I had dropped out of law school when I met Eve. She was very beautiful. Very pale, cool in her black dress, with never anything more than a single strand of pearls. And distant. Always poised and distant. By the time the girls were born, it was all so perfect, so ordered. Looking back, of course, it was rigid. The truth is she'd created a world around us that we existed in, where everything had its place, where there was always a kind of harmony. Great dignity. I will say... it was like an ice palace. Then suddenly one day, out of nowhere, an enormous abyss opened up beneath our feet and I was staring into a face I didn't recognise.
From the beginning, Woody Allen had a very clear idea of what a Woody Allen film should be. The reason he got into filmmaking in the first place was due to the mishandling of his script for What’s New, Pussycat? (1965). From that point on he chose to direct his own scripts. When the sixth film he directed himself, Annie Hall (1977), won four Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Original Screenplay (by Allen and Marshall Brickman), Allen’s credentials as one of the leading filmmakers of the era was nailed, and he immediately set about taking the biggest risk of his career – a drama that would make no concessions whatever to what Allen called “entertainment.”
To look from Annie Hall to Interiors is quite jarring. The man who had become a master (some had called him a genius) at making audiences laugh was strenuously avoiding laughter. He tells the story of a New York family: Arthur, a corporate lawyer father (E. G. Marshall), Eve, an interior designer mother (Geraldine Page), and their three daughters, Renata (Diane Keaton), Flyn (Kristin Gruffith) and Joey (Mary Beth Hurt). Eve is desperately neurotic, and when Arthur announces at the breakfast table that he wants to live alone for awhile, Eve reacts by attempting suicide. She methodically seals all of the windows and doors of her Manhattan townhouse and turns on the gas. She survives.
Arthur vacations in Greece and returns with a woman named Pearl (Maureen Stapleton), informing his daughters that he intends to marry her. She is the opposite of Eve – ebullient, funny, and warm. The daughters react in different ways, with Joey siding entirely with her mother, despite her feeling that she wasn’t her mother’s favorite. The wedding takes place at the Long Island summer house. Sometime well into the night, Eve appears inside the house and Joey, who has been drinking all night, seizes the occasion to berate her. Eve drowns herself in the Atlantic. Joey nearly drowns trying to save her, but is resuscitated by Pearl. The film closes where it began, with the three sisters gazing through the windows of the beach house at the “peaceful” ocean.
In his interview with Robert Bresson in 1972, Charles Thomas Samuels asserted that “in your films all the people speak with a single, a Bressonian voice.”(1) However convincingly Bresson defended himelf against Samuels’s assertion, it is obvious to all but the most purblind Bresson fan that the people in his films, drilled by him in take after take to avoid all inflection, all dramatic emphasis, don’t speak or behave like real people. The problem is that, to a certain extent, Samuels’s point is applicable to every good filmmaker – especially to those who write their own scripts. All of the people in Woody Allen’s films speak the same language with a single voice. Here is a dialogue between the characters Renata (Diane Keaton) and Frederick (Richard Jordan) that is typical of Allen’s style throughout Interiors:
Frederick: You OK?
Renata: I just experienced the strangest sensation.
F: Well, you look kinda pale.
R: It was as if I had a sudden...clear vision where everything seems...sort of awful and predatory. It was like... It was like I was here and the world was out there, and I couldn't bring us together.
F: Could you have had one of those dreams?
R: No. No, because the same thing happened last week when I was reading upstairs. I suddenly became hyper aware of my body. And I could feel my heart beating, and I began to imagine that...I could feel the blood sort of coursing through my veins and my hands and in the back of my... neck. I felt precarious, like I was a machine that was functioning but I could just conk out at any second.
F: You're not gonna conk out. You gotta put those kind of thoughts out of your head.
R: Yeah. It frightens me, too, you know, because...I'm not that far from the age when Mother began showing signs of strain.
F: You're not your mother. You're not. You're not. You've been under stress and you haven't been sleeping well. Things like that.
Most of the actors deliver their lines creditably. Diane Keaton is experienced with Allen’s dialogue. Richard Jordan is not, but he gives a powerful performance in the film as a successful but dissatisfied writer. E. G. Marshall is given the most thankless role in the film, as Arthur, the egoistic patriarch who wants out of his marriage to Eve. Geraldine Page is the nervous center of the film, and she gives a brilliant performance as Eve. Late in the film Joey discovers Eve has come back to the summer house and lets her have it:
Mother? Is that you? You shouldn't be here. Not tonight. I'll take you home. You look so strange and tired. I feel like we're in a dream together. Please don't look so sad. It makes me feel so guilty. I'm so consumed with guilt. It's ironic... because, uh... I've cared for you so... And you have nothing but disdain for me, and yet I feel guilty. I think you're... really too perfect to live in this world. I mean, all the... beautifully furnished rooms, carefully-designed interiors, everything's so controlled. There wasn't any room for any real feelings. None. Between any of us. Except Renata, who never gave you the time of day. You worship Renata. You worship talent. Well, what happens to those of us who can't create? What do we do? What do I do, when I'm overwhelmed with feelings about life? How do I get them out? I feel such rage toward you! Oh, Mother. Don't you see? You're... not just a sick woman. That would be too easy. The truth is... there's been perverseness and wilfulness of attitude in many of the things you've done. At the centre of a sick psyche there is a sick spirit. But I love you. And we have no other choice but to forgive each other.
Joey doesn’t notice, but Eve has left the house and heads straight into the ocean.
It would be easy to argue, and it has been argued, that so much of the dialogue in Interiors is uncomfortably portentous and stilted. But so is the dialogue in Ingmar Bergman’s films. The difference is that Bergman managed to develop a style of pacing and framing that maximized the dramatic effect of his dialogue. He had at his disposal some of the greatest actors in the world and a great cinematographer. Woody Allen was clearly aiming at the same level of intensity, without having attained the same mastery of tone and proportion that Bergman worked toward for more than a decade.
It isn’t exactly Allen’s fault that no one was prepared for his sharp turn away from comedy into High Seriousness. The critical reception to Interiors was almost hostile. Bergman’s film, Autumn Sonata, was released the same year, and Vernon Young, who didn’t like the Bergman film, wrote:
If, without knowing anything whatever about the work of either director, one had seen Woody Allen’s Interiors and Ingmar Bergman’s Autumn Sonata in the order of their respective debuts in New York City, one might have easily concluded that the Swedish film-maker had attempted to imitate the American: the same photographic and cutting style, the same concentration on a handful of overwrought characters, and the very same subject – namely, maternal domination. (2)
Autumn Sonata was further evidence of Bergman’s decline into self-parody – but only because Bergman had been making films for thirty years. Interiors was only Allen’s eighth film (Bergman’s eighth film was 1949’s To Joy). I think Interiors is a revelation. If it hadn’t bombed, and if the critics had been kinder, Allen might have continued in the same direction. Instead, he made Manhattan.
(1) Encountering Directors (New York: Putnam, 1972).
(2) “Autumn Interiors,” Commentary, 1979.
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