Annie Hall

The 1977 satirical comedic romance, Annie Hall, was one of the first films to bring critical acclaim and public awareness to Woody Allen; a director, writer, actor, and comedian whose extensive career and unique filmmaking personality resulted in several Award-winning features. His projects often had similar formulas and reoccurring ideas, were usually presented in a fantastical realism manner, and would usually star him in the leading role with characters that didn’t feel too far off the real person. Though his career was damaged by his controversial personal life, his filmography won’t easily be forgotten, with films like Manhattan, Hannah and Her Sisters, Vicky Christina Barcelona, Midnight in Paris, and Blue Jasmine, being very memorable pictures that helped immortalize his unique style, and he can thank Annie Hall for starting this trend.

Jewish comedian Alvy Singer (played by Woody Allen) is a depressed, awkward, neurotic man in his mid-forties who is trying to come to grips with his recent breakup with his on-again, off-again girlfriend, Annie Hall (played by the late Diane Keaton). Flashing back to before they met, the movie shows these two awkward people fumble through conversations and discovering that they have a thing for the other, but in going through the typical stages of a relationships (particularly the sex), they find that things aren’t clicking and Alvy’s blunt, uncaring, and constantly paranoid personality only further pushes Annie away. After shuffling through failed marriages and both finding a strange comfort in the bland immobile existence that is their love life, the two decide to try and make things work despite the gigantic red flags waving right in their faces (mainly hers), but even with this pact and literal mindset of settling, can they truly survive each other?

Becoming the Best Picture winner of the Academy Awards for that year (while also taking home Best Original Screenplay, Director, and Supporting Actress), Annie Hall carries with it some interesting and distinct qualities but overall hasn’t aged phenomenally and now stands as a pretty generic and unfunny feature.

This was one of the first films Allen did that adopted a more realistic and unpleasant atmosphere, which would’ve felt very unlike his previous comedic-based pictures. It appears that his personal mindset and emotional stability around the time of creating the film bled into the script, as the similar experiences and fears he faced during this time helped create the themes, ideas, and atmosphere for this story, which he wrote alongside his frequent collaborator, Marshall Brickman. The movie’s tone is incredibly cynical and downtrodden, and it feels like the audience is forced to watch a mid-life crisis occur on-screen without much optimism to balance things out. Since the film is not openly stated, but plainly meant to be autobiographical, it doesn’t feature much in terms of plot, character, or even obstacles to overcome, mainly just being a story about two people in a relationship that constantly ebb and flow between each other despite not feeling right for the other.

To some extent, the direction and vibe match this down-to-earth presentation, and Allen’s unique qualities as a filmmaker like fourth wall breaks, his surreal manner of telling a straightforward tale, and the distinct visuals and camera tricks used to express emotions and inner turmoil, do help give this film a slightly memorable identity. However, whether it was due to still feeling fresh in the water or just plain poor execution, these elements never go far enough to feel properly utilized, which results in most of the film not aging particularly well, especially with other recent films with similar themes and forms of execution being much stronger and more defined (though it could be argued that this film inspired them). It has this air of pretentiousness that adds to the frequent unpleasantness this film exudes, as it thinks that it’s deep and smart despite most of its content sounding like scraps out of a philosophy book and hollow words of wisdom from a done-with-life therapist. The movie is dull, slightly annoying and doesn’t contain as much complexity or depth as it pretends to feature, instead feeling like a rom com minus the simple ”junk-food” feeling of enjoyment that can come from the genre, but the film’s short length means it at least doesn’t drag its feet and knows it can’t survive a longer running time.

Throughout the many movies he’s made, an element of Allen’s work that some either enjoy or hate, is the fact that a majority of his starring roles (or even supporting roles) would just be him riffing on himself. The characters he plays would be neurotic, socially weird, sexually repressed, a constant whiner and more concerned about telling dumb jokes than making people identify with him, and this movie suffers from that very issue. His character in Annie Hall is very unlikeable, very hard to stomach due to how much he complains and hates on something (every line out of his mouth is a whine), and while inserting himself into his own films could work as a one-time thing, the frequentness with which he does it makes it feel like poor acting and that he’s either incapable or worse, unwilling to play a unique character. With a pretty tight roster and most of Allen’s performance and screentime feeling like a standup who’s incapable of seeing normally without throwing in a lame zinger, he’s easily the worst and least sympathetic part of this entire film.

On the flip side, Diane Keaton is easily the strongest aspect, with her performance as the titular Annie Hall being strong enough to win her an Oscar and you can understand that decision. Despite not being the most complex character or having the most amazing writing, it’s a role that was specifically written for Keaton and you can feel how she’s allowing her natural charm, energy and even oddness to form into a defined character. In good contrast to the rest of the cast who have very little to work with like Tony Roberts, Paul Simon and even a brief Christopher Walken cameo, she’s a pleasant ray of sunshine in a very bleak experience, and while there are definitely qualities that hold her back from truly shining like her limited screen time and the fact that her biggest contribution to the plot is being romantic involved with a very weaselly lead, she is most certainly the strongest element to come out of this film.

Woody Allen movies did have the benefit of being viewed as different for their time, as he was a director that wanted to be unique and avant-garde with what would otherwise be straightforward ideas, which resulted in several movies that went off-the-rails in places but still kept a stabilizing stance for the most part. While this movie doesn’t go too surrealist to the point where it barely feels like it’s in the same reality, it slightly tip its toe into some odd ideas and visual presentations to the point where it becomes more than just another run-of-the-mil quirky romance. It almost feels like a play in parts due to Allen’s character acting as an omnipresent narrator who breaks away from the events of the film and gives his thoughts to the onlooking audience, and because of this bizarre nature and tone, it actually never feels out of place or off-putting. Doing stuff like having random pedestrians on the street dictate their opinion on his life despite never witnessing it, stepping out of time to physically watch flashbacks of his past, using subtitles as a way of reading a person’s inner thoughts, even having no true soundtrack and relying on nothing more than pure diegetic ambience, has the potential to be smart, clever, and even a little inspired for the time (which, to be fair, it probably was). But due to the passage of time, the fact that others have done it stronger, and even because the movie’s portrayal of said elements isn’t that daring, they feel more like unique novelties rather than properly ingrained elements.

You admire it for being one of the few to create this idea, but it doesn’t hold much outside of that title to keep people really marvelling at it. The cinematography by Gordon Willis ranges from decently composed to bizarrely drawn-out, switching from being well laid-out to focusing on random things for no reason. It feels like a movie where anything presented as different and not of the norm would’ve been praised for being unexpected and ”containing unforeseen layers” when in reality, it’s random for the sake of being random. Much like how a piece of art that features random spurts and streams can be praised for being abstract, truly great abnormal content still needs a focal point and grounded structure to make sense and feel deservedly praised, and while the film has an element of structure (the relationship aspect), it’s barely engaging as a crux,  so the unique qualities don’t enhance the material like they should, but rather feel like spurts and streams that are needed to liven something up. The editing by Ralph Rosenblum and Wendy Greene Dewhurst is handled really awkwardly, as several scenes feel like they stop right in the middle and trail on to something entirely different, it never feels like it concludes at the right moment which only furthers the off-putting, negative energy of the whole picture.

Annie Hall isn’t an awful movie to sit through and actually has a few aspects that could’ve made for a fun, unique film, but the miserable tone, unfunny writing, awful lead character and a presentation that is a little too early to be as interesting as it could be, prevents it from lasting the passing of time and is no doubt suffering a mid-life crisis similar to its lead. Woody Allen’s work won’t be for everybody (even excluding how they view him as a person), but there is at least something different to experience from his films, and maybe for some, this film will work like it did for so many people back in the day (some even still regard it as an American classic). If the idea of watching an annoying, unfunny man constantly complaining about his love life while managing to somehow go out with Shelly Duvall, Carol Kane, Diane Keaton, and Sigourney Weaver (look that one up to know more) is what you consider classic material, then this emotionally stunted rant might be worth dissecting.