Diane Keaton · 1978 · Signature Roles
Renata is a poet, the eldest daughter of a wealthy family whose parents’ divorce exposes every fault line in their lives.
Renata is a poet, the eldest daughter of a wealthy family whose parents’ divorce exposes every fault line in their lives. Diane Keaton plays her in Woody Allen’s first outright drama — a film influenced by Bergman, shot in muted colors, with no jokes to hide behind — and her performance is all restraint: the watchfulness, the guilt, the sense of a woman who has written about feeling and now must actually feel it.
Interiors divided audiences, but Keaton’s work in it proved her dramatic range. She does not play Renata as a symbol of artistic pretension. She plays her as a daughter trying, and failing, to hold her family together with words, in a film that argues words are not enough.
