By Stuart Mitchner
I wanted to be a movie star. I wanted people — lots of people I didn’t know — to love me.
—Diane Keaton, from Brother & Sister
In A Biographical Dictionary of Film (Knopf 1994), David Thomson suggests that Diane Keaton’s Best Actress Academy Award for Annie Hall “must have been a tribute to her likability.” According to Thomson, Woody Allen’s film was “nearly an ‘ism in the late seventies, a way of dressing, reacting, and feeling. When people fall in love with an idea, they don’t bother to check how much substance it has. Being Woody Allen’s best girl then seemed a very hip role.” After noting how “deadpan cute” Keaton was “in her basic attitudes,” and after mentioning her two previous Allen pictures, Thomson says “in Annie Hall it was as if her real self had emerged. Everyone felt good about her.”
In spite of all the good stuff that he leaves unsaid, Thomson’s summation is worth repeating: everyone felt good about her. Is that better than everyone loved her or the idea of her? If you were there in 1977, you were in love with more than an idea. For sure you were charmed by the oddball romance of Alvy and Annie, “charm” being one of moviegoing’s synonyms for the all-too-easy-to-say L-word. It may be Keaton is the loveliest foil a lovesick urban clown like Allen ever performed with, his affection for New York all the more relatable because it meshes with Keaton’s unique presence and personal music in her embarrassed comment after a tennis match, an iconic Meet Cute moment:
“Oh, God, whatta — whatta dumb thing to say, right? I mean, you say it, ‘You play well,’ and then right away I have to say ‘you play well.’ Oh, oh, God, Annie. Well, oh well, la-dee-da, la-dee-da, la-la. Yeah.”
How many moviegoers woke up to something new in that scene? Annie a stylish bumbling delight, hands on hips, one elbow bent, big tie hanging down five inches below her black vest, scolding herself (“wotta jerk”) as she continues to babble charming nonsense.
The Halls of Wisconsin
Keaton’s memoir Brother & Sister (Knopf 2020) makes clear how close to Diane Hall’s family history Allen’s film was, the main difference being that Annie had to come from a midwestern family, not her real-life Southern California one. The teenage boy on the book’s cover is her brother Randy, renamed Duane in the film, where he’s played by Christopher Walken. Keaton quotes from her mother Dorothy Hall, who after admitting that she only saw Diane (“her mannerisms, speech pattern, expressions, dress, hair”), adds “that the Hall family was depicted as funny, especially Duane, a unique personality Woody’s character couldn’t cope with. Colleen Dewhurst playing me was not a high spot. She didn’t come off well. Grammie Hall was a sight gag…. The audience loved it all. This will certainly be a very popular movie.”
Mrs. Hall’s reference to a “unique personality” is a fond mother’s version of Randy Hall, the complexly troubled individual who inspired Keaton’s memoir and provides the book’s epigraph: “I’m starting to think of myself in the past tense. What I remember is what I am: a million fragments passing in a storm.” No wonder, then, that the most hilarious turn in New Yorker Alvy’s visit to the Wisconsin Halls occurs when Duane confides in him after dinner: “Can I confess something? I tell you this as an artist, I think you’ll understand. Sometimes when I’m driving … on the road at night… I see two headlights coming toward me. Fast. I have this sudden impulse to turn the wheel quickly, head-on into the oncoming car. I can anticipate the explosion. The sound of shattering glass. The flames rising out of the flowing gasoline.” Next we see a glassy-eyed Duane driving Alvy and Annie to the airport; it’s a rainy night, and Allen’s Alvy is staring nervously at the lights of oncoming cars.
Brother Reviews Sister
Keaton’s next significant role after Annie was as, in her own words, the “ambitious, free-loving left-wing feminist journalist” Louise Bryant in Warren Beatty’s 1981 film Reds. According to Keaton, it was the first time her brother ever wrote to her about her acting, saying: “I think you outdid yourself … there were times when I wanted to stop the projector so the moment wouldn’t move so fast. Where did you learn to use your face so well? I think you ran across every emotion in the book, then threw the book away and made up some of your own.”
David Thomson thought Keaton’s “finest performance” was her “complex portrait of lover, heroine, feminist, and weary companion” to Beatty’s John Reed. The key word is “heroine,” for it’s a heroic performance. Gone is the lovably dithery and “deadpan cute” ambiance of Annie Hall, yet Keaton remains not only true to the essence of the role, she still radiates “likability” as you follow her through actor-director Beatty’s epic biopic (complete with intermission). You may not love her as you do Annie but there are times when, like her brother, you want to slow down the film so you can fully appreciate what she’s doing, and the scenes where she forcefully holds her own, lashing out at Beatty’s Reed and Jack Nicholson’s Eugene O’Neill, may be what her brother had in mind when he said she “threw the book away” and made up her own emotions.
Dizzying Transitions
When reports of Keaton’s death coincided with my reading of Thomas Pynchon’s new novel Shadow Ticket, I had no trouble imagining a place for her in his world. That there was room is implicit in Richard Poirier’s advisory that to “read Pynchon properly you would have to be astonishingly learned not only about literature but about a vast number of other subjects … so that you can take in stride every dizzying transition from one allusive mode to another.”
Having seen, so far, five Keaton films since her passing, I’ve been struck by something explosive and uninhibited in her performative persona, usually expressed through laughter. It’s in the way she can let herself go in Something’s Gotta Give (2003) as Erica, the successful 57-year-old playwright living in style in the Hamptons laughing and gamboling her way into a life-or-death romance with boorish, in-your-face 63-year-old Jack Nicholson.
Seven years earlier in Marvin’s Room (1996), she’s 50-year-old Bessie, sensible, devoted, and doomed (leukemia) enduring a wild drive into the ocean with Hank, her seriously disturbed, fresh-from-the-asylum nephew, played by a stunning, 18-year-old Leonardo DiCaprio, who would surely have had Keaton thinking of her brother Randy. When her wild, beautiful nephew crashes through a chained barrier and heads straight for the roaring surf, Bessie screams “NO!” in middle-aged shock and disbelief, but minutes later as the swerving, surf-splashing ride ends, she’s believably, beautifully transitioned into an ecstatic teenager, drunk with joy, laughing along with her new best friend.
Pynchon Comes to Life
Yes, Pynchon’s back. There’s too much in Shadow Ticket for one column and my notes are full of passages I never had time or space to quote from. Of all the novel’s variously delightful females, from the mobster’s fiancée April to the dizzy cheese heiress Daphne, I neglected to mention my favorite, Terike, a Budapest motorcycle babe (this being 1932, the bike she calls “a metaphysical critter” is a 500 cc Guzzi Sport 15). I flashed on Keaton and DiCaprio’s wild ride as soon as Terike set off with the detective protagonist Hicks McTaggart in the sidecar, “the rig speeding over cobbles and under arches, flying, it seems, above broken road surfaces and up impossible grades, through gateways, down indoor-outdoor corridors that seem too narrow for a bike let alone a combination.”
You can feel Pynchon coming to life with Terike on his way to one of the novel’s numerous prose cadenzas: “You want a gearbox disassembled and repaired on the move, time and a half if you’re doing over 100 miles per hour, she’s your gal. She can get anything that’ll fit in a sidecar across the worst terrain you can think of, war-damaged cities a specialty, master of urban obstacle-running, she can go straight up the sides of walls, pass through walls, ride upside down on the overheads, cross moving water, jump ditches, barricades, urban chasms one rooftop to the next, office-building corridors to native-quarter alleyways quicker than a wink.”
Yes, Pynchon’s rolling and the best is yet to come as he describes Terike’s first time beneath the city as a dispatch biker, an astonishing passage that ends on “a silent patch in the undercity clamoring with youthfulness as messengers in dusters, helmets, and goggles pull out of the traffic to gather briefly for quick tunnelside smoke breaks and, finding themselves enticed by surfaces whose acoustics promise to be kind to those who can’t sing but must anyway, gathering for eight or sixteen bars or so, echoing up branch tunnels, exit ramps, up to the street, which now seems like daytime to a resident of the night.”
More To Come?
Since I quoted numerous reviews suggesting that Shadow Ticket may be Pynchon’s last book, I have heard from a well-connected email friend in L.A. via an August interview with film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum that “Pynchon actually has a second completed novel” in store for us. While, as far as I know, there are no completed pictures coming from Diane Keaton, she’s very much alive in films like Marvin’s Room and Shoot the Moon, where, to paraphrase her brother, she covers “every emotion in the book,” then throws the book away and makes up some of her own.”