Manhattan revisited: Watching Woody Allen's movie again after 35 years

It's literally impossible to watch Woody Allen's 1979 film Manhattan with the same pleasure and interest we took in this film 35 years ago - knowing what we do about his troubled life. Here's a movie about a 42-year-old intellectual, comedy writer, and literary aspirant - played by Allen as one of the near-versions of himself - torn between two relationships: with a woman his age who's smart, cultured, a literary snob, pretentious at times, high strung, and gets all his jokes, in other words, Diane Keaton, and a woman, no a girl, beautiful and vapid, played by Mariel Hemingway, who is, get this: 17 years old. Perhaps that was a bit off-putting when the film came out in 1979, but looking back at the film now it's totally odd and disturbing - and mainly because nothing in the film, nobody in the film, has the slightest sense that there's anything perverse, in fact, illegal about this relationship. Allen and his friends just remark that she's "young." In most movies, the hero would have to make a choice and would inevitably realize that the young girl is totally inappropriate and would choose he coeval and intellectual punching weight, Keaton - but no, in this movie, as in other Allen films, the sad sack protagonist doesn't get the girl whom he should - he goes back to Hemingway, she's the one. The strengths of this movie are many, legion, most notably Gordon Willis's incredible cinematography; Manhattan has never looked better, especially in the stunning opening montage against the NY Symphony Orch playing Rhapsody in Blue (the score is great as well, with the NY Symph also playing orchestrated versions of various great 30s and 40s #s, Embraceable You, But Not for Me, etc.). It has rightly been noticed, however, that Allen "scrubs" Manhattan - leaving out the crime, dirt, crowds, grime, suffering - life for these characters is so easy - just one example, his best friend, a high-school English teacher of all things - on a whim drops down many thousands for a classic Porsche. Oh really? What's not noticed so often, however, is that Allen also "scrubs" the story: Hemingway (a terrible actress, by the way - no surprise that unlike so many Allen stars her career on screen went nowhere) has no life outside of her relationship with Allen: no friends, no siblings, no classmates, her parents are mentioned in passing but they seem to have no interest in or knowledge of her relationship with a 42-year-old guy? Oh what a shame and what a waste: there are so many fine scenes in this movie and some of the funniest movie lines ever (I wish people could mate for life - like pigeons, or Catholics; You're so beautiful tonight I can't keep my eyes on the meter). I wish I could like it more, or like it still.