Interiors

I've had the Woody Allen movie Interiors sitting on my DVR for almost a year now, as I think I recorded it during last year's 31 Days of Oscar when it was in April because of the Academy's moving the ceremony thanks to the coronavirus panic. In any case, I recently got around to watching Interiors so I could do a post here on it.

Geraldine Page plays Eve, the matriarch of a upper-middle-class family. Eve is an interior decorator, with a sense of style that tends toward a lot of white; at the beginning of the movie she's got some ideas for her daughter Joey (Mary Beth Hurt). Joey has done some writing but hasn't really decided on what to do for a career; currently she's living with Mike (Sam Waterston), who is doing research on Marxism. (Plot synopses suggest they're not married, although I don't recall any dialogue in the movie that definitively says whether they're married or just living together.)

Joey has two sisters. Renata (Diane Keaton) lives in New York as do both Eve and the parents; she is a published poet whose husband Frederick (Richard Jordan) is also a writer. The third sister is Flyn (Kristin Griffith); she doesn't show up so often largely because she's an actress who has to go on location to do the low-budget movies, TV shows, and commercials that she appears in. It won't get her to the A list, but it seems that at least it will pay the bills.

We get a sense from the way Eve just waltzed right in to Joey's apartment and started moving stuff around to re-decorate the place that she can be a bit demanding. She's so demanding, in fact, that her husband Arthur (E.G. Marshall) has decided to leave the house and engage in a "trial separation". That trial takes him on a vacation to Greece, and devastates Eve, who acts as though she relied on Arthur quite a bit.

Things are about to get quite a bit worse for Eve, however. Arthur returns home from Greece and announces that he met a nice American widow there, Pearl (Maureen Stapleton). Pearl is everything Eve is not, gregarious and mildly bohemian in that she's learned how to do card tricks and the like. It's easy to see why somebody like Arthur who spent 30-odd years with a woman like Eve would suddenly turn to a person like Pearl. Eve responds to the announcement that Arthur wants a divorce so that he can marry Pearl by attempting to commit suicide.

If there was a rift between Arthur and Eve, there are also rifts between other members of the family. Renata worries about Joey's apparent aimlessness, while Joey has issues with the way her parents treated her and Renata differently. Renata and Joey both also have problems to deal with with the respective men in their lives. That's going to become even more of an issue when Arthur and Pearl decide to have a small wedding ceremony, for family only, in the family's beach house out on Long Island. Eve shows up some time after the actual ceremony, leading to the film's finale.

Interiors is a movie that seems to sharply divide people in their reviews. It's easy to see that the acting is good, as is the direction and production design. But at the same time, it's incredibly difficult to identify with the various characters in the movie, which is almost unrelentingly depressing. Some critics have suggested this was Woody Allen trying to make an Ingmar Bergman movie, and that's not an unfair description. (My first thought for the color scheme was reminiscent of Track of the Cat, but of course Bergman's use of ever more red in Cries and Whispers is fairly similar to the disproportiontely white color palette in Interiors.) It's quite talky, and for a long time it feels as though the movie isn't really going anywhere.

I didn't dislike Interiors to the extent that some people might, but I also definitely didn't like it as much as those who praise it clearly like it. So this is one that you absolutely need to watch for yourself and draw your own conclusions about. Interiors is not a movie for everybody, and that's not necessarily a bad thing, or an insult to the people who find it's not for them.