Diane Keaton was always 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.