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Who is this man? And why are these people doing these terrible things, if not always to him, then always in his shocked presence? His name is Isaac Davis, and he is directed by, played by and created by Woody Allen (with the assistance of his co-writer and friend, Marshall Brickman). Davis is the central character in Allen's new movie, Manhattan, and to put the matter simply, he is the mainspring of a masterpiece that is that perfect blending of style and substance, humor and humanity that his friends and followers were convinced he would one day make. It is also a rare summarizing statement, at once assured and vulnerable, in which an artist casts a selective eye over the fantastical life of his times and shapes his observations into an unsparing, compassionate, always witty and radically moral narrative. Tightly constructed, clearly focused intellectually, it is a prismatic portrait of a time and place that may be studied decades hence to see what kind of people we were.
In essence, what Woody Allen is saying in Manhattan is that our mental diets consist very largely of cultural junk food. We eat it up eagerly, because we are under the misapprehension that it is actually health food. The harm it does is hidden from us for years, like that of environmental carcinogens. We do not connect the workings of these intellectual pollutants with those strange buzzings in our brains—that erratically sounding, endlessly distracting static that prevents contemporary men and women from hearing one another's voices clearly, and therefore from making the connections they desperately need. The deftness with which Allen exfoliates failing and failed relationships, the delicacy with which he demonstrates how broad cultural collapse influences personal deficiency, the balance he strikes between tenderness for the victims of these disasters and toughness about their own contributions to the moral lassitude of the time give Manhattan its singular, touching resonance.
It is a very deceptive movie. Shot in black and white (actually in a rich variety of grays painstakingly rendered by Cinematographer Gordon Willis), it announces at once that it intends to be different from the general run of movies. Still, the picture induces howls of laughter in the opening reels, raising expectations that we are again simply going to see the superb comic character whom Allen has been developing since the early '60s. After a while, however, the raucousness dies down. The movie never ceases to be funny, but it starts to be something more. In the end, by administering a series of steadily intensifying shocks of recognition, silence in the theater is almost complete—and there is something awed about it. We are not prepared for the earnestness, integrity and palpable truthfulness that is offered in Manhattan.