Channelling real-life pain onscreen
Actress drew on her own love and loss to play matriarch in a failing marriage in her latest movie
If you’re looking for someone who can deliver the true complexity of male-female relationships in all their sweet and sour splendour, look no further than Diane Keaton.
She’s been doing it brilliantly for 45 years in a wide assortment of movies, from Annie Hall and Something’s Gotta Give to The Godfather and Reds, with one Oscar, three additional nominations and $1.1 billion in collective North American film grosses to prove it.
Her latest entry, Love the Coopers, opens Nov. 14. It tells the story of four generations of a dysfunctional family trying to smooth out their differences over the Christmas season. What gives this version an extra kick is that Mom and Dad decide just before Santa’s sleigh comes into view that they’re ready to call it quits after 40 years of marriage.
“I think that unhappiness in a marriage is a captivating problem,” Keaton says in a phone interview, without a trace of irony apparent.
The 69-year-old Keaton has never been married, although she has two adopted children and has survived long-term romantic entanglements with some of the most complex men in show business: Woody Allen, Al Pacino and Warren Beatty.
“The moment when two people finally face each other and admit that the relationship they once had is gone, that’s a really painful and powerful thing. It doesn’t matter if it’s been four years or 40. It still cuts deep. I’ve been there. I remember it.”
“The moment when two people finally face each other and admit that the relationship they once had is gone, that’s a really painful and powerful thing.” DIANE KEATON
That’s why Keaton knew she could only play it with a certain kind of actor.
“I thought it was very important who played my husband. I didn’t want that typical Hollywood American Daddy kind of guy. I wanted someone smart and powerful and real.”
And she got that in John Goodman. The sequence where their marriage finally falls apart while bickering over a long-postponed trip abroad has the punch Keaton was talking about.
“I loved that scene. Oh yes. It gives you a unique point of view about the American family, doesn’t it? All these picture perfect marriages that are falling apart inside . . . ”
But when gently reminded that nothing in her own life reflects the world of the movie, she agrees totally.
“I love a film that forces me to play someone else’s life. Well, I mean, in terms of who you are, you are essentially the same person, but the circumstances are always wildly different. Look at the way I started my career!”
Indeed. In the five years between 1972 and 1977, she tackled an assortment of Woody Allen comedies (culminating in her Oscar-winning turn in Annie Hall), played the high drama of The Godfather I & II and defined the dark side of the singles-bar generation as the tragic heroine of Looking for Mr. Goodbar.
“I’m drawn to so many different types of women. I read a script, I see a new world and it has a seductive way of pulling you in. Then you realize that there’s a serious emotional layer underneath you’ve got to deal with.”
But perhaps the final bait to doing Love the Coopers was the fact it allowed Keaton to sing onscreen again.
Everyone remembers her hesitant but haunting rendition of “Seems Like Old Times” in Annie Hall and though she sang in 2014’s And So it Goes, not many people got to see it.
This time around, she offers a delicate and touching rendition of “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,” sitting around with her family just as things are about to really fall apart.
Keaton recalls what she tapped into to deliver that scene.
“I remember saying to myself, ‘I’ve got to give this all one more chance,’ but let’s be honest: iI’s hard to be vulnerable at the best of times. And it’s even harder to open up once you’ve been hurt.
“We’re all hiding from our feelings. We’re all trying to protect ourselves. We’re all afraid of going through the pain again.”
It’s an emotional journey that Keaton has been on several times over the decades — onscreen and off. In her films, it’s led to serendipitous occasions like the bittersweet romantic comedy of her 2003 hit, Something’s Gotta Give.
And in real life? After a pause, she sings a bit of “My Way.” “Regrets, I’ve had a few . . .” Then she stops.
“Of course, I’ve had regrets that I couldn’t have been a bit more mature about what my expectations were from men, from relationships. But I didn’t know how to do that.
“I still believe in the possibility of change. My mother understood that.”
Keaton’s complex relationship with her mother was captured in her brilliant 2011 memoir, Then Again, a topic she’s drawn to again now.
“My mother grew up with all that 1950s stuff about how a woman was just a wife and a homemaker, but in the 1960s she really changed that. She knew what the women’s movement was before it was even a movement. She was an artist, a great artist, but she just didn’t have the opportunities.”
Keaton’s latest love is architecture and she’s constantly buying old mansions, converting them, then selling them and moving on.
“Yes, I admit it, I’m always fantasizing about the next place, the next project, the next dream.
“But there’s always going to be a dream and I’m going to keep on pursuing it. That’s what I know.”