Woody Allen's Manhattan is populated by people who can't figure out what they want. They wander the streets, prodded along by the big sounds of Gershwin, looking for something they've never seen which may also be something that they already have. Isaac (played by Allen) quits his job and leaves his girlfriend, only to end up wanting both of them back. Michael Murphy's Yale, affluent and highly motivated, becomes bored in his marriage and takes a mistress, then leaves the mistress, only to want her back when she then begins seeing Isaac. Mary, the mistress, played brilliantly (of course) by Diane Keaton, is a neurotic intellectual who is eternally dissatisfied with her position among New York's elite -- everyone else is "a genius" and "devastating" while she's just "from Philadelphia" -- who bounces between men, responding gratefully to affection from any source even as she constantly contends that "I'm beautiful and deserve something better," always arguing with herself and floundering when her therapist succumbs to an acid-induced coma.
The only character in the film who seems at all comfortable with her life and the choices she's made is 17-year-old Tracy (Mariel Hemingway), who Isaac is dating at the beginning of the film and who may or may not accept him back at the end. Mary may giggle when she asks Tracy what she does for a living and the beautiful youth answers "I go to high school," but it is the nonchalant Tracy who knows herself more than these self-obsessed older New Yorkers. She wants Isaac in the beginning, and she wants him at the end; she also wants to study in London, to grow, to figure out what she's good at and what the world is going to offer her, but she sees no conflict in these desires and is confident that everything can work out. "Have a little faith in people," she implores Isaac at the end of the film, as this is what she's always done and it's worked out so far for her.
Writing Tracy as a 17-year-old does two things for Allen's film, and they are distinctly at odds: it makes us doubt the utility of her outlook (what do 17-year-olds know, anyway?) but also simultaneously implicates us in the same process of dismissal that Allen's characters fall into in relation to Tracy's seeming naivete. We wonder how much weight her words could possibly carry, even as she emerges as the film's voice of reason -- and possibly its savior.
What is it about New York that muddles our desires into a senseless blob, distancing us irretrievably from what we thought we wanted? Why, indeed, is a film about being lost and confused given the title Manhattan? Even as the film visually celebrates the city's impossible beauty -- with fireworks, even -- does Allen blame the city for the characters' misdirection? And will Tracy end up just like the rest of them, as soon as she is allowed to more extensively test her outlook, or is she somehow immune to the tendency to overthink her desires and decisions?
The film itself doesn't answer any of these questions. Woody Allen's smile at the end is possibly ironic (what does it mean to "have faith in people," and was this ever a realistic possibility for him?) or maybe his relationship with a high school student has, improbably, helped him grow up a little bit. But the city is still there, and as the camera abandons the characters and produces a montage of the topography of the island, we are left to wonder if the people -- and the annoyingly narcissistic minutiae of their daily lives -- ever really mattered at all; whether, indeed, the whole thing has been a trick played by Manhattan itself, a random sampling of stories that ultimately could have happened anywhere. I wrote a paper on Manhattan as an undergraduate at NYU which made the claim that the city is the protagonist and the narrative arc of the film is a fall from grace, a subsequent desperate floundering, with an ultimate redemption, the "grace" being the fireworks celebration of the film's opening and the "redemption" being the slightly wiser, more elegiac closing montage. Reading the film this way, the characters themselves are merely an allegory of the journey of this mysterious island.
And I still think some of that's true. But I think it's also about Woody Allen's smile, and Mariel Hemingway standing there with her bags, and the cab waiting outside, and not knowing where any of us will go next or whether we'll be happy with ourselves when we get there.