Alvy Singer (Woody Allen) is a stand-up comedian in New York City. Annie Hall (Diane Keaton) is an aspiring singer and photographer in New York City. The two of them start dating.
I’ve never seen a Woody Allen film until now. Honestly, I’ve always intended to! Blue Jasmine and Midnight in Paris have sat there tantalisingly either on the DVD shelves or for free on Amazon Prime but alas, when choosing something to watch my hand has always gravitated automatically to the Ugly Betty DVDs. But now, as a result of this project, I have been forced to face the Allen, and I suppose Annie Hall, being often hailed as his magnum opus, is a good place to start.
Annie Hall has all the tropes and trademarks that Woody Allen is often lambasted for. Lengthy camera shots, hefty amounts of naturalistic dialogue, plot-lite and a snarky, pessimistic sense of humour. And all in all, Annie Hall is not a bad use of 90 minutes. It is, in fact, a superb bit of character work, and we spend the entirety of the film getting to know the two main characters through snappy flashbacks, meta-theatrical set pieces, anecdotes and simply watching them sitting around talking. The film captures the experience of getting to know a new person - you don’t really get them until you discover more about their past, their psyche and how you behave around them yourself.
It’s easy to identify with Alvy. He’s short, ugly and socially awkward, and knows it too. Like almost all stand-up comedians, his self-loathing leads to a debilitating series of self-deprecating jokes, and using intellectualism as his safety net. He’d rather see a 4-hour documentary about Nazis than go to a fashionable party where he could feel out of place. Annie, meanwhile, is the optimist, life-is-for-living kind of gal. She is driven by beautiful things, friendly people and general motivation to experience the world. The two are so mis-matched that the relationship is doomed from the start, but they find solace in one another by almost trying to be the other one. The cleverest scene for me was during one of their first encounters in which they discuss photography. Annie discusses her love of photography’s spontaneity and the beauty of every day things, but Alvy insists on social perspective and rules of framing a picture. Meanwhile, a series of subtitles reveal both characters’ inner thoughts, in which Annie wishes she was as analytical as he, while Alvy worries that she will see him as a bit of a dork.
These innovative pieces of abstract meta-theatre mean that the film achieves a level of character analysis that is very, very deep. Second or third viewings along with critical analyses of Freudian and Jewish themes would probably help me understand the film in the same way that academics would. For now, I gained great enjoyment out of Alvy and Annie’s thoughts being illustrated on screen, as well as Alvy’s complaints to the audience directly and his questioning of random passers by about relationships, all of whom answer frankly and without batting an eyelid. The film is a very intense dissection of dating, making psychological and social comments that the Bridget Jones movies only dream of achieving.
But whilst I enjoyed the innovation of the film-making and the sparky dialogue, I had no emotional connection to the romance between them. I realise that I’m probably not supposed to. This is not a romantic comedy like It Happened One Night, Marty, The Apartment or even last week’s Rocky where you are literally screaming for the man and woman to get together. But I would have liked to want Alvy and Annie to get together, and such intense psychoanalysis makes even 90 minutes a little arduous at times.
Annie Hall is proof that sometimes smaller, lower-budget movies can achieve great things. But one of its fellow Best Picture nominees was the far more marketable and far grander Star Wars, and whilst I would have loved to be a typical film critic who places Annie Hall on a pedestal, I still prefer Star Wars.
Highlight
The abstract touches were really fun. The subtitles scene explained above, plus a scene in which Alvy tries to have sex with Annie but she is so not in the mood that a ghost version of herself gets up from the bed and sits watching sardonically, are examples of some great ideas coming from Allen.
Lowlight
Not a particular “moment” as such, but some emotional involvement would have been nice. I guess I’m always going to prefer the Titanic-style romance over this.
Mark
6/10
When I was studying at RADA, I was having a full-on discussion with my coursemates in the pub after rehearsals. Our topic of discussion was Woody Allen and the accusations against him by his own children of abuse. ‘But,’ said one of my friends, ‘if he asked you to be in his film, you wouldn’t say no.’
Allen’s films are often superb. I’ve seen a handful of them and while I find these older ones - Hannah and Her Sisters, Manhattan etc to be so much more dated, that’s actually very indicative of Allen’s style of churning out a film a year at least. He scripts them, shoots them and then moves on. It’s a ferocious career that results in a Wikipedia page that’s crammed with films of every genre. His later films Midnight in Paris and Blue Jasmine are extraordinary, brimming with imagery, desire and a sense of restlessness that leads characters into bizarre, unhappy situations. The calibre of actors who still choose to work with him (Cate Blanchett, Sally Hawkins, Michael Sheen) are testament to the strength of work he produces.
And Annie Hall is very much Allen canon. It has familiar flashes of magic realism and cinematic trickery (at one point Annie and Alvy walk through rooms from her past where they watch her younger self being wooed by a pretentious actor (‘put your foot upon my heart’, the lothario actor says, kneeling on the floor in front of her). And it also has the familiar separateness. It’s very hard in any Allen film to feel engaged with the characters, I think he deliberately separates us from them, so we watch but don’t feel. It’s often due to his own performance (Allen often takes the lead role in his own work) which is always exactly the same: small, neurotic, insecure and Jewish.
I actively dislike him as an actor. He never goes beneath the surface to find the spark that makes people likeable, and so he irritates me so much that I spend every scene wishing he wasn’t in it. In the more recent Midnight in Paris, the ‘Allen’ role was taken by Owen Wilson who imbued it with so much more heart that it lifted the film to actually become affecting as well as cerebral. I’m also at odds with another element - they often lack good comic timing so what would be very funny moments miss the beat by a second and actually fall flat. I don’t tend to laugh, when a split second earlier would have had me cackling.
I do however like the surrealism. As Paul points out, several scenes feature metatheatre in its best form, characters speaking direct-to-camera, or Allen turns and just speaks to passers-by on the street. It’s fun and breaks up the sometimes-interminable long scenes of naturalistic dialogue. My friend once described Allen films as ‘Sunday afternoon movie’, and she’s right. There’s never any urgency to them, they’re long slow pieces perfect for after a large roast when you’re half-comatose on the sofa. They’re lethargic, but often packed with excellent performances (also we saw a very young Carol Kane in this, which was odd after seeing her pop up in Ugly Betty recently as well as the brilliant Lilian in The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt).
So now for the elephant in the room. I found it very hard to get away from the fact that this is a film by a celebrated film-maker who has serious allegations of abuse against his children, and who married his then-wife’s adopted daughter.
As part of this project, we have to sometimes come to films that have problematic themes or performers. Kevin Spacey crops up soon in American Beauty and I’m not yet sure about how I feel about watching and critiquing that. I feel the same here. The question of how we separate the art from the artist is an ongoing one (there’s a whole swathe of literary criticism about ‘The Death of the Author’: analysing the work on its own merits without knowledge of the creator), but Allen makes it hard to do this, by being onscreen most of the time, playing the main character who has (I imagine) his own actual traits of insecurity and unlikeability. The character also makes a joke about child-molesting at one point, the irony of which is crushing. Essentially we have made an agreement to watch all the films in this project, but I felt uncomfortable for a large portion of this film. Do we write these films out of history? Do we carry on blindly? Do we wait until Allen is dead and buried and try to smooth over his own history? Does the art outlive the artist? I have no idea.
Highlight
I really did enjoy the surrealism of the film overall. It broke up lengthy serious scenes well.
Lowlight
Long scenes of naturalistic dialogue tend to bore me.
Mark
I considered abstaining from marking this as I can't help but feel that by giving it a value, I'm almost letting it - and therefore its writer, director and star - off scot free. However as this fits within the wider project, I want to chart it. So I'm reluctantly giving it 7/10. The art wins in this instance.
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