Diane Keaton’s Shadows and Light

The critic David Thomson, in his outrageous, brilliant, poignant, and often very funny book “The New Biographical Dictionary of Film,” talks about how some stars radiate a kind of preternatural goodness, which, presumably, casts its own kind of light on the audience. Not the beautiful, shadowy doom that Montgomery Clift brought to the screen, for instance, or the troubled, mischievous sharpness that Jeffrey Wright and Regina Hall lend to their work, but something as warming as sunshine and just as seductive. And while Diane Keaton, who died on October 11th, at the age of seventy-nine, will be remembered for the charm of her attitude toward comedy—How did I, a nice-enough girl from Santa Ana, end up here? Why, and how, am I doing this?—it’s the essential goodness that characterizes all her work, the sunshine that breaks through the fog of confusion, that will stay with us most powerfully. We loved her for her ambivalence about performing, how she wanted to be seen even as she ran from it, hiding her face under the brim of a hat, or behind tinted glasses, or in the arms of one of her onscreen lovers. It was the nuance of that ambivalence that kept us in our seats, and sometimes on the edge of them, because we’d all been there when it came to love or power: Is this mine to have and to hold? Or should I give it back? Keaton wasn’t a greedy star, anxious for the spotlight, like Bette Davis, or luscious and silent, like Isabelle Adjani, or as firmly rooted in the earth as Diana Sands. She stood apart from her own stardom, even as she desired recognition, and so successful was Keaton’s deflection of her “I” that we hardly noticed that her career lasted as long as those of her most successful male contemporaries—Pacino, De Niro, and so on—something very rare for a female star in Hollywood.

Keaton’s ambivalence turns up in many of her roles, too. So often, onscreen, we can see the process of intellection that her characters go through; and, when they hit pause on their uncertainty and take a good look at it, the result is unforgettable. In Woody Allen’s “Love and Death” (1975), which was inspired by Russian literature—Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, that lot—Keaton plays Sonja, a fickle woman desired by a number of men with droopy mustaches, in the Napoleonic era. Sonja is discontented. What is life? she wonders. On the other hand, What time is our reservation? Standing in an attic, she talks with her cousin, Boris (Allen), who has distinguished himself in their village as both a coward and a philosopher, about the nature of being:

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SONJA: I feel as though my life would be wasted if I didn’t love deeply with a man whose mind I respected, whose spirituality equalled mine, and who had the same lustful appetite for sensual passion that drives me insane.

BORIS: You’re an incredibly complex woman.

SONJA: I guess you could say I’m half saint, half whore.

BORIS: Here’s hoping I get the half that eats.

Part of what makes Keaton and Allen’s collaborations so wonderful—they worked together on eight movies—is that Keaton never gives us the feeling that she actually hears or understands what Allen is saying. Her characters skitter along in language, rarely lighting on anything for long. (Meryl Streep described Keaton’s Annie Hall as a hummingbird whose thoughts dart here and there.) You remember Keaton’s Mary, in “Manhattan” (1979), going to see Isaac (Allen) after his married best friend, Yale (Michael Murphy), has broken up with her. Isaac lives in a noisy New York apartment, and, to calm herself down, Mary decides to take a Valium. Isaac, apologetically, gives her a glass of water that has rust in it from the pipes. Mary is going on about Yale, weeping, and then, in the middle of the drama, she stops and says of the water, “God, this is brown, isn’t it?” Keaton could turn on a dime—from despair to neutral observation of the situation and her place in it. Which was where? In the clarity of her equivocation. She might break your heart again and again, but hers was already somewhat broken.

Keaton’s performances embody a sort of moral code, distinctly American: even Louise Bryant, the at times fast-and-loose journalist Keaton played in Warren Beatty’s “Reds” (1981), a character she said she did not like, wrestles mightily with the question of right and wrong, and how to live—if you could call it living—within the confines of a gender-based Puritanism. That great struggle—how to be—also accounts for Theresa Dunn’s anguish in “Looking for Mr. Goodbar” (1977), directed by Richard Brooks. A Catholic girl who survived polio, Keaton’s Theresa is, when we meet her, studying to be a teacher for the deaf and having an affair with a married professor. When the professor ultimately rejects her, she backs away from him—a gesture of apology that her mouth can’t deliver—asking, Why? Is it her smell that turns him off? Is she too straight in bed? (It’s as if Theresa were reading from a list of “don’ts” in a women’s magazine.) When he hurls a final insult, she folds in on herself, like a child being pummelled by someone she considered a friend. (“What I remember about that experience,” Keaton told me once, “was how kind Richard Brooks was.”) Wounded and bewildered, Theresa vows—silently—never to have that feeling again, never to be at anyone else’s mercy. And for big chunks of “Looking for Mr. Goodbar,” she becomes the male gaze, and just as self-regarding. She can inhabit her body, which she sees as spiritually degraded, only through action and the possibility of danger. Even Christ can’t clear the clouds from Theresa’s mind. (Her faith is part of the turn-on for her when she picks up and seduces strange men: she is sinning in His eyes.)

In Vanity Fair in 1987, Keaton told Joan Juliet Buck, “I was always pretty religious as a kid, but I had trouble with Jesus early on because I couldn’t understand that there was a son of God here on earth. I was primarily interested in religion because I wanted to go to heaven.” Longing to be somewhere else, someone else, up in the firmament, is the mark of a dreamer, and Keaton’s characters, like the terminally ill Bessie in “Marvin’s Room” (1996), dream of joy, a joy that is less fleeting than life. Bessie’s father, Marvin, has had a stroke and can’t speak, so Bessie holds a mirror up to the window to reflect sunbeams toward him and make him smile and feel the warmth of the world’s heart. In those moments, she’s like an older Laura from Tennessee Williams’s “The Glass Menagerie,” polishing her bits of glass so she can watch the light play in them.

Like Laura, Keaton’s characters don’t know what to do with the attention they crave once they’ve got it. There are actually very few love scenes in Keaton’s movies, and the ones I remember seem partially obscured by darkness or clothing: in that era, innuendo was generally more interesting to filmmakers than being explicit. Plus, there was her natural modesty (“I have definite opinions about my body,” she told Buck). Keaton distinguished herself in her first Broadway show, “Hair,” in 1968, not only by singing “Black Boys” (“Black boys are delicious, chocolate-flavored love”) but by not taking off her clothes at the end of the first act—she didn’t see the point.

In the eighties, Keaton gave several remarkable performances about the politics of the body. In the sensitively drawn, almost emotionally overwhelming movie “Shoot the Moon” (1982), directed by Alan Parker, she plays Faith Dunlap, a middle-aged woman with four young children. In the first scenes, we watch as Faith gets dressed to go out, only later to be emotionally stripped down as she realizes that she no longer wants to be married to her husband, George, a writer, beautifully played by Albert Finney. Soon after she and George separate, Faith entertains a workman named Frank, who is building a tennis court on the couple’s property. As she and Frank sit apart in the parlor, nearly silent, first-date jitters, tentativeness, anxiety, hope, fear, and attraction fill the space between them. Frank makes a pass, and, in a move that is part Faith, part Keaton, Faith retreats. But then, there’s a touch, a kiss, and you can almost hear her heart beating beneath her oversized shirt: Will I be hurt? Is this love? Is it?

Like many of Keaton’s characters, Kay, the wife of Michael Corleone (Al Pacino), in Francis Ford Coppola’s three “Godfather” films, lives in a morally compromised world: goodness is not part of anyone’s calculations; reflection slows things down (unless you’re thinking about how to stick it to the next guy before he sticks it to you). In the first film, Keaton wears a terrible wig—a coiffure she loathed—but I think the awkwardness of it actually helped her to develop Kay’s awkwardness; her innocence is in direct contrast to her husband’s canniness. Just as Keaton was a sort of Wasp foil to Allen’s Jewishness, Kay is “white” in contrast to the Corleones’ darkness. But Keaton doesn’t over-emphasize Kay’s difference; Kay just is, and, when she rebels against the Corleones’ legacy of violence, she uses her own body to take a stand, telling Michael, “I wouldn’t bring another one of your sons into this world!” Kay’s ethics are her downfall, just as sensuality becomes a kind of downfall for Anna in “The Good Mother” (1988). A single parent, Anna falls for an Irish sculptor (Liam Neeson) who wakes her up to her own body, to pleasure, but, even as she explores the beauty of it, you can see, flickering across Keaton’s face, all the doubt and fear Anna feels when intimacy—the ultimate stranger—shows up at her door.

Throughout her acting career, Keaton, whose diverse creativity and productivity got less attention than her persona—she would not have known who she was if she wasn’t making something—worked on other projects. With the curator Marvin Heiferman, she made art books that drew on movie stills and tabloid pictures, while also producing works of her own. (Check out “Reservations,” her book of photographs taken in hotel interiors. Not surprisingly, Keaton was drawn to images of furniture that was unusual or positioned at odd angles.) Her books, like her documentary filmmaking—her 1987 film, “Heaven,” explored various ideas about the afterlife—were an extension of her love of imagery and collage, an interest she inherited from her mother, the charismatic Dorothy Hall.

In 2011, Keaton published “Then Again,” her first memoir (three more would follow). The book is beautiful for a number of reasons, one being that it is a kind of conversation with her mother, whose triumph in the “Mrs. Los Angeles” beauty pageant when Keaton was a child was an impetus for her getting onstage herself. Incorporating selections from Dorothy’s journals, scrapbooks, and collages in “Then Again” gave Keaton a scrim to hide behind while she talked about herself; the most harrowing section of the book has to do with her body, her struggle with bulimia. She developed this self-destructive behavior when she was in “Hair”—she was told she’d be paid more if she slimmed down—and it continued for years until she finally beat it with the help of psychoanalysis (the talking cure, where, perhaps for the first time, Keaton was invested in dialogue outside of a script). In that chapter of the memoir, everything we feel and identify with in Keaton’s performances—the clouds that sometimes obscure the sun, the goodness that cannot face itself—comes rushing out, raw and true; it’s a shattering accomplishment, and one of the best things I have ever read about addiction. When I got to know Keaton a little, I said that, given all that she had learned, she should play the heroin-addicted Mary Tyrone in Eugene O’Neill’s “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” one day. Her eyes widened, and she smiled as she turned away. Then Keaton, the introvert who loved to shine, the thinker who thought of herself as anything but, looked back and said, “That’s all I need! Are you out of your mind?” ♦