It has often been quipped about the onscreen pairing of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers that he gave her class and she gave him sex. With his romantic comedy “Annie Hall” (1977), Woody Allen gave Diane Keaton one of the defining roles of her career while she, for better and, yes, for worse, helped establish him as a credible-enough romantic lead.
Allen had jokes and timing. Keaton did too, but she also had emotional transparency, a tremulous quality that drew you to her, and expressive eyes that watered easily but could also light up with persuasive joy. After “Annie Hall,” she also deservedly had an Oscar for best actress.
Keaton, whose death was reported on Saturday, was a star for decades, though she began to shine most brightly in the 1970s, the era that saw her in some of her greatest roles. Among these, of course, was Francis Ford Coppola’s “Godfather” saga, in which she played Kay to Al Pacino’s Michael Corleone. In the first two movies, Kay is one of the few female roles of any substance in a story filled with juicy male characters and swaggering, domineering actors. That imbalance alone makes Kay seem an impossible part, but it’s especially tricky because she has to be an intermediary between you and the Corleones’ brutal, cloistered world. You may not necessarily think of Keaton when you think of these films, but she’s crucial to them.
This is made graphically clear near the end of the first film, after Michael’s sister accuses him of murdering her husband. After he orders her taken away, a distraught Kay asks if it’s true. With bloodless cool, Michael lies, saying no and takes her in his arms. A relieved Kay goes to an adjacent room to make them drinks and sees two men kiss her husband’s hand, one addressing Michael as “Don Corleone.” As another begins closing the door separating Kay from the men, Coppola cuts to Kay silently staring at the camera with a look of stunned, horrified understanding. She now sees her husband for who he is and, as she looks at him, the door swings shut in front of her, obscuring her like a closing tomb. It’s the last shot in the film.
Keaton’s emotional openness, her readability, is critical to “The Godfather” because of what Kay and Michael mean to each other and how their relationship speaks to the shadowy whole. The film is the story of a family and a criminal syndicate, but it is also a tragedy about a marriage, its secrets and lies. Kay’s love for Michael, her innocence and sweetness, help make him an immediately sympathetic presence, while the hurt that later clouds her eyes foreshadows Michael’s betrayal of her and his dramatically shifting role from the family’s baby boy to its patriarch. From the start, Kay is a mirror for the viewers, who are also similarly seduced by Michael, as well as fascinated, repelled and helplessly hooked on him.
Keaton starred in other serious films, notably “Reds” (1981), Warren Beatty’s sweeping romantic epic about the journalist and communist activist John Reed, who chronicled the Russian Revolution in his book “Ten Days That Shook the World.” Keaton plays another journalist, Louise Bryant, a freethinker who becomes involved with Beatty’s Reed and their pal, the playwright Eugene O’Neill (Jack Nicholson). There are few actresses who could hold their own while sharing the screen with such supreme scene-stealers as Beatty and Nicholson, but Keaton does despite some wobbles. The character can seem absurd (blame the script, not the actress), but Keaton’s Louise also helps tether the film’s ideas in feeling.
Decades later, Keaton and Nicholson reunited in Nancy Meyers’s frothy 2003 romantic comedy, “Something’s Gotta Give.” I resisted the movie at first, in part because it takes place in one of Meyers’s gauzily perfect bubble worlds with their pretty white people, fantastically expensive kitchens and bespoke gardens. In this fantasy, Keaton plays Erica Barry, a successful, divorced playwright in her 50s with a typical Meyers dream house in the Hamptons. It’s there that Erica’s daughter (Amanda Peet) brings home her latest romantic interest, Harry Sanborn, a 63-year-old music-industry guy and aggressively confirmed bachelor whom Nicholson plays with a persuasive mix of lustiness and boorishness.
Meyers tips her hand early the moment you hear Nicholson’s Harry enthusing about the women he dates. “Ah,” he says, “the sweet, uncomplicated satisfaction of the younger woman,” as various long-limbed beauties stride across the movie’s bouncy opening credits. Harry is a total horndog, but after assorted comic complications, Erica brings him to heel. First, though, Harry has to nearly die (heart attack) because sometimes that’s what it takes for an older man to notice a woman who’s more in his age bracket. He recuperates at Erica’s house, where they circle each other warily before falling into bed. Things remain complicated and Harry breaks her heart, which she repairs with help from a besotted doctor played by Keanu Reeves.
By the time “Something’s Gotta Give” was released, Keaton had played a range of roles, not all of which asked much of her. It’s vital to understanding her career to remember that the same year that “Annie Hall” was released, she had also starred in “Looking for Mr. Goodbar,” in which she played a teacher from an oppressive religious family who’s murdered by a one-night stand; it’s a bleak take on what women risk in an ostensibly sexually liberated world. The critic Molly Haskell rightly praised Keaton, noting her “instinctual delicacy.” Keaton’s ability to show you a character’s vulnerability was as striking as her gift for showing you what can lie beneath such sensitivity, including neediness at its rawest and most acutely exposed.
Keaton continued to take on serious roles, both worthy (the 1982 marriage drama “Shoot the Moon”) and not (the 1984 spy intrigue “The Little Drummer Girl”). She made more comedies, too, including “Baby Boom” (1987), which Meyers wrote with her soon-to-be ex, Charles Shyer, who also directed. By the time Meyers and Keaton joined forces for “Something’s Gotta Give,” they were both veterans of an industry that, like Nicholson’s character, was grossly dismissive of women, though particularly older ones. If it took me awhile to come around to “Something’s Gotta Give,” it was largely because it seemed too obvious and silly, and too removed from the real world and its problems. And yet, and yet …
I kept returning to that film again and again, occasionally just catching it on TV and then happily seeking it out. After watching it more times than I remember, I copped to the fact that I had fallen as hard for it as Keaton and Nicholson’s characters do for each other. Some of my adoration comes just from the pleasure of watching skilled, well-synced performers pretending to fall in love. Years later, I also realized that what else I loved was Keaton, who by the time she made this movie had successfully transcended a male filmmaker’s la-di-da ideal to become a female filmmaker’s avatar: a beautiful, funny, soulful, successful and blissfully independent woman with lines on her face, a penchant for turtlenecks, a blissed-out Reeves as a consolation prize and a besotted Nicholson, ta-da, finally and gratefully at her side.
Manohla Dargis is the chief film critic for The Times.
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