P.Many great actresses have starred in romantic comedies. But usually, if they want to win an Oscar, they have to look for more serious roles. The late Diane Keaton, who died suddenly this week, took the opposite trajectory and made it look disarmingly natural. His first major film role was in The Godfather, an American masterpiece as serious as ever. But that same year, she reprized the role of Linda, the object of a nerdy hero’s affections, in a film adaptation of Broadway’s Play It Again, Sam. (Keaton originated the role opposite playwright Woody Allen on stage.) She continued to alternate between serious dramas and romantic comedies throughout the ’70s, and it was the latter that won her the Academy Award for Best Actress, changing the genre forever.
That Oscar was for Annie Hall, co-written and directed by Allen, with Keaton as the title character, half of the film’s fractured love story. Allen and Keaton had been romantically involved before making the film and remained close friends for the rest of his life; in interviews, Keaton had characterized Annie as an idealized version of herself, through Allen’s eyes. It would then be easy to assume that Keaton’s performance involves doing what came naturally to him. But there is too much diversity in Keaton’s work, both between his performance in The Godfather and his Allen comedies and within Annie Hall itself, to dismiss his comfort with romantic comedy as simply charming activity – even though it was, of course, extremely charming.
Annie Hall served as Allen’s transition from broader gag-based comedies to a more naturalistic style. As such, it contains plenty of gags, fantasy sequences, and a loose patchwork of relationship memoirs sandwiched between some scathing glimpses of a doomed romantic relationship. (The script even included a murder mystery, presumably reused to some extent in Allen and Keaton’s 1993 reunion, Manhattan Murder Mystery.) Keaton, similarly, presides over a transition in American romantic comedies, playing neither the goofy-era speed-talker nor the ditz bomb popularized in the 1950s. from this, she mixes and matches aspects of both to create something entirely new that still reads today as strangely contemporary, interrupting her own boldness with her own false-start hesitations.
Watch, for example, the scene where Annie and Alvy Singer (Allen) first connect after a game of tennis, ping-ponging for invitations for a joyride (despite the fact that only one of them owns a car). The jokes are quick, but zigzag unpredictably, with Keaton soloing around his own discomfort before ending up in a dead end of “la di da,” a phrase that sums up his nervous whimsy. The film physicalizes this sensitivity in the next scene, as she makes blasé chatter while driving recklessly through the streets of Manhattan. Later, she centers herself singing It Had to Be You in a nightclub.
These are not examples of Annie acting erratically. Throughout the film, there is dimensionality to her slight insanity – her willingness to try drugs, her hippie hangover, her panic over lobsters and spiders, her refusal to be manipulated by Alvy’s attempts to turn her into someone more superficially serious (which for him means obsessed with death). At first, Annie may seem like an odd character to win an Oscar; she’s the romantic protagonist of a film seen from a man’s point of view, and the central couple’s arc doesn’t lean toward changing enough to accommodate each other. Yet Annie changes, in ways both observable and unknowable. She just doesn’t become a more suitable partner for Alvy. Many later romantic comedies stole the superficial elements – neurotic complexes, offbeat fashions – without really emulating Annie’s ultimate independence.
Perhaps Keaton was wary of this trend. After her working relationship with Allen ended, she took a break from romantic comedies; The baby boom is actually the only one to have occurred in the entire 1980s. But during its absence, Annie Hall, the character perhaps more than the loosely structured film, became a model for the genre. Meg Ryan, for example, owes much of her career in romantic comedies to Keaton’s ability to play simultaneously smart and flibbertigibbet. This made Keaton a perennial queen of romantic comedies, even though she actually played more wives (whether happily, as in Father of the Bride, or less so, as in The First Wives Club) and/or moms (see The Family Stone or Because I Said So) than single girls falling in love. Even in her reunion with Allen, they are a long-married couple brought together by comical amateur sleuths – and she slips easily and beautifully into this role.
But Keaton had another major romantic comedy success in 2003 with Something’s Gotta Give, as a playwright in love with a young boy (Jack Nicholson, naturally). The result? Her latest Oscar nomination, and a whole subgenre of romances where older women (usually played by movie stars, but still!) reassert their romantic and/or social agency. Part of the reason his death seems like such a shock is that Keaton was still making these films as recently as last year, a constant presence at the multiplex. Now audiences will no longer take this presence for granted to realize the enormous influence she had on romantic comedy as we know it. If it’s harder to think of current versions of Meg Ryan or Goldie Hawn who are also following in Keaton’s footsteps, that’s probably because it’s rare for a performer of Keaton’s talent to dedicate herself to a genre that’s been mostly putting out fodder for a while now.
Consider: There are 10 living actresses who have received at least four Best Actress nominations, including Nicole Kidman, Jane Fonda and Ellen Burstyn. It’s rare that one of these roles comes from a romantic comedy, let alone half of them, as was the case for Keaton. Because his character has become so familiar, it may have been easy to overlook just how much nuance and care Keaton brought to a genre better known for its star turns. She also had the requisite star quality and depended heavily on it in films like the Book Club series (where she lives the obvious dream of Adam Sandler’s team and literally plays a character called Diane). But she also played characters like Annie Hall, Erica in Something’s Gotta Give, and the more distant Mary in Manhattan, with a passion, both comic and touching, absent in the more plastic imitations of Annie or Nancy (Meyers, who directed Keaton only once, but through his writing, became as associated with his later period as Allen was with his early stuff). Perhaps she was able to carry that disappointment and disillusionment from the Godfather films with her, subtly anchoring her later roles. Or maybe comedy really is more complicated to perform than drama. Either way, it’s no wonder it’s so associated with romance, despite its wider reach. Keaton’s characters may have been hard to pin down, but like her, they were easy to love.
