful memory and a requiem for it.
This time, she phrases her question as if it were a rhetorical device and not something that good old Woody can deflect with a clever epigram.
IMAGE: Diane Keaton in Manhattan Murder Mystery.
What draws you into Manhattan Murder Mystery is this added dimension that Diane Keaton brings to it.
Even as you wonder about the woman who croaked next door, you cannot stop thinking about Carol, the woman in transition.
It also helps that in Carol Lipton, you can see glimpses of Keaton’s progression as an actor, unfolding right before your eyes, like brisk paper cuts — she’s alternately the farm-fresh ingénue of Play It Again Sam and Sleeper, the freckled winger of Love & Death, the diffident diva of Annie Hall and Manhattan, the bloat-face of Shoot The Moon and Crimes Of The Heart.
This is a woman mourning the inevitable, fighting that great artist, Time, as he puts his final touches.
Here, then, is how she does it.
There’s a suppressed hysteria to Carol, a restlessness (the lovers she could’ve had, the career she never did), for which Diane Keaton finds the perfect pitch.
While Carlo Di Palma’s camera zips about, zooms and pans suddenly, and Woody keeps rattling off his zingers (“I am a detective. They lowered the height requirement”), Keaton teases out the subtexts — and she does so without ever letting the thrill or the humour drain away.
This, to my mind, is the most staggering feature of her performance here. For all her depth of perception, she never turns her character into a rosary at a nightclub.
In fact, her wonderful intuition about the groaning emptiness within Carol becomes the counterpoint for those later scenes where she christens herself a private detective, a wrinkled Nancy Drew of sorts.
As she pursues her neighbour’s death (she’s confident it was a murder), something is let loose in Carol, and you completely empathise with her feeling of being ‘alive’ after a long time.
You even forgive her questionable methods — which include feeding chocolate truffle to the chief suspect, snooping in his apartment, and inspecting his wife’s ashes. And when poor Larry Lipton cannot wrap his head around Mrs. Lipton’s this transformation, when he tries to direct her back to tepidness (‘I forbid you to go. Is that what you do when I forbid you?’), the effect is nothing less than bliss.
It’s as if you are watching the Woody-Diane chemistry of all those years being magically rekindled and carried off onto a higher plane!
There had always been a Pygmalion-like aspect to the Woody-Diane sagas. In those sagas, he would invariably be the man trying to sculpt her into the woman of his dreams, and she would be the creation who, after a period of blind worship, walks out on him.
IMAGE: Diane Keaton in Manhattan Murder Mystery.
Manhattan Murder Mystery is where Keaton tweaks this formula and stops Woody from wallowing in his masochism.
This time, she’s not his comedy partner but the main act itself.
Hers is the obsession at play in a scene of their circling a dish of Tuna Casserole while arguing the odds of sighting a dead woman on a bus.
One moment they grow all possessive of each other (Alan Alda and Anjelica Huston generate marvellous confusion as the vultures waiting out on the Liptons to separate), and the next moment they find themselves sliding deeper into the mystery at hand.
As they make the rounds of New York’s famous cultural centres, fountains and intersections searching for clues, she chides him for being such a creampuff.
“Look, Larry,” she says, taking the nebbish by his chin, “look, we’ve got plenty of time to be conservative, okay?”
In what must rank among the greatest instances of tag-teaming in cinema, she gets the urge to put on her detective’s costume in the thick of the night, while he wobbles out of the bedroom in his undershirt and pyjamas, adjusting his glasses and trying to make his slippers fit.
This is a busy movie, a chronicle of a world in constant motion. Yet it is Keaton’s commitment to Carol Lipton’s interior life that keeps us perpetually off-balance.
Her consciousness, never at peace and whirling, together with Woody and Marshall Brickman’s ingenious mixing of tones sets up the armature for a buoyant cosmopolitan tale that balances marital comedy and intrigue, melancholy and sexual envy.
Though we seldom see it cited among Woody Allen’s best works, I have a feeling that it will outlive most of his fabled ones.
But why had I specifically reached for Manhattan Murder Mystery after that fateful Friday night when they placed my grandmother on an aluminium mortuary tray and slid her into the cold? It’s hard to say why certain movies seem appropriate for certain states of pathos.
Like any average cinephile in his solitary lair, I too have my set of half-crazed rituals that I cannot quite explain.
Every time life appears to be rushing past me and I worry that I am not up to speed, I seek my cure in The Big Lebowski.
A grainy print of Thoovanathumbikal is my go-to pick for a lazy weekday afternoon when the light outside is a shade of dull grey.
December may be the most sterile month of the year, artistically speaking, but it’s also the ideal month to watch John Huston’s The Dead (the greatest adaptation of a literary work), in which a symphony of Irish voices, songs, and epiphanies bursts through the wind and the snow.
IMAGE: Diane Keaton in Manhattan Murder Mystery.
Movies are not meant to lift you out of your depression; at best they can clarify your funk. And so it was that week in Kerala, when Manhattan Murder Mystery became my artistic snorkel to a bunch of changing realities.
I watched it on my mobile in snatches. Ten minutes here, fifteen minutes there, as I shuttled between forgotten uncles and oppressive rituals.
Between pieties that could not be avoided and necessary silences, I kept returning to Carol Lipton’s twitchy energy, her refusal to accept the slow fade that Larry seems to have resigned himself to.
My grandmother now rests as a pouch of bones and ashes beside the jackfruit tree she had planted as a little girl.
There’s something almost obscene about that reduction.
And yet, watching Keaton navigate Carol’s terror of irrelevance, her frantic need to validate her instincts, I found myself arriving at a dim acceptance.
An understanding that the fight itself is what matters, that Carol’s reluctance to let Paul House get away or the way she climbs through stuck elevators and scurries across dark basements in pursuit of a hunch is its own kind of dignity.
IMAGE: Diane Keaton and Woody Allen in Play It Again Sam.
My grandmother never stopped fighting — after raising four daughters all by herself, she fought for us little ones and with her sons-in-law whom she viewed as varying degrees of ‘ineffectual’, fought her terrible feet with which she waddled about like a penguin, and then at the very end fought to remember our birth stars even when she forgot our names and finally for her breath as the fluid slowly filled her lungs and she could fight no more.
The movie seemed to be muttering something about the passage of time. It seemed to say that we don’t go gracefully, that ageing is the violent thing, and that the only proper response is Carol’s: To refuse the script, to chase the mystery, to believe in your narrative even when everyone around you thinks you have lost the plot.
Back in Mumbai, between the condolence visits (each one a knife turned, well-meaning but sharp) and the brutal business of returning to routine, I found my thoughts circling back to Manhattan Murder Mystery. To Diane Keaton.
On the night of October 11th, I waved my wife over as she was folding the sheets in the bedroom (I was nibbling on a pillow).
“You have to see this,” I said to her, pulling up the trailer for Manhattan Murder Mystery on my phone.
Over the years, she has learnt that it’s better to indulge me when I am in the grip of some movie fanaticism.
I watched her face as she watched the screen — her calf-like eyes widening, her snub nose flaring, studying Keaton’s movements, her odd phrasings of lines, the nervous energy, the jolts, the joustings.
When the 2 minute-long trailer ended, I heard my wife’s schoolgirl voice go, “She is so beautiful.”
“Yes,” I replied, with the certainty of the converted, “and she is also the world’s greatest living actress.”
I went to sleep that night trying to compose a piece in my head, the title crystallising as I drifted off, and soon I found myself reaching for a notebook near at hand lest I forget the exact sequence of words: “Lessons in mortality from the world’s greatest living actress.”
The Whatsapp message came through early on October 12th, Sunday morning: ‘The star of Annie Hall and Manhattan passes away.’
I stared at my phone and then at my notebook, where I had scrawled the title the night before.
I laughed one of those bitter, breathless laughs that’s barely distinguishable from a sob.
“Damn that Diane,” I said to no one in particular. “She never lets anything go to plan.”
Photographs curated by Manisha Kotian/Rediff
Feature Presentation: Rajesh Alva/Rediff
