OVERVIEW
A study of a narcissistic, neurotic, self-absorbed, and deeply insufferable man, Annie Hall makes you wonder how intentional and self-reflective Woody Allen actually was when he directed and acted in the movie. His character, Alvy Singer, is a twice-divorced, pessimistic stand-up comedian who never stops talking. What he says is either a condescending remark about those around him or a self-deprecating admission designed to get ahead of his own shortcomings, always delivered with enough wit and speed to seem intelligent on the surface.
It is Manhattan in the mid-1970s when Alvy meets Annie Hall (Diane Keaton), a young aspiring singer with insecurities of her own who is initially drawn to his confidence and eccentricities. The film retraces their eighteen months together from Alvy’s perspective, moving freely through their courtship and eventual separation, while slipping into childhood memories, fantasies, and direct addresses as he tries to make sense of where it all went wrong. Yet with every recollection, the reason becomes increasingly apparent.
BACKGROUND
Coming off the comedy Love and Death (1975), and with a growing admiration for Ingmar Bergman, Allen wanted his next project to be more sincere and substantial. What he wrote with Marshall Brickman, under the working title Anhedonia, was frustratingly not quite it: a sprawling journey through Alvy’s mind, packed with fantasies, multiple relationships, and even a murder mystery. The first assembled cut ran around two hours and twenty minutes, and after weeks in the editing room, Allen and editor Ralph Rosenblum found that only one part truly worked: the romance between Alvy and Annie. Focusing on a single relationship gave Allen the film he had wanted in the first place. He cut entire plotlines and jokes, some of which would resurface in later projects, and went through five rounds of reshoots before arriving at the lean 93-minute version.
Released in 1977, Annie Hall became a commercial success before winning Best Picture, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, and Best Actress for Keaton. More importantly, it established the template for much of Allen’s career to come, transforming his reputation from a witty comic director into that of one of the most recognizable American auteurs of his generation.
THE REVIEW
For all the seriousness Allen was beginning to incorporate into his work, Annie Hall remains an extraordinarily funny film. It moves at the speed of Alvy’s thoughts, jumping between memories, fantasies, observations and jokes without waiting for one idea to settle before introducing another. Allen and Brickman’s screenplay is packed with clever formal inventions, many of which still feel playful and organic because of how much they reveal about the characters.
When an obnoxious man loudly pontificates about Marshall McLuhan while waiting in line for a movie, Alvy simply pulls McLuhan himself from behind a sign to tell the man he knows nothing about his work. Elsewhere, Alvy remembers growing up in a house beneath the roller coaster at Coney Island, turning his childhood anxiety into a wonderfully literal image, and surprises the family doctor with his pessimistic view of human life. Some of these devices recur throughout the film, like addressing the camera. Others appear once and never return, like the subtitles that reveal what Annie and Alvy are thinking during a conversation, which is the smarter choice.
While it works fantastically as a doomed romantic comedy, it is far more interesting as a character study. Alvy is a man who recognizes nearly every one of his flaws and chooses to learn very little from them, using self-awareness as a shield, as if acknowledging his faults were enough. Allen plays him with nervous energy and comic precision that initially makes him endearing despite how despicable he ultimately is, making it easy to understand why Annie and his previous partners would take an interest in him. It does not take long for the less flattering portrait to emerge, or for us to discover that there is not much behind the quirky, clever, but increasingly annoying remarks. He lies with remarkable ease when it benefits him, judges the intelligence and tastes of the women he dates, and repeatedly expects them to accommodate anxieties he has little interest in changing.
Keaton does impressive work portraying a character who moves in the opposite direction, gradually finding herself and developing the confidence to escape Alvy’s manipulations. When they first meet, Annie is insecure and impressed by Alvy’s apparently more confident and cultured way of speaking. He encourages her to read, take classes, and pursue her singing, initially for narcissistic reasons, but in doing so helps her develop the taste and ambition that eventually allow her to realize she does not require him. By the time she encounters Alvy again, the meeting matters so little to her that it becomes the clearest indication of how much she has grown. Keaton captures that transformation physically as well, in the increasing confidence with which Annie walks, speaks, expresses herself, and sings. Where she once seemed afraid of the microphone, by the end of the film, she commands her audience’s attention.
While that central dynamic is fascinating and makes it easy to understand why Allen and Brickman discarded so much of the original script to build the film around it, Gordon Willis is the one who makes the work feel cinematic and grown-up. In his first collaboration with Allen, the cinematographer brings a degree of visual control that distinguishes Annie Hall from the director’s earlier comedies, and sometimes that means simply keeping things basic. He often keeps the camera at a distance and trusts the actors to control our attention within the frame, without the constant movement of Love and Death. Willis also gives New York a natural, lived-in quality while Los Angeles is rendered with a brighter artificiality that suits Alvy’s contempt for the place. Even the film’s more elaborate tricks are presented with remarkable simplicity. The split-screen therapy sequence, for example, turns two separate sessions into a single comic conversation and exposes the different ways Alvy and Annie remember their relationship. The technique is clever, but remains in service of character.
FINAL THOUGHTS
That combination of formal invention and emotional observation is why Annie Hall remains so influential, and why Allen spent the rest of his career being measured against it. The fractured chronology and the address to the camera became standard equipment for the romantic comedies that followed, along with the willingness to treat the end of a relationship as something more complicated than tragedy, and much of it still works better here than in the countless films that borrowed it. Perhaps the strangest thing about the film today is how clearly it understands Alvy, regardless of how clearly Allen understood himself. The autobiographical reading is hard to avoid, and what has become known about Allen since 1977 makes the distance between him and Alvy difficult for some to ignore. Many dislike its Best Picture win over Star Wars, yet although Annie Hall sold far fewer toys, its impact on cinema is just as big.