Manhattan (1979)
½ — Manhattan (1979)
Let me be straight with you: Manhattan is one of the worst films I've seen in a long time. Not in a boring, forgettable way. In an actively unpleasant, what-am-I-watching way. The reputation this thing carries around with it like a prize is genuinely baffling to me, and I came in giving it every benefit of the doubt. The accolades, the "classic" label, the breathless reverence. I was ready to be won over. I wasn't.
The film opens with Woody Allen's character narrating over black and white shots of New York while Gershwin swells on the soundtrack, and it's immediately, aggressively pleased with itself. Then we're dropped into a room full of people talking about art and culture and cinema in that particular way that nobody actually talks, ever, in real life. They're not characters. They're mouthpieces for a writer who wants you to know how clever he is. There's a difference between sharp dialogue and a group of people reading aloud from a pretentious notebook, and this film never works out which one it's going for.
Then there's the relationship at the centre of the whole thing. Allen's character is seeing a seventeen year old girl, and the film frames this as charming. Romantic, even. It's not played as something troubling or complicated, something the story is interrogating. It's just presented as normal, as sweet, as part of the texture of life in New York. I'm sorry, but no. That's not edgy or transgressive or brave filmmaking. It's deeply uncomfortable, and not in any way that rewards the discomfort. The fact that this was celebrated, that critics lined up to call it a masterpiece, says something pretty grim about the era it came out of.
Allen himself, as an actor, does nothing for me here. He plays the same whining, neurotic, self-obsessed character he always plays, and at no point did I feel anything for him other than mild irritation that could occasionally tip into genuine dislike. The creep dial is turned all the way up and dressed up as sensitivity. Nobody else in the cast gets enough room to be a real person either. They exist to bounce off Allen, to validate him or abandon him or desire him, and that's about it.
The soundtrack, all those big Gershwin arrangements, sounds like something you'd hear played for laughs over a cutaway gag in Family Guy. I don't mean that as a compliment. It's so on the nose, so self-consciously grand, that it starts to feel like the film is scoring its own magnificence in real time. And the editing, particularly the scene transitions, kept pulling me out of whatever thin thread of engagement I'd managed to find. Abrupt cuts, awkward jumps, scenes that just sort of stop and start again somewhere else with no particular rhythm or reason.
For a romantic comedy, it's almost impressively unfunny. I didn't laugh. I didn't smile. I didn't feel the warmth that even a mediocre entry in the genre can usually muster. A film can have unlikeable characters and still be compelling. Plenty of my favourites are full of awful people. But you need something: a point of view, a wit, a genuine human pulse underneath the posturing. Manhattan has none of that, as far as I could tell. It's hollow at the centre and dressed up in critical prestige like a borrowed coat.
Half a star, and I'm being generous with the half.
Rating: ½ | Year: 1979 | Watched: 2025-04-12
Where to watch
Watch in the UK
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Related on Movies With Macca
More from the 1970s: Fantastic Planet (1973) · Here and Elsewhere (1976) · Italianamerican (1974) · Punishment Park (1971)
More comedy: The Eagle (1925) · The General (1926) · Americana (2023) · The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! (1988)
More drama: Viy (1967) · Wonder (2017) · A Better Tomorrow (1986) · Beautiful Boy (2018)
