Review of Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993) by Paul Z — 12 Jun 2009

Woody Allen may be one of the most naturalistic, simplistic and self-effacingly unambitious filmmakers still working, but he can fool you. Or at least he fooled me. The plot itself is very clever, the murder plot being loaded with wit and old film noir and pulp novel knowledgability and the subplots and characters being typical Woody Allen tools accompany it with a successfully funny irony. It just seems so quick, so fleeting, so light.

Really though, there is a lot of nuance that goes into this little film. In some sense like a Billy Wilder film (perhaps the reason for the film's early Double Indemnity reference), Woody will use cinematic techniques very heavily, but absolutely none of it is called to attention. There are minute details everywhere, from an elusive black cat crossing during a seemingly inconsequential expository scene, and the intent to keep decorative flowers in the foreground throughout shots of Woody and Keaton bickering about the possibility of foul play on the part of their neighbor. When Alan Alda is talking on the phone with Keaton at a questionable hour of the night, he puts his beer on his coffee table and the camera stays on it, evoking volumes about his character in relation to Keaton, his loneliness, his emptiness. This is all done so well indeed that the effortlessness can almost be mistaken for no effort. The cinematography is characterized by an almost entirely hand-held quality, simple pointing and shooting, panning and zooming, following, the most elementary employments. But in the apparent deficiency of technique, there is enormously effective technique. He relaxes our attention to aesthetics, and so we feel that we're watching a light, breezy little geriatric romantic comedy.

Indeed, a central theme of the movie seems to be indifference, which tends to come with age when people seem to unfussily accept that there are many things they've never gotten to do and probably never will, and in effect some, like Woody's character, seem to see life's reality as a place where nothing exciting happens so there's no reason to feel dejected because there's no point of comparison to make between yesterday and today. It gives the murder plot a refreshing sense of adventure for Keaton and Woody must awaken from his humble grind to save his marriage from her newfound sense of excitement.

Sometimes, its the unadorned format that gives the film stylistic release. There is one moment where Keaton glances out of a restaurant window at a passing city bus. This is the kind of shot that could've looked differently in the hands of nearly every other director. It's a murder mystery after all, and one would take for granted the manipulation of light, a sleeker film stock, but no. It is as if we are looking not at a screen depiction but looking in real life at a passing bus on the street.

The two have not lost any of their flare as a comic duo. Roughly thirty years after Sleeper, Love and Death and Annie Hall, they have a chemistry to which Woody's teamings with his other female leads cannot compare. They both have so much character even while playing the age-old staples of their acting careers; Woody plays virtually the only role of his entire acting career. There's just a wise humility to their on-screen antics that keeps them ripe.