Film Friday: Woody Allen's 'Interiors' starring Diane Keaton

It must have been jarring for audiences in 1978 to see Interiors. Mere months after nearly sweeping the 1977 Academy Awards with one of the greatest comedies of all time, Annie Hall, Woody Allen turned his attention to serious matters. Interiors was the signal that Allen had much more to say as a filmmaker than just “people get in the way of love.” No, Allen had a few words to say about families, siblings and parents, but the only way he could do this was with a drama Ingmar Bergman would have been proud of.

It takes a lot of emotional power to sit through all 99 minutes of Interiors. The film starts out innocently enough and we might even be convinced that this is going to be a comedy. An overbearing mother sweeps into her daughter son-in-law’s apartment with better ideas for her interior design. But we soon discover that laughter is not to be found here, as the daughter and her husband began questioning her sanity.

The family at the center of the film is headed by Eve (Geraldine Page) and her estranged husband Arthur (E.G. Marshall). They have three children, all daughters who, like their parents (and every other significant Woody Allen character), are creative types with varying levels of success. Flyn (Kristen Griffith), the youngest, is a successful and beautiful Hollywood star, but she’s not making the kind of projects she’d like to. Joey (Mary Beth Hurt) is the middle child and the only stable part of her life is her husband, Mike (Sam Waterston), since she can’t quite figure out her place in the world. She is a disappointment to her family, especially since Renata (Diane Keaton) has had such success as an author.

Joey’s life is held back by Eve, since she’s the only one apparently not busy enough to lead her own life. Arthur has left New York and the catalyst for the family is his decision to finally get a divorce. He wants to marry Pearl (Maureen Stapleton), a wealthy simpleton in the eyes of the daughters.

There is truly no room for comedy in Interiors, meaning that the drama is almost too hard to bear. Allen clearly dreamed of making a movie like Bergman’s opus Persona, that he nearly does leave behind his own style. One might even believe that this was a Bergman movie in English if you didn’t see the opening credits. Cinematographer Gordon Willis is doing a Sven Nykvist impression as much as Allen is doing a Bergman impression. The framing of faces, particularly the eerie, iconic shot at the end of the movie with the three sisters, and images of objects - the interiors of our characters’ minds - are all callbacks to the Swedish masters’ works.

But Interiors isn’t completely like a Bergman movie. The dialogue is still clearly the work of Allen, with everyone in the family clearly defined. One might even wonder how these people are from the same family. Still, we do get a sense that the daughters really do love each other at the end. It feels as if the challenge for them was really living up to their parents’ images of them. Joey is at one extreme, giving up her life for her mother, while Flyn has completely deserted everyone with her job. But that’s OK, because she’s a success.

Renata is, of course, the more complicated one and gets Diane Keaton’s best performance during this period of Allen’s career. She and her husband (Richard Jordan), who is a struggling novelist, live close enough to New York that they could help Joey, but they rarely do. She is even Eve’s favorite child. All that pressure to lead a great, successful life and be the ultimate artist has taken a toll on Renata, made more obvious by Keaton’s performance. A moment early in the film when she just has her hand on the window is beautifully shot and shows the absolute connection she had to the character. Annie Hall may be remembered as one of her great achievements, but what Keaton does throughout this film just leaves you impressed.

Despite her fine work in the film, Keaton was ignored at the Oscars, probably because she had just won for Annie Hall. However, Geraldine Page’s heartbreaking work was not passed over, and Maureen Stapleton even got a nod for her relatively brief (but powerful) role in the last third of the film.

Interiors feels much more than just a tryout from the director, an attempt to see if he could handle drama - a test he passed. It is an exploration of ideas Allen could finally handle dramatically now that he had the credentials as a filmmaker after Annie Hall. It is a film that can affect an audience multiple ways and one to see as you grow older. Surely, this will feel different to parents and it will feel different for a group of siblings. Interiors is a film I can’t wait to revisit, only because I can’t guess at what my next reaction would be.

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image courtesy of Dara Kushner/INFphoto.com

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