SONNY BUNCH: Diane Keaton, 1946–2025.
Manhattan and Annie Hall are slowly being written out of the cinematic history books thanks to critical discomfort with Woody Allen, but Keaton’s work as Allen’s muse in those two films is iconic for good reason. As the title character in Annie Hall, Keaton embodied the archetype that would much later come to be known as the Manic Pixie Dream Girl. But whereas the trope would evolve over the years to serve fully and solely as a means for the lead actor’s growth, Keaton’s Annie was a real and realized character, while Allen’s Alvy seems stuck.
And she was a fashion plate, of course: Keaton’s wardrobe in that movie, the bowler hats and slacks and vests and suspenders, was chosen by the actress herself, and I don’t think you can overstate the impact this brand of feminine-masculine quirk had on the fashion landscape. It’s a key look for a character that Allen wrote at least partly based on Keaton herself; Allen’s awkward nebbish is really only tolerable because of her self-deprecatingly confident tomboy routine, and her Academy Award for Best Actress was well deserved.
As Roger Ebert noted in a re-review of Manhattan, “Allen’s whole career is based on making the secondary characters heroic,” and that is certainly true of Keaton’s work in Annie Hall and Manhattan. Allen’s stand-in leads need someone to save them from themselves, and Keaton serves . . . well, if not quite that role, then something close to it. Less so in Manhattan, I suppose, where she again serves as an audience stand-in of sorts, though one who mostly says to be saying “Get a load of this guy, can you believe him?” The appeal is there, but she’s smart enough to know to get away, and Keaton sells it with skill.
The two greatest crime dramas of all time and two of the greatest romantic comedies of all time, in a single decade, all of which have Keaton at their center. That’s not a bad legacy, particularly when forty-five more years were to follow. Rest in peace.
Read the whole thing. Allen’s writing in Manhattan is nowhere near as sharp as it was in Annie Hall and in the early 1990s, Mariel Hemingway‘s character was retroactively seen as foreshadowing Allen’s relationship with Soon-Yi Previn, a woman who is 34-years younger than Allen. (Hemingway’s Tracy character was allegedly inspired by Woody’s late-1970s relationship with actress Stacey Nelkin, then age 17) But Manhattan’s cinematography and music are absolutely intoxicating, and with the exception of a cameo at the end of 1987’s Radio Days, it would be the last time Keaton would work with Allen until 1993’s Manhattan Murder Mystery, the first film Allen made after everything had hit the fan.