Diane Keaton

Looking for Mr. Goodbar

Something’s Gotta Give

Salutations my sweet, sweater-weather-lovers, I hope you’re feeling rested or perhaps just relieved post-Thanksgiving break. Now comes the mad December dash to Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, and whatever better nondenominational holiday you may or may not celebrate. I’m feeling neither holly nor jolly this December for a multitude of reasons, but I am feeling a sense of pride, nonetheless, for having survived another hopelessly hellish year. I may give off more Krampus vibes this year than I’d like, but I’m no Grinch when it comes to watching and discussing movies. A couple of months ago, we lost a titan of stage, screen, fashion, class, and vivaciousness: the great Diane Keaton. It’s finally cold enough to wear a turtleneck, so this week I am paying homage to the queen of turtlenecks(, hats, scarves, gloves, glasses, and cozy sweaters), and dedicating a night to one of the most likable actors to ever grace the screen. Diane Hall (she later took her mother’s maiden name, Keaton) was born on January 5, 1946, in Los Angeles, California, despite her being known as a staple of New York City society and cinema. She was inspired by another masculine-dressing icon, Katharine Hepburn, and dropped out of college to pursue acting in Manhattan. She became an understudy in a 1968 stage production of the musical Hair, which led to her booking a lead role in Woody Allen’s production of Play It Again, Sam. This kicked off a professional and romantic relationship between Keaton and Allen that would span decades, genres, and different controversies, but where most people fell in love with Diane Keaton, was in her titular role in Allen’s 1977 film Annie Hall. Even Woody Allen’s greatest haters (myself included) cannot deny the comedic imprint Annie Hall made upon society and popular culture, but even greater of an impact was made by the muse who inspired and played this role, whose effortlessly funny demeanor, self-deprecating sense of humor, and palpable charisma practically leaps through the screen. With this role, Keaton not only won the Oscar for Best Actress, she basically invented the Manic Pixie Dreamgirl archetype. Keaton had already starred opposite Al Pacino in The Godfather, she’d already spent nearly a decade performing in Woody Allen projects, but something clicked into place with Annie Hall—and women’s fashion was never the same because of it. From then on, Keaton became New York and Hollywood’s go-to self-effacing charm machine, putting any audience at ease while occupying roles as high-powered businesswomen and cozy homemakers and everything in between. She steadily became known as everyone’s favorite, funny, chic mom or aunt or friend in films like Baby Boom, Father of the Bride, Look Who’s Talking Now, The First Wives Club, Hanging Up, The Family Stone, Because I Said So, Mad Money, the Book Club series—not to mention her more serious roles in films like Reds, Shoot the Moon, Marvin’s Room, Mrs. Soffel, and On Thin Ice. She became a real estate developer, she contributed to The Huffington Post, she played Amelia Earhart, she directed a documentary about the possibility of an afterlife called Heaven, she adopted two children, she executive-produced Gus Van Sant’s controversial film Elephant, she’s in a Justin Bieber music video, and she had legendary romances with Woody Allen, Al Pacino, and Warren Beatty. Diane Keaton packed in so much life into her time on Earth, but it still wasn’t enough for this critic. So let’s honor her incredible legacy by exploring two of her most iconic, groundbreaking, and questionable films.

In 1977, Diane Keaton was in two films that really pushed the envelope: the hilarious Annie Hall, and the unbelievably bleak Looking for Mr. Goodbar. Though it was Annie Hall that won her the Oscar that year, both of these roles really got people talking—about each film’s subject matter, and the clever and considerate ways in which Diane Keaton tackled each one, respectively. And since I’ve seen Annie Hall, I figured it was time to visit the meanest, dirtiest era of gritty 1970s New York City, and watch Richard Brooks’ film Looking for Mr. Goodbar. Based on Judith Rossner’s 1975 novel, which was inspired by the 1973 murder of the schoolteacher Roseann Quinn, Looking for Mr. Goodbar follows the chaotic and cut-short life of Theresa Dunn, who is tormented by her own desires. The film alternates wildly between Theresa’s lived experiences and fantasies, which can be more than disorienting at times. Theresa is meant to seem awkward, ugly, needy, and forever plagued by the large scoliosis scar branded onto her back which makes her feel defective, but my main takeaway was none of this. What truly plagues her, as we very quickly and vividly learn, are the throngs of arrogant and abusive men who come in and out of her life. The first despicable man in her orbit is her angry Irish-Polish drunkard of a father, who clearly favors Theresa’s perfect, older, blonder, scoliosis scar-free sister, Katherine (Tuesday Weld), despite the fact that Katherine has left her husband and now partakes in multiple affairs, a secret abortion, recreational drug use, and a short-lived marriage to a Jewish man. Her father makes her life so miserable that Theresa finally moves out and finds herself a place in the city. While in college, Theresa becomes involved with her pervy, pretentious, profoundly unpalatable and married professor, who claims to have “chosen” Theresa because she is “the only girl in class who knows proper syntax and grammar.” The two are on-again-off-again for an undetermined amount of time—as the events of this movie move at a breakneck pace while simultaneously dragging on for far too long—and he breaks whatever is left of her spirit and self esteem with his wishy-washy wannabe-wise academic asshole behavior. Some of the most appallingly cringey lines in this whole film are uttered by this professor, and though she goes on to meet several more terrible men, this one might just be the worst because he too easily says things like, “I just can’t stand a woman’s company after I fuck them.” After this chauvinist pig finally moves away, Theresa is free to explore the entire city’s crop of chauvinist pigs, and thus begins her perilous odyssey into New York City’s drug-and-sex-fueled underworld. By day, she is a wholesome, inspiring teacher at a school for deaf children, and by night, she’s just looking for fulfillment in the form of a one-night-stand. First, she meets Tony Lopanto (Richard Gere) a shady but sexy young man who introduces her to cocaine, quaaludes, and a new, more literal form of insecure male violence. She is so dazzled by his chaotic energy that she practically waits by the phone all night for him to call, though she’s just met a more upstanding man in the daylight—a welfare caseworker named James (William Atherton), whom her parents actually approve of. As she juggles these two wildly different bachelors, Theresa gets sloppier, more curious, more eager to explore her deepest, darkest, most shameful desires. It all leads her down a path that ultimately leads to her demise, which isn’t surprising if you know the inspiration for this film, but it is nevertheless terrifying and painful to experience. I’ll be honest, Looking for Mr. Goodbar is one of the biggest bummers I’ve ever seen, but some of its pointed portrayals of the seediness of this city and this era felt hilariously heavy-handed. I’m aware of how rough New York was during the 70s, but all of the signs screaming “sex, sex, sex”, all of the fur-coat-wearing drug dealers, and all of the loose, uninhibited youth running the streets felt a bit like parody at a certain point. It’s as if everyone’s concerned mothers banded together to make an anti-NYC propaganda film, and let me just say, as a horror/thriller/lesson to be learned, it is effective. But as an entertaining, satisfying film, I’m not so sure. Looking for Mr. Goodbar is edited so turbulently, lines of dialogue are overwritten so intensely, and the sex is presented so salaciously, it was increasingly overwhelming to take in. The music, the cast, and Richard Gere’s glow-in-the-dark switchblade were so unbelievably cool, and the descent into melodrama was compelling enough, but as a complete package it just dizzied and drained me. Diane Keaton grounds this haphazard film, and brings a sense of humanity and normalcy to this story that’s written like a bad one-act high school student-directed play. No amount of Donna Summer or Richard Gere could make me forget how try-hard some of this dialogue is, and my girl Pauline Kael perhaps put it best in her review: “Richard Brooks [...] has laid a windy jeremiad about our permissive society on top of fractured film syntax. He’s lost the erotic, pulpy morbidity that made the novel a compulsive read; the film is splintered, moralistic, tedious.” Thank god for Diane Keaton, who is captivating as hell, and keeps you watching, even when you desperately wanna turn it off.

The same could be said for tonight’s next film, from the silly, sweater-wearing era of Diane Keaton’s career for which she is perhaps best-known by my generation, this is Nancy Meyer’s 2003 film Something’s Gotta Give. I have a love-hate relationship with the work of Nancy Meyers, because while I cannot deny her ability craft a cozy, memorable scene, I am almost always jarred by some element, character, or slight leaning into misogynistic and uncomfortably audacious territory. I loved The Parent Trap and Father of the Bride growing up, I really loved Private Benjamin (which she co-wrote), and a few Christmases ago I thoroughly enjoyed watching The Holiday, because any film that casts Jack Black as a romantic lead is doing something right. But I was perplexed and disturbed by the trite tribulations and grown-adult-whining in It’s Complicated, I was so put-off by the film The Intern that I started it and stopped it within fifteen minutes of the flight I was on, and I could be wrong, but I don’t think the Mel Gibson-led film What Women Want is a film I’d particularly enjoy, either. So I cautiously pressed play on Something’s Gotta Give—a film that kicked off the Diane Keaton-in-a-comfy-sweater Renaissance and remains to be one of her most well-known films in a resume chock-full of famous films. Something’s Gotta Give opens with a montage of young, gorgeous, thin, white women, hailing cabs and skipping the line at the club and generally looking nubile and hot, as the distinctly creepy male voice of Jack Nicholson begins to narrate about the allure of younger women. As he says, proudly, “Ah, the sweet uncomplicated satisfaction of a younger woman… I’ve been dating them for over 40 years.” Jack Nicholson stars as Harry Sanborn, a 63-year old playboy, perpetual bachelor, owner of a record company, and a practically languid lech whose current victim—I mean girlfriend—is 29-year old Marin (Amanda Peet) who comes from money, so why she would ever be with this shlubby senior citizen is one of this film’s many unanswered mysteries. We learn that she’s rich early on, when she takes Harry for a romantic weekend getaway at her mother’s Hampton’s beach house (that looks so much like Ramona Singer’s Hampton’s home) and the two explore the cavernous space as Marin strips for him. But their intimate weekend is cut short when Marin’s mother Erica (Keaton) and aunt Zoe (Frances McDormand) unexpectedly show up. At first they only see the strange and barely-dressed Harry, so they naturally think he’s robbing them, to which Zoe threatens: “Watch it buddy, I was in the Israeli army.” Remember when I mentioned being jarred by the audacity of Nancy Meyers’ movies? Mmhmm. But when Marin walks in and Erica learns that her daughter is in fact dating this callous crone, she is even more horrified. But the four adults decide to put the awkwardness aside, and try to coexist for the weekend. All is fine and well but still strange until Harry and Marin are about to finally have sex for the first time, and Harry suffers a heart attack. My eyes kept consistently rolling into the back of my head until Harry and these three women rush him to the hospital and we’re introduced to Harry’s doctor, Julian Mercer (Keanu Reeves), then suddenly I woke up and started really paying attention. Not only does Julian have impeccable bedside manner, he is so drop dead gorgeous that these women cannot look away from him. But he seems to be particularly interested in Erica, especially when he learns that she’s one of his favorite playwrights. Then, suddenly, the entire plot was beamed into my brain, as if I’d seen this movie before, because it is so egregiously clear once Julian enters the scene and completes this incestuous love quadrangle. Marin is with Harry who is gonna begrudgingly fall in love with the age-appropriate Erica who is gonna begrudgingly fall in love with him too even though the young and beautiful Julian is hardcore pursuing her. It doesn’t make sense, it doesn’t make me happy, but I could see it coming a mile away, and SPOILER ALERT, I was correct. If there is a world in which the angelic Keanu Reeves is interested in Diane Keaton, then why, pray tell, would she ever give him up for the sweaty, steely, practically dead Jack Nicholson? I’m sorry, but that’s not a reality that I can accept, and I’ve seen a lot of inane, infuriating rom coms. Where Nancy Meyers gets it right is in the little moments of intimacy, the clever bits and bobs of dialogue that peek through the heaps of cringey, sloppy, downright misguided nonsense in the premise. I wish there was more of that, more laughs, more moments where Diane gets to shine instead of adopting uncharacteristic insecurities that Jack Nicholson’s character brings out of her. Something’s Gotta Give rushes through its shameless story and yet drags on far too long, far past when I stopped caring, and its predictable sappiness actually began to exhaust me. It’s disappointing, because I really wanted to like this movie. Everyone told me I’d like this movie. And the fact that studios passed on making this movie initially because of a supposed lack of interest in seeing older people in a romance really made me want to root for this film. And while some moments made me chuckle and some of its meta winking-and-nudging charmed me, the overall result was infuriating. I take rom coms seriously, okay? I believe in love, I believe in whatever silly or serious stakes there are to go through, and I want to be fully immersed into whatever sweet scenario is dreamed up. I don’t want to be constantly reminded of an elderly man’s penis, I don’t want to see Diane Keaton humiliated—and I’m not talking about the scene where she is fully nude (kudos to you, Diane)—and I certainly don’t want to see Keanu Reeves get his heart broken unless its by Patrick Swayze in Point Break. Keanu and Diane are without a doubt the best things this movie has to offer, and though I winced in discomfort each time Jack Nicholson was on top of her, I felt relieved that, at the very least, she also got to make out with Keanu. Call me a cynic, call me an unfun feminist, but I’m just not romanced by this film’s plot, nor am I charmed when Jack Nicholson says, “Why is it that you broads want all or nothing?” and Diane Keaton responds, “I don’t know, we’re just goofy about that stuff.” I know Nancy Meyers can write, and there’s just no way this is her best. I wanted to like Something’s Gotta Give, but it really just pissed me off. And I did like Looking for Mr. Goodbar, even though it depressed the hell outta me. Kinda want a Mr. Goodbar now, though. Rest in peace, Diane Keaton, a men’s fashion will never again be so fashionable. Ta ta for now ❤️