Cinema: Woody Allen Comes of Age

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In that statement, all the strands he has so carefully laid out in this movie come together. Visually, and with glorious help from an often ironically used Gershwin score, he has turned Manhattan, which is one of Allen's passions, into a dream city, deliberately contrasting the awesome aspirations implicit in its construction with the distracted lives he sees taking place in it. He says: "There's no center to the culture. We have this opulent, relatively well-educated culture, and yet we see a great city like New York deterioriate. We see people lose themselves in drugs because they don't deal with their sense of spiritual emptiness. I intend Manhattan to be a metaphor for everything wrong with our culture." He says that he and Brickman in their original script intended to make a direct comment on everything that they loathe about modern chemical, mechanized and ideological distractions. Though a few of these were lost in the final cut, it is hard to miss Allen's meaning. He does offer some tentative solutions to the issues he raises. One is contained in the character of the young girl, Tracy, played affectingly by Mariel Hemingway, 17, Papa's granddaughter. She is alarmingly direct and uncomplicated in her statement of love for Davis. His obsession with the age difference between them is something more than a bow to conventional morality; it is a convenient excuse for avoiding commitment. But while all the other characters are complicating their lives with excesses of cerebration, she is the one who offers to Isaac a reasonable definition of love: "We have laughs to gether. I care about you. Your concerns are my concerns. We have great sex."

Allen, perhaps idealistically, believes that in the end, the commitments we must make to one another come down to something that simpleā€”if we have a little luck. "Each of us is so finely tuned that to have two people meet and then intermesh is a matter of luck. I've had friends who when they marry say, 'I know we're going to have to work at it.' I always think they're wrong. The things that are really pleasurable in life, whether it's playing Softball or working on your stamp collection, really require no effort."

Allen is also convinced that the way to confront the spiritual emptiness that is much on his mind is by making a series of individual moral choices, based essentially on an instinctive sense of right or wrong. "We have to go at it the hard way, and come to terms with the fact that the universe seems to contain only the grimmest possibilities. We have to develop structures of our own that encourage us to believe that it genuinely pays to make the moral choice just from the pragmatic point of view."

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