| Interiors | |
|---|---|
 Theatrical release poster | |
| Directed by | Woody Allen |
| Written by | Woody Allen |
| Produced by | Charles H. Joffe |
| Starring | |
| Cinematography | Gordon Willis |
| Edited by | Ralph Rosenblum |
Production company | Jack Rollins–Charles H. Joffe Productions |
| Distributed by | United Artists |
Release date |
|
Running time | 92 minutes |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Budget | $3.1 million[2][3] |
| Box office | $10.4 million[1] |
Interiors is a 1978 Americandrama film written and directed byWoody Allen. It starsKristin Griffith,Mary Beth Hurt,Richard Jordan,Diane Keaton,E. G. Marshall,Geraldine Page,Maureen Stapleton, andSam Waterston.
Allen's first full-fledged film in the drama genre, it was met with acclaim from critics. It received fiveAcademy Award nominations, includingBest Director,Best Original Screenplay (both for Allen),Best Actress (Page), andBest Supporting Actress (Stapleton). Page also won theBAFTA Film Award for Best Supporting Actress.[4]
Arthur, a corporate attorney, and Eve, an interior decorator, are the parents of three adult daughters. Renata, the eldest daughter, is a poet whose husband Frederick, a struggling writer, feels eclipsed by her success. Flyn, the youngest daughter, is an actress who is away most of the time filming; the low quality of her films is an object of ridicule behind her back. The middle daughter, Joey, who is in a relationship with Mike, cannot settle on a career, and resents her mother for favoring Renata, while Renata resents their father's concern over Joey's lack of direction.
One morning, Arthur unexpectedly announces that he wants a separation from his wife and would like to live alone. Eve, who isclinically depressed, attempts suicide in her new Manhattan apartment. The shock of these two events causes a rift among the sisters. Arthur returns from a trip to Greece with Pearl, a high-spirited and more "normal" woman, whom he intends to marry. His daughters are disturbed that Arthur would disregard Eve's suicide attempt and find another woman, to whom Joey refers as a "vulgarian".
Arthur and Pearl marry at the family'sLong Island beach house, with Renata, Joey, and Flyn in attendance. Later in the evening, Joey lashes out at Pearl when Pearl accidentally breaks one of Eve's vases. In the middle of the night, Frederick drunkenly attempts to rape Flyn in the garage, but she manages to escape. Meanwhile, Joey finds Eve in the house, and sadly explains how much she has given up for her mother, and how disdainfully she is treated. Eve walks out onto the beach and into the surf. Joey unsuccessfully attempts to save Eve, but nearly drowns in the process. Mike rescues Joey, pulling her to shore, so that Pearl resuscitates the drowned victim by tilting Joey's head back, clearing the airway, and pinching the nose, to administer rescue breaths into her lungs viamouth-to-mouth.
The family attends Eve's funeral, each placing a single white rose, Eve's favorite flower and a symbol of hope to her, on Eve's wooden coffin, after which the three sisters look out at the sea from their former family beach house and comment on the peacefulness of the sea.
Interiors grossed $10.4 million in the United States and Canada.[1]
On thereview aggregator websiteRotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 78% based 18 reviews, with an average rating of 6.9/10.[5]weighted average, assigned the film a score of 67 out of 100, based on 9 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews".[6]
Vincent Canby ofThe New York Times called the film "beautiful" and complimentedGordon Willis on his "use of cool colors that suggest civilization's precarious control of natural forces", but noted:[7]
My problem withInteriors is that although I admire the performances and isolated moments ... 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 ofTime wrote that the film's "desperate sobriety ... robs it of energy and passion"; Allen's "style is Bergmanesque, but his material isMankiewiczian, 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."[8]
Roger Ebert gave the film four stars and praised it highly, writing, "Here we have a Woody Allen film, and we're talking aboutO'Neill andBergman and traditions and influences? Yes, and correctly. Allen, whose comedies have been among the cheerful tonics of recent years, is astonishingly assured in his first drama."[9]
Gene Siskel awarded three stars out of four and wrote:
I thought the unremitting pain of the first half of the film was almost laughable, as if Allen had made a bad Bergman film. I thoroughly enjoyed the second half, in which the film's only bright, lively character (Maureen Stapleton as the father's new, romantic interest) makes her entrance. At the end, I left the theater thinking that the picture was painful and didn't have much applicability to my life, but that I would always remember its characters more for the superb acting than for Allen's script.[10]
Charles Champlin called the film "somber, intense and stunning", concluding, "LikeCries and Whispers, Allen'sInteriors is, for all the somberness of the material, in the end an affirmation of life and a transcendent piece of art. The film lovers will love it if joke-seekers do not.[11]
Penelope Gilliatt ofThe New Yorker wrote: "This droll piece of work is [Allen's] most majestic so far. The theme its characters express is veryChekhovian. It is pinned to the idea that the hardest, and most admirable thing to do is to act properly through a whole life."[12]
James Monaco, in his 1979 bookAmerican Film Now, describedInteriors as "the most pretentious film by a major American filmmaker in the last thirty years" alongsideMickey One (1965).[13]
In 2016,Interiors was listed as Allen's 11th best film in an article byThe Daily Telegraph criticsRobbie Collin and Tim Robey, who wrote that "the emotional effort being expended is cumulatively hard to shrug off" and praised Stapleton's performance.[14]
Allen's own fears about the film's reception are recounted in a 1991 biography of Allen byEric Lax, where he quotesRalph Rosenblum, the film'seditor:[15]
He [Allen] managed to rescueInteriors, 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 writingLong Day's Journey into Night and it turns intoEdge of Night."[15]
Looking back on the film in 1982, Allen said:
I should have brought Pearl, Maureen Stapleton's character, in earlier. I thought the audience would be entertained before the nub of conflict emerged. I thought that it was entertaining enough before Pearl entered, but it wasn't. It should have been. I should have started it with Pearl coming in right away and the whole thing would have flowered right from the start.[16]
The plot and characters ofInteriors are alluded to in theDeath Cab for Cutie song "Death of an Interior Decorator", taken from the 2003 albumTransatlanticism.[18]
