I Would Never Join A Club That Took Me As A Member

ANNIE HALL's story is as old as dirt, but like all great human dramas, it can always be told in a fresh way if the man telling it is clever enough.



I was cranking out a long review of Woody Allen's ANNIE HALL a couple of hours ago like it was nothing, one of the most interesting things I'd ever written about any film ever, and then I accidentally closed my browser window and that was the end of that. Thus, what you're actually getting is much shorter than what I actually wanted to write. Boo-hoo.

And BTW, Go Irish beat Spartans.

***

ANNIE HALL (Woody Allen, USA, 1977, S)

La-di-da, La-di-da, La-La... Sorry, had to get it out of the way, you really can't start reviewing this movie until you've said that. Watch it and you'll see what I mean. Anyway...

Woody Allen's magnum opus goes to show that sometimes a movie can be great almost solely on the basis of how the story is told, even while the story itself is workaday and average. It does not follow the trajectory of two lovers (which almost every romantic comedy does, which is why most of them are so damned unbearable unless you're one of those people who read Teen Cosmo in high school and makes time on Thursday nights to catch THE OC) so much as it follows Alvy Singer's (Allen) description of his relationship with a giddily charming young singer named Annie Hall (Diane Keaton). Allen is known for being a great writer, first and foremost, and ANNIE does not disappoint lovers of Allen's signature style of acerbic, Jewish, New York humor. But there's much more working under the surface with ANNIE than funny one liners, over-the-top parody, introspective flashbacks, and WAYNE'S WORLD-like conversations with the viewer.

Allen's wonderful performance is calm and unforced, mostly because he is essentially playing himself. What is most remarkable is that Allen extracts the same qualities out of Keaton, who is so funny and disarming that it's hard to remember sometimes she's an immature pseudo-hippie who's on the chronic. Allen's collaboration with the great cinematographer Gordon Willis (THE GODFATHER) is also very fruitful, although Allen's brilliant usage of the camera is a bit difficult for today's audiences to appreciate. Allen turns very simple cinematic conventions--the angle we face when we look in a camera, how close we are to it, whether we film a conversation in alternating close-ups of each person versus putting both of them in medium shot--into very profound statements about where Annie and Alvy stand. What I love about ANNIE HALL the most, however, is its honesty. I certainly wouldn't date Annie, and I sure as hell wouldn't sleep with her or shack up with her as Alvy did. But ANNIE HALL dos not attempt to mount a defense for either person's actions (and trying to would certainly be an out-of-character move for Allen, perhaps the most self-deprecating of auteurs). It doesn't attempt to deceive us as to what happened, and it has the kind of ending we'd expect it to have in real life, because in real life we don't just learn to accept the other person's faults and live happily ever after in spite of the girl's drug habit and the boy's years of inculcation in Freudian psychobabble. ANNIE HALL is Alvy's confession, and like all good confessions, it is complete, even if he can't see how much wrong there is in the story he confesses.