Critquing the movie Mahhattan by Woody Allen - Thesis Example

The bustling of the city exemplifies the same intensity and restlessness of the people that flock its streets. Woody Allen’s ‘Manhattan’ is not a romantic comedy, it is not a drama or a theme film, it is by the very epitome a homage to New York City. Anyone who would watch this film would begin to realize by the first ten seconds that what you are watching is not limited to a peek at the lives of New Yorker’s because you realize by the very beginning that the main character is the city and the characters are just breathing in the very life of the Big Apple.

It is easy to fathom that the film, as written and directed by Woody Allen, contemplated of Manhattan through his perspective and idealization. Seen through the eyes of twice divorced 42-year-old Isaac Davies, it is imperative that Allen categorically played himself and the natural register of many of the character’s quirks are his own. At the outset, Isaac was not a complex character because he was above all adjectives deeply neurotic. But this was not far removed from all the other characters of the film.

They just mostly vary in degree but all of them are destructive and broken and easily subjects of Freudian psychoanalysis that one could figure them out it in a matter of moments. His ex-wife narrowed him down in her book by saying that “He was given to fits of rage, Jewish male paranoia, male chauvinism, self-righteous misanthropy and nihilistic moods of despair” (Manhattan). But this of course would be a delineation and reduction of the entirety of a human being which is impossible and derogatory.

The same must be taken in the context that the book that she wrote titled ‘Marriage, Divorce and Selfhood’ was her subjective attempt to encapsulate their relationship most geared to her advantage and led to his infamy. This book was mostly the cause of his neurosis as portrayed in the film and perhaps his wariness in the beginning of the film was most justified