Interiors

Directed by Woody Allen
Written by Woody Allen
Starring Kristin Griffith, Mary Beth Hurt, Richard Jordan, Diane Keaton, E.G. Marshall, Geraldine Page, Maureen Stapleton, Sam Waterston
USA, 1978
Rated PG ("mature" themes)

C-

ADOLESCENSE AND ELITISM: THE FILMS OF WOODY ALLEN AND INGMAR BERGMAN
Ingmar Bergman and Woody Allen are trying to say the same things with their movies. They are the two different sides of the same coin, and the reason why they have been two of my favorite directors over the past two or three years is because their movies are very adolescent in nature, with a kind of urgency to grasp what cannot be grasped and to wrestle with the corny issues of alienation and religion that I’ve been having fits over. (Max von Sydow’s struggle in The Seventh Seal relates to mine more than any other character’s in movie history.) Bergman is serious and angst-ridden and Allen is muddled and self-deprecating; Bergman made me understand myself and Allen let me laugh at what I understood. In their work, I felt I had found my ambassadors and spokespeople, just as I found similar voices in the art of Joni Mitchell and James Dean. But there’s an arrogance to adolescent anguish (mine began early, probably because of Bergman), the idea that everything revolves around one’s problems, and there’s a conceit and self-importance to the films of Ingmar Bergman and Woody Allen too, and often it’s fitting. The movies don’t work sometimes when the self-obsession goes overboard.

Interiors was the first attempt of Woody Allen’s to make a "serious" movie. Made after probably his greatest film, Annie Hall, it is about the artsy-arrogant mentalities of the sophisticated-pontificating-professor and the deep-and-feeling-hippie-actor in that film, but this time, Woody Allen is taking those kinds of characters seriously, instead of making fun of them. Interiors was intended as a homage to Allen’s idol, Bergman, but it has taken out all the subtlety of Bergman and replaced it with all the overt banalities that made for some of the Swedish master’s most pretentious work. It’s filled to the brim with everything Americans laugh at in foreign films- all the clichés of suffering and self-destruction and philosophy. I think it’s funnier than the intentional humor in Take the Money and Run.

The immaculate Mel Bourne sets and the sandy Gordon Willis cinematography create an appropriate atmosphere of dead air. The opening shots are taken right out of Cries and Whispers, and we can predict the film’s pace and acting and ending once we see lingering shots of the earthy tones and sullen decoration of the characters’ habitat; when in doubt, Woody’s motto is "just stare at one of the vases." A normal dysfunctional American family drifts in and out of this setting: the obsessive interior decorator mommy (Geraldine Page); the established poet daughter (Diane Keaton); the talentless, restless, bookish-looking daughter (Mary Beth Hurt); the sexy TV actress junkie daughter (Kristin Griffith); and daddy E.G. Marshall. Daddy tells mommy (whose complete fragility is seen as self-centered) that he wants a trial separation (he makes sure to tell her it’s not irrevocable) when mommy really doesn’t have a hope of regaining her man; daddy informs the family a while into the film that he’s going to marry the sprightly vulgarian Maureen Stapleton.

The Chekhovian three sisters Bergman so often uses is another evident tribute/theft to/from Cries and Whispers, as is the close attention paid to delicate sounds like breathing and the turning of a page on the soundtrack. Interiors is in the tradition of such Bergman films as Dreams and Cries and Whispers, both of which are films that claim to be about important, probing human issues but are peppered with tired monologues (the latter is a stylistic triumph, though, and is often moving.) Bergman has always had a mastery of his sensual images, working with such greats as Gunnar Fischer and Sven Nykvist, but in a number of his movies, he is intent on telling us rather than showing us. His characters carp and complain and, in his most unsuccessful films and scenes, they are reduced to one-noted people who preach to themselves and pompously try to illuminate everyone else’s emptiness. Woody Allen cooks up one long monologue and that’s his film; the characters are often seen sitting next to windows, pressing their hands to the glass, accusing each other of lack of love, and accusing themselves in voice-over.

Once Woody Allen’s tributes to Bergman (and other, mostly foreign, directors) were fun, funny, like his spoof of The Seventh Seal in Love and Death, possibly his most immaturely hilarious comedy. Here, he intellectualizes the spoofing; are we really to take all this pretension seriously? It must be a parody, but the whole film lacks the sting of criticism. We can’t quite bring ourselves to believe that the witty Woody could be so stern, could make such a straight-laced drama. It comes off not as Woody Allen’s most mature and intelligent film, but as Ingmar Bergman’s worst and most patronizing film.

The worst of it is the dialogue which, I’m hoping, was intentionally bad. Mary Beth Hurt is stuck with the most stinky lines, and that’s why her performance is so unbearable. Her character jumps at the chance to psycho-analyze her mother at the film’s climax with an eloquent speech peppered with indictments; this is moments before Geraldine Page goes out into the beach and kills herself (coincidentally, Bergman released a movie in the States a month later called Autumn Sonata, which had much of the same stuff between a mousy daughter and her unloving mother.) At the end, we find another throwback to Cries and Whispers when Hurt writes in her diary and mumbles something like, "I felt compelled to write these thoughts down. They seemed very powerful to me." Poor Diane Keaton spends most of her time slumped on couches with her cigarette, talking about mortality or something like that.

Woody Allen, like an elitist, projects a wanna-be elitism, and that’s what comes across in Interiors. The only worthwhile thing about the film, besides the trite but notable visuals, is that it does capture this clumsy snobbery that seems to be at the core of so many artists and art-admirers. Especially in our movie-going society, there seems to be a dichotomy between those who nonchalantly follow pop culture and those who pride themselves on being deep thinkers and art lovers. As David Ansen noted in an essay a few years ago, you’d never find the crowd going to The Butcher Boy also going to Godzilla, or vice versa. Interiors’ family is made up of tormented-creative types, and in one scene, the daughters and their lovers get into one of those discussions on the social/emotional meanings of a play they have seen, and Maureen Stapleton, the unrefined vulgarian outsider, is shut out of the conversation because she actually dares to go to a play to enjoy herself. Ingmar Bergman’s films, like many by foreign and independent directors, are uppity morality plays to those who just go to the movies for entertainment, and Woody Allen has always pictured himself as the elite New Yorker who goes to art houses and museums (he takes Diane Keaton to The Sorrow and the Pity for a date in Annie Hall, and tussles with her on Bergman in Manhattan), even when he’s derisively lampooning that group of people.

Woody Allen’s elitism falls flat on its face. The film is symbol-happy; Geraldine Page loves vases, so we know Maureen Stapleton is going to break a vase by the end. Allen seems to think a great drama is one in which every scene is dramatic, and so we get back-to-back episodes of this family burning in hell. He doesn’t even allow himself to appear in the movie because he doesn’t want anything to detract from the audience taking this seriously. His drama is not rugged and honest like it wants to be, but cold and measured. When people say "That’s life" about a movie, they usually refer to a hard-hitting drama, but Annie Hall is far more true-to-life than Interiors, not to mention far more moving. One of the problems with this film is its duality: Allen is condemning the artsy-fartsy, "deep" folk who discuss art and culture, but his execution and style for the film is artsy-fartsy, somber and elitist itself. The real value of Interiors may be to critics; I know I sat and wondered whether I was making a fool out of myself with my analyses of cinema after watching it.

Lately, Woody Allen’s films have been minor ones (even when he makes a great film like Manhattan Murder Mystery, it feels minor), and Ingmar Bergman has stopped directing films and has been focusing on theater. Both used to make the kind of movies that the adolescent in all of us, the self-centered part of us, could claim as its own story. When I find myself embarrassed by my clumsiness, I just think of vintage Woody, the epitome of Jewish-New Yorker neurosis, and when I get spiritually low, I think of all those tortured characters in the Bergman films.

The two directors followed a bare-bones formula for most of their career, and I think they were rarely successful when they strayed from it. When Woody’s not goofy and neurotic in his movies, or when he doesn’t even appear in his movies, the whole thing usually falls apart. When Bergman isn’t pondering human restlessness, his films hardly ever work because describing the itchiness of existence is what he’s always done best (the exception is Smiles of a Summer Night, a lovers-swapping sex farce that has some moral undertones, but is a white chocolate-y twist, I think, on Renoir’s The Rules of the Game.) Bergman and Allen used their own uncertainties about themselves to make great films; they always indulged in histrionics, but it was only when Bergman tried to lecture us verbally, and when Allen tried to be Bergman, that they became insulting preachers.

By Andrew Chan [AUG. 3, 2000]

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