Diane Keaton was less a movie star than a shapeshifter, always slipping between archetypes and rewriting them along the way. This week at Film at Lincoln Center, that restless, singular energy is the subject of “Looking for Ms. Keaton,” a retrospective celebrating one of American cinema’s most idiosyncratic presences. (It begins on February 13, running through February 19.)
The weeklong series traces Keaton’s staggering range over a six-decade career: the comic bravura, the tender vulnerability, the quiet authority she later grew into. Together, the 15 films, many shown on 35mm, reveal an artist in dialogue with her time, interrogating romance, femininity, power, and aging long before such inquiries became fashionable. (And fashion, of course, was central to Keaton’s career, from the nervy, waistcoated ingénue who made menswear feel like a manifesto to her late-career roles swaddled in creamy, cozy silhouettes that augured coastal-grandmother chic.)
“The way in which her films charted a kind of coming-of-age of American womanhood is incredibly coherent, even as she played many different kinds of women,” says Film at Lincoln Center programmer Maddie Whittle. “She was always wrestling in her roles with how to say something about where women were at a particular moment, whether that was engaging explicitly with ideology, as in Reds, or in a more implicit register, portraying complicated women navigating what it means to be a wife and mother or a sister and daughter.”
Whittle detailed for Vogue the echoes between Keaton’s film roles and her real life, why what she wore onscreen resonated so much with audiences, and why her performances remain, decades later, ones we love to revisit.
Vogue: Diane Keaton appeared in more than 60 films between 1970 and her death last October, with many indelible performances that remain lodged in the cultural imagination. What version of her were you most interested in foregrounding?
Maddie Whittle: I wanted to shed light on her open-mindedness, self-deprecation, and unfailing self-possession. She was not afraid to make fun of herself or participate in the joke, but she was never going to invite jokes made at her expense. There’s a dignity to her performances when she’s leaning into farce or slapstick, and even in the most intense dramatic roles, there’s a playfulness and an openness to seeing where a particular character might take her—which is why her performances remain so vital. She’s such a crucial element of films that audiences keep returning to because there’s more to discover in the women she portrays.
Did she discuss how she chose her roles?
I have the sense that she was always interested in characters she could learn from, that perhaps offered her space to explore a different perspective. She played many mothers over the years, but she herself did not become a mother until late middle age—she adopted two children in her 50s. It’s fascinating to watch a film like Baby Boom with that in mind, as an example of a role she took long before she herself decided to become a mother. The film is about a woman stumbling into motherhood in spite of herself, and you see, time and again, elements of her characters surfacing in her own life story. Being romantically involved with her various costars or directors she worked with is another thread that was clearly part of her creative process.
What surprised you as you went back through these films?
In my imagination, I see Diane Keaton as a dominant presence who steals every scene and you can’t take your eyes off of. In the Godfather films, Kay Corleone is a fairly small character, yet she’s the moral center of gravity and an audience proxy. I was used to thinking of her as a gravitational force, but in several films, especially ensembles like Crimes of the Heart or Shoot the Moon, I was struck by how generous a co-performer she is. She’s not afraid to let her costars seize the scene. That’s not to say that she fades into the background, but she was very good at asserting her presence in a way that informed the rhythms and textures of a film without necessarily needing to be the dramatic center of attention.
Not all movie stars become fashion icons. Why did what Keaton wore onscreen resonate so much with audiences?
It’s a question of chemistry because these were clothes that she either selected for herself or brought some element of herself into. She inhabited them very effortlessly and organically, and that shines through, especially when it’s a look that the mainstream hadn’t seen before, in the case of Annie Hall. She really took ownership of that character’s presentation and brought her own items into the mix. That continues through the years she worked with Nancy Meyers—it’s a very generationally specific aesthetic. The ascendancy of Eileen Fisher owes a lot to that. Even as she’s often described as awkward, kooky, and quirky, there’s always a poise to the way that she carries herself and a self-knowledge that imbues her choices with sexiness. This sense that she was always an agent of her own look, the driving force behind her visual presentation, is powerful.
What performance would you recommend for someone who thinks they know Diane Keaton already?
Shoot the Moon is an underseen, undercelebrated film from 1982 that follows the dissolution of a marriage. Her character is emblematic of the crossroads women faced in the ’80s about what they were entitled to want from marriage, family life, and sex. There’s an ambivalence that contemporary audiences might see as quaint or old-fashioned, but because of the emotional vividness of her performance and the real lack of vanity she brought to it, I found it incredibly relevant to today. In the canon of divorce films, it’s in some ways more urgent than films that we might have seen in the last few years, because it’s so unflinchingly getting at conflict, angst, and resentments.
Did going over Keaton’s body of work change or clarify anything for you personally?
I had taken her for granted. I was born in 1990, so she’s been a star for as long as I’ve been alive, but I saw her as a star of the past—enduring but not necessarily speaking to the present. But spending this much time with her convinced me that we have never seen an artist like her before or since. She’s a far more singular voice than I had given her credit for—not just channeling characters that were concocted by often the men responsible for writing a screenplay or bringing a film to screen, but taking ownership of her characters. That makes her stand out among her peers and the generations who have followed.
