“Annie Hall” won four Oscars at the 50th Academy Awards in 1977, including for best picture, beating out “Star Wars.” This is Woody Allen’s signature film and masterpiece, and definitely his most popular.
It’s also one of the best films of the 1970s, and underlines Allen’s quintessential niche—that of a (self-proclaimed) New York, Coney Island-raised, Jewish working-class-background nebbish-y comic, whose self-deprecating neurosis is born of Jewish guilt combined with an autodidactic, college professor-level intellectualism. Even though the man claims to prefer watching the Knicks and playing his clarinet, he clearly read his way through most of New York’s Strand Bookstore.
“Annie Hall” is also a love letter to Diane Keaton (her unique, Chaplinesque feminist wardrobe started its very own fashion craze) and is Allen’s romanticized version of New York City existence, which was only topped by his next film, “Manhattan.”
Odd Couple
Alvy Singer (Woody Allen) meets Annie Hall (Dianne Keaton) after a doubles tennis match arranged by his friend Rob (Tony Roberts). She’s a ditzy Wisconsinite WASP trying to make it as a singer in New York, and he’s a Jewish schlemiel of a New York comedian.
Their relationship initially works because Annie is starry-eyed and naïve, and Alvy is established and exotic to her and has much to teach her. He turns her young, curious mind on to many things, including books on death and dying, college courses, therapy, and black-and-white documentaries about the Holocaust.
Annie and Alvy move in together, and we soon observe the vast, cultural Grand Canyon between their two families (Annie’s grandmother, “Grammy Hall,” is rabidly anti-Semitic).
Annie then slowly begins to blossom as a recording artist, which takes her to Los Angeles, wooed away by Paul Simon (of Simon and Garfunkel) playing an L.A. agent. Alvy, ever the dedicated New Yorker, makes one feeble attempt to woo her back.
Impressions 45 Years Later
Watching it all these years later, what jumps out at me is how incredibly self-involved Alvy is. Mostly, we think of Keaton’s Annie Hall as a vacuous, “la-dee-dah” airhead, but at this late date, her character seems like a perfectly normal, uneducated, low-self-esteem-having small-town girl, with Alvy Singer buzzing around her like a horsefly.He’s forever landing on her with the quick stings of invasive insight into her character flaws that only a professional stand-up comedian could get away with, because the stings are leavened with humor. But seeing it now, I’m amazed she didn’t start trying to swat him earlier. Not to mention the slightly creepy, fumbling foreplay he’s forever foisting. Overall hangs the slightly pornographic atmosphere emanating from his obvious obsession with sex.
Speaking of which, all Alvy’s women were, or are, in therapy, and they’re there because he makes them go (and pays for their therapy himself), because he always wants sex, and his mechanical, cerebral approach and overly verbose nebbish-y commentary makes them all (highly unsurprisingly) never in the mood. Annie would like to smoke weed all the while, and Alvy doesn’t like that—he’d like for her to appreciate him for who he is, but he’s too annoying and icky to be appreciated without chemical enhancement.
Lastly
All in all, “Annie Hall” is really a brilliant depiction of the generation, stasis, degeneration, and destruction phases of a relationship. It’s so often the case that relationships don’t work out because women think they can change men (men never change; men represent order), and men think women will stay the same (women change and evolve quickly; women represent chaos).
Annie Hall outgrows Alvy. She reads his intellectual books, takes his prescribed adult education courses, puts together her own worldview, sheds her naïveté, grows up, and, not being nearly as neurotic (and with a woman’s natural pragmatism and common sense in matters of the heart) recognizes that he’ll never change, will never learn to have fun, and will project his neurotic neediness onto her forever. And so she moves on. It’s perfect. And sad. And funny. Re-rent it.
