Woody Allen Is Both a Genius and a Predator—Why Mariel Hemingway's New Revelation Matters
March 26, 2015 in Blogs
This is my own garbage confession: Woody Allen’s “Manhattan” used to be one of my favorite movies. If I am confessing fully, I have to admit that on some level, I will always feel drawn to it, maybe in the way that disillusioned former church-goers might feel a yearning from somewhere deep inside of them when they pass a door they know on so many levels they can never cross again. Knowing the truth about what you believe and longing for the time before you knew it are not mutually exclusive states of being.
That is how I, and I’m sure many others, have long approached “Manhattan,” since I became aware of the allegations of sexual abuse against Woody Allen and started seeing the film’s April-December “romance” in the stark and unforgiving light which it deserves. To love that film as an adult is to embrace a willful innocence about art, business and life that none of us can really afford to begin with.
Mariel Hemingway was 17 when she played the teenage girlfriend of Woody Allen, then 44, in the film he wrote, directed and starred in. It’s considered one of his finest pieces of work — and on many purely aesthetic levels, it is. It is witty, lovingly shot, and in so many ways a frank and unflinching indictment of conflicted male desire, pitting Hemingway’s winsome high schooler Tracy against the charmingly neurotic intellectual (and very much adult) Mary (Diane Keaton) in Allen’s Isaac’s struggle between his head and his heart.
Blah, blah, blah your conflicted male desire.
If you had asked me at 17 if I would ever date a 44-year old, I might have actually barfed.
If you had asked me at 19 if I thought there was anything disgusting about Tracy and Isaac’s relationship in “Manhattan,” I would have said something like, well, it’s not real life, is it? It’s a story. And to make great literature and film and drama, we have to create spaces of empathy for characters who …read more
Source: ALTERNET
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