IN Vanity Fair In 1987, Keaton told Joan Juliet Buck: “I was always quite religious as a child, but from the very beginning I had a problem with Jesus 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, in the vault of heaven 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 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 the sun's rays on him, making him smile and feel the warmth of the world's heart. At such moments, she looks like old Laura from a Tennessee Williams movie.”The Glass Menagerie— polishes shards of glass to see how the light plays in them.
Like Laura, Keaton's characters don't know what to do with the attention they crave once it's been received. In fact, there are very few love scenes in Keaton's films, and the ones I remember seem to be partially hidden by darkness or clothing: in that era, innuendo was usually more interesting to filmmakers than explicitness. Plus, there was her natural modesty (“I have a certain opinion about my body,” she told Baku). Keaton distinguished herself in her first Broadway show, Hair, in 1968, not only by singing “Black Boys,” but also by not taking off her clothes at the end of the first act—she didn’t see the point.
In the eighties, Keaton gave some remarkable speeches about the politics of the body. In the sensitively drawn, almost emotionally overwhelming film Shoot the Moon (1982), directed by Alan Parker, she plays Faith Dunlap, a middle-aged woman with four young children. In the opening scenes we see Faith getting dressed to go out, only to be emotionally stripped later when she realizes she no longer wants to marry her husband George, a writer played wonderfully by Albert Finney. Soon after she and George break up, Faith entertains a laborer named Frank who is building a tennis court on the couple's property. As she and Frank sit separately in the living room, near silence, first date dread, uncertainty, worry, hope, fear and attraction fill the space between them. Frank makes the pass, and in a move that's part Faith, part Keaton, Faith backs away. But then there is a touch, a kiss, and you can almost hear her heart beating under her huge shirt: Will it hurt me? Is this love? This?
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 in anyone's calculations; thinking slows things down (unless you're thinking about how to get it to the next guy before he puts it on you). In the first film, Keaton wears a terrible wig—a hairstyle she hated—but I think his awkwardness actually helped her develop Kay's awkwardness; her innocence is in direct conflict with her husband's cunning. Just as Keaton was a kind of Wasp foil to Allen's Jewishness, Kaye is “white” in contrast to Corleone's darkness. But Keaton doesn't exaggerate Kay's difference; Kay simply is, and when she rebels against the Corleones' legacy of violence, she uses her 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 something of Anna's downfall in The Good Mother (1988). Anna, a single mother, falls in love with an Irish sculptor (Liam Neeson) who awakens her to her own body, to pleasure, but even as she explores its beauty, you can see, flashing across Keaton's face, all the doubts and fears Anna feels when a close friend – a complete stranger – shows up at her door.
Throughout her acting career, Keaton, whose varied creativity and productivity received less attention than her personality (she wouldn't know who she was unless she did something), worked on other projects. She worked with curator Marvin Heiferman to create art books based on film stills and tabloid images, as well as creating her own work. (Check “BookingHer books, like her documentary filmmaking (her 1987 film Heaven explored various ideas about the afterlife), were an extension of her love of images and collage, an interest she inherited from her mother, the charismatic Dorothy Hall.
In 2011, Keaton published “Then again“, her first memoir (with three more to follow). The book is wonderful for a number of reasons, one of which is that it is a conversation of sorts with her mother, whose triumph in Mrs. Kelly's Los Angeles Beauty Pageant when Keaton was a child was the impetus for her coming onto the stage. The inclusion of excerpts from Dorothy's magazines, albums, and collages in Then Again Keaton's opportunity to hide while she talked about herself; the most harrowing section of the book is about her body, her struggle with bulimia. She developed this self-destructive behavior while she was in Hair – she was told she would be paid more if she lost weight, and this continued for years until she finally overcame it through psychoanalysis (talking therapy, where Keaton was perhaps first engaged in dialogue outside the script). In this chapter of the memoir, everything we feel and identify with in Keaton's performances—the clouds that sometimes blot out the sun, the goodness that cannot resist itself—comes out, pure and true; it's a devastating achievement and one of the best things I've ever read about addiction. When I got to know Keaton a little, I said that, given all she learned was that she should play heroin addict Mary Tyrone in Eugene O'Neill's film.”Long Day's Journey into Night“One day.” Her eyes widened and she smiled, turning away. Then Keaton, the introvert who loved to shine, the thinker who thought of himself in very different ways, looked back and said, “This All I need! Are you crazy? ♦
