Themes: Sibling Relationships, Mothers and Daughters, Crumbling Marriages
Main Cast: Maureen Stapleton, Kristin Griffith, Mary Beth Hurt, Richard Jordan, Diane Keaton, E.G. Marshall, Geraldine Page
Release Year: 1978
Country: US
Run Time: 95 minutes
MPAA Rating: PG
Plot
Diane Keaton, Kristin Griffith, and Mary Beth Hurt play Renata, Flyn, and Joey, the grown daughters of wealthy Arthur (E.G. Marshall) and his emotionally disturbed wife, Eve (Geraldine Page). When Arthur leaves Eve, her three daughters rally around her. As it turns out, none of the daughters are ideally suited to provide an "anchor" for their distracted mother, but all four women are strengthened by their renewed relationship. Interiors received five Oscar nominations, including Best Director for Woody Allen, Best Original Screenplay for Allen, Best Actress for Geraldine Page, Best Supporting Actress for Maureen Stapleton (who plays Arthur's new love), and Best Art Direction for Mel Bourne and Daniel Robert. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
Review
In the wake of his Oscar-winning breakthrough with Annie Hall (1977), and ahead of his melancholy Manhattan (1979), Woody Allen worked off his debt to Ingmar Bergman with this overtly "serious" film, a grim, beautifully shot exploration of family dysfunction. Allen's least funny movie, Interiors is also his most polarizing, dividing viewers who found it suffocatingly slow and pretentious from those who hailed Allen's leap forward as a serious art director. Influenced most immediately by the family chamber drama of Bergman's Cries and Whispers (1972), the film derives much of its power from the stunning cinematography of Gordon Willis, who had also shot the Godfather movies, and the art direction of Daniel Robert. For some observers, Allen learned the wrong lesson from the mainstream embrace of Annie Hall, and his lunge toward claustrophobic, self-satisfied, middlebrow art violated everything that he had ever mocked, right down to the straight-faced used of talking heads addressing the camera that he had lampooned in Take the Money and Run (1969). For others, Interiors only highlighted the underlying seriousness of Allen's movies, especially as he headed toward such classic comedy dramas as Manhattan, Hannah and Her Sisters (1986), and Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989). In light of those later movies, Interiors looks better than it did at the time, holding up surprisingly well on its own terms as an incisive Chekhovian drama of a ruined family, featuring a gallery of unforgettable performances from such stalwarts as E.G. Marshall, Geraldine Page, and Maureen Stapleton. ~ Leo Charney, All Movie Guide
Nancy Collins - Young Flynn; Kerry Duffy - Young Renata; Henderson Forsythe - Judge Bartel; Penny Gaston - Young Eve; Missy Hope - Young Joey; Roger Morden - Young Arthur; Maureen Stapleton - Pearl; Sam Waterston - Mike
Three sisters live through the painful separation of their parents. Their father parts from their controlling and mentally unstable but artistically inclined mother who ends up committing suicide and marries a more "normal" but plainer woman.
He [Allen] managed to rescue Interiors, much to his credit. He was against the wall. I think he was afraid. He was testy, he was slightly short-tempered. He was fearful. He thought he had a real bomb. But he managed to pull it out with his own work. The day the reviews came out, he said to me, 'Well, we pulled this one out by the short hairs, didn't we?'
Later, while watching the film with an acquaintance, Allen reportedly said "It's always been my fear. I think I'm writing Long Day's Journey Into Night and it turns into Edge of Night."[5]
Vincent Canby of The New York Times called the film "beautiful" and complimented Gordon Willis on his "use of cool colors that suggest civilization's precarious control of natural forces", but noted:[2]
My problem with Interiors is that although I admire the performances and isolated moments, as well as the techniques and the sheer, headlong courage of this great, comic, film-making philosopher, I haven't any real idea what the film is up to. It's almost as if Mr. Allen had set out to make someone else's movie, say a film in the manner of Mr. Bergman, without having any grasp of the material, or first-hand, gut feelings about the characters. They seem like other people's characters, known only through other people's art.
Richard Schickel of Time wrote that the film's "desperate sobriety ... robs it of energy and passion"; Allen's "style is Bergmanesque, but his material is Mankiewiczian, and the discontinuity is fatal. Doubtless this was a necessary movie for Allen, but it is both unnecessary and a minor embarrassment for his well-wishers."[6]
Nearly 30 years after the film was released, essayist David Rakoff commented on the film in an article for Nextbook's online magazine of Jewish culture. He called it pretentious, with a "narcotized affect ... as chilly as an Alex Katz painting, with a similar goyische naches[7]anti-Semitic-by-omission EasthamptonWaspiness obtaining to it all."[8]
Interiors grossed $10.43 million in the United States[1].
The song is at least partly the inspiration for the song "Alice & Interiors" by the band Manchester Orchestra from their album I'm Like A Virgin Losing A Child
^ According to a glossary of Portnoy's Yiddish from an Occidental College website for a course entitled "Jewishness, Genders and Sexualities", "goyische naches" means a "non-Jewish source of pride and pleasure, especially military service and sports",
