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“Manhattan Murder Mystery” begins with a thunderous overture in the form of Bobby Short’s 1973 recording of Cole Porter’s “I Happen to Like New York” as the camera sweeps overhead with panoramic views of the glittering city skyline at night. Carol Lipton (Diane Keaton) might like New York, or have liked it once, but she seems less enamored as the movie opens, palpably suffering through a New York Rangers hockey game at Madison Square Garden to which she has been dragged by her husband Larry (Woody Allen). Is it any wonder when they return home to their apartment and their down-the-hall neighbors Paul and Lillian House (Jerry Adler and Lynn Cohen, respectively) invite them over some late-night coffee, she jumps at the chance despite her spouse’s protestations? When Lillian asks Carol if she works, she replies that she used to, at an ad agency, but that was many years ago. This comment is never followed up on, but it doesn’t need to be. Her age is never said, but she and Larry have a son in college and Keaton was 47 at the time of “Manhattan Murder Mystery’s” release and there is a palpable middle-age drift in Keaton’s line reading of “many years ago,” one that communicates how Carol’s life did not slip off track, necessarily, but started to coast. When Mrs. House turns up dead, ascribed to a mysterious heart condition, Carol becomes convinced a murder has been committed and sets out to solve it.
In many ways, “Manhattan Murder Mystery” feels familiar, but that’s part of the point. “Paddington” and “Paddington 2” director Paul King might have encouraged his cast to pull inspiration from writer/director Allen’s 1993 comedy, but Allen’s 1993 comedy is pulling inspiration from the noirs of the 40s and 50s. “Too much ‘Double Indemnity,’” Larry cautions when Carol spitballs insurance as Mr. House’s possible motive. In truth, “Manhattan Murder Mystery” is nowhere near as tightly plotted as that masterpiece. There are contrivances galore and myriad gaps in logic and the conclusion, itself an ode to “The Lady from Shanghai,” is a bit underwhelming. Not that it matters. Allen is more focused on comedy than precise narrative coherence, yielding at least one true classic bit, the falsification of a phone call, the scene that to which “Paddington 2” paid gleeful homage. Even more than that, though, “Manhattan Murder Mystery” succeeds via the chemistry and energy of its leads, reteaming for the first time since the 70s, though unlike “Annie Hall” in which Allen’s character led the narrative, Keaton’s leads this one, a refreshing and crucial change of pace.
In his New Yorker obituary for Keaton, Hilton Als noted that what made their collaborations so successful was that “Keaton never gives us the feeling that she actually hears or understands what Allen is saying.” This was never truer than in “Manhattan Murder Mystery,” so much that Allen wrote it into the text, a hilarious sequence in which Larry declares that he forbids Carol from breaking into the House’s apartment in the middle of the night. She breaks in anyway. “Is that what you do when I’m forbidding?” he rhetorically, haplessly asks. Though Larry is spurred to win his wife back over, motivated in part by their mutual friend Ted (Alan Alda, perfect), recently divorced and nursing a longtime crush on Carol, the chief excitement is in watching Carol unlock a newfound sense of joy. At one point, she remarks that she feels “dizzy with freedom,” and Keaton brings that sentiment to life, undergirded in the handheld camerawork. In most movies, the camera drives the action, but in “Manhattan Murder Mystery,” the camera hastening around corners and down halls and across streets always feels as if it’s hustling to keep up with her.
