Diane Keaton’s Shadows and Light

In Vanity Fair in 1987, Keaton told Joan Juliet Buck, “I was always pretty religious as a kid, but I had trouble with Jesus early on because I couldn’t understand that there was a son of God here on earth. I was primarily interested in religion because I wanted to go to heaven.” Longing to be somewhere else, someone else, up in the firmament, is the mark of a dreamer, and Keaton’s characters, like the terminally ill Bessie in “Marvin’s Room” (1996), dream of joy, a joy that is less fleeting than life. Bessie’s father, Marvin, has had a stroke and can’t speak, so Bessie holds a mirror up to the window to reflect sunbeams toward him and make him smile and feel the warmth of the world’s heart. In those moments, she’s like an older Laura from Tennessee Williams’s “The Glass Menagerie,” polishing her bits of glass so she can watch the light play in them.

Like Laura, Keaton’s characters don’t know what to do with the attention they crave once they’ve got it. There are actually very few love scenes in Keaton’s movies, and the ones I remember seem partially obscured by darkness or clothing: in that era, innuendo was generally more interesting to filmmakers than being explicit. Plus, there was her natural modesty (“I have definite opinions about my body,” she told Buck). Keaton distinguished herself in her first Broadway show, “Hair,” in 1968, not only by singing “Black Boys” (“Black boys are delicious, chocolate-flavored love”) but by not taking off her clothes at the end of the first act—she didn’t see the point.

In the eighties, Keaton gave several remarkable performances about the politics of the body. In the sensitively drawn, almost emotionally overwhelming movie “Shoot the Moon” (1982), directed by Alan Parker, she plays Faith Dunlap, a middle-aged woman with four young children. In the first scenes, we watch as Faith gets dressed to go out, only later to be emotionally stripped down as she realizes that she no longer wants to be married to her husband, George, a writer, beautifully played by Albert Finney. Soon after she and George separate, Faith entertains a workman named Frank, who is building a tennis court on the couple’s property. As she and Frank sit apart in the parlor, nearly silent, first-date jitters, tentativeness, anxiety, hope, fear, and attraction fill the space between them. Frank makes a pass, and, in a move that is part Faith, part Keaton, Faith retreats. But then, there’s a touch, a kiss, and you can almost hear her heart beating beneath her oversized shirt: Will I be hurt? Is this love? Is it?

Like many of Keaton’s characters, Kay, the wife of Michael Corleone (Al Pacino), in Francis Ford Coppola’s three “Godfather” films, lives in a morally compromised world: goodness is not part of anyone’s calculations; reflection slows things down (unless you’re thinking about how to stick it to the next guy before he sticks it to you). In the first film, Keaton wears a terrible wig—a coiffure she loathed—but I think the awkwardness of it actually helped her to develop Kay’s awkwardness; her innocence is in direct contrast to her husband’s canniness. Just as Keaton was a sort of Wasp foil to Allen’s Jewishness, Kay is “white” in contrast to the Corleones’ darkness. But Keaton doesn’t over-emphasize Kay’s difference; Kay just is, and, when she rebels against the Corleones’ legacy of violence, she uses her own body to take a stand, telling Michael, “I wouldn’t bring another one of your sons into this world!” Kay’s ethics are her downfall, just as sensuality becomes a kind of downfall for Anna in “The Good Mother” (1988). A single parent, Anna falls for an Irish sculptor (Liam Neeson) who wakes her up to her own body, to pleasure, but, even as she explores the beauty of it, you can see, flickering across Keaton’s face, all the doubt and fear Anna feels when intimacy—the ultimate stranger—shows up at her door.

Throughout her acting career, Keaton, whose diverse creativity and productivity got less attention than her persona—she would not have known who she was if she wasn’t making something—worked on other projects. With the curator Marvin Heiferman, she made art books that drew on movie stills and tabloid pictures, while also producing works of her own. (Check out “Reservations,” her book of photographs taken in hotel interiors. Not surprisingly, Keaton was drawn to images of furniture that was unusual or positioned at odd angles.) Her books, like her documentary filmmaking—her 1987 film, “Heaven,” explored various ideas about the afterlife—were an extension of her love of imagery and collage, an interest she inherited from her mother, the charismatic Dorothy Hall.

In 2011, Keaton published “Then Again,” her first memoir (three more would follow). The book is beautiful for a number of reasons, one being that it is a kind of conversation with her mother, whose triumph in the “Mrs. Los Angeles” beauty pageant when Keaton was a child was an impetus for her getting onstage herself. Incorporating selections from Dorothy’s journals, scrapbooks, and collages in “Then Again” gave Keaton a scrim to hide behind while she talked about herself; the most harrowing section of the book has to do with her body, her struggle with bulimia. She developed this self-destructive behavior when she was in “Hair”—she was told she’d be paid more if she slimmed down—and it continued for years until she finally beat it with the help of psychoanalysis (the talking cure, where, perhaps for the first time, Keaton was invested in dialogue outside of a script). In that chapter of the memoir, everything we feel and identify with in Keaton’s performances—the clouds that sometimes obscure the sun, the goodness that cannot face itself—comes rushing out, raw and true; it’s a shattering accomplishment, and one of the best things I have ever read about addiction. When I got to know Keaton a little, I said that, given all that she had learned, she should play the heroin-addicted Mary Tyrone in Eugene O’Neill’s “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” one day. Her eyes widened, and she smiled as she turned away. Then Keaton, the introvert who loved to shine, the thinker who thought of herself as anything but, looked back and said, “That’s all I need! Are you out of your mind?” ♦