| Collector's Corner February 2004
 Annie HallStarring: Woody Allen,
Diane Keaton, Tony Roberts, Carol Kane, Paul Simon,
Shelly Duvall, Colleen Dewhurst, Christopher Walken, Marshall McLuhan,
Jeff Goldblum, Sigourney Weaver, Beverley D’Angelo
Directed by: Woody Allen
Theatrical release: 1977
DVD release: 1998
Video: Widescreen (letterboxed), fullscreen
Sound: Dolby Digital 2.0 mono
Released by: MGM Home Entertainment
There's an old joke. Two elderly women are at a
Catskills mountain resort, and one of 'em says, "Boy, the food at this place is
really terrible." The other one says, "Yeah, I know, and such small
portions." Well, that's essentially how I feel about life. Full of loneliness and
misery and suffering and unhappiness, and it's all over much too quickly.
-- Alvy Singer’s opening monologue, Annie Hall
Annie Hall is the story of two neurotic people
whose brains won’t get out of the way of their feelings. We watch, sometimes as
voyeurs, sometimes as participants, as Alvy Singer (Woody Allen) and Annie Hall (Diane
Keaton) variously nurture and annihilate each other’s egos. There is no real
storyline. Instead, we see more of an arc along which we jump randomly back and forth
through time, watching all the forces that lead up to this flawed romance and that finally
make it untenable.
This isn’t the type of flick to watch, cuddled up with
your sweetie, on a romantic Valentine’s Day. Yet somehow, Annie Hall makes us
laugh with and care about the characters, no matter their foibles or pretensions.
Writer-director-star Woody Allen’s ability to fashion such a sweet movie from such a
potentially off-putting story is miraculous. Where most romantic comedies show a romance
building despite pitfalls and roadblocks, Annie Hall rubs our noses in the detritus
of Allen’s favorite defense mechanisms -- repression, denial, sublimation, and, most
of all, intellectualization. How did this potential downer of a film become Allen’s
most successful and beloved film, and win the Academy Award for Best Picture?
The secret is Woody Allen’s willingness to plainly
show his own insecurities (thereby giving us something to identify with) and to
demonstrate how silly they are (which, perversely, makes us feel better about ourselves).
His technique is what sets him apart. First, he uses every trick in the comedian’s
book. We get standup, skits, puns, impressions, cartoons, slapstick. But then, to propel
his story past what simple words can convey -- and this is when people began thinking of
Allen as a directorial genius -- he uses risky effects that, at the time, were either
unknown or seldom used. Annie Hall contains pure cinematic devices to show the
subjective side of Alvy and Annie’s relationship. In fact, the film is a tour de
force of uncommon cinematic techniques that go by so quickly you might not notice them. A
few examples:
In chapter 2, Allen starts the disorientation by addressing
the audience directly. In chapter 4, he has a flashback in which he’s shown as both a
child and as an adult in a child’s world, followed by the children acting like
adults, and culminating in the children talking directly into the camera and telling us
their futures. In chapter 5 he uses far focus with close sound to disorient and force the
viewer to listen to his ranting about anti-Semites. Chapter 7, one of Allen’s most
famous scenes, involves him listening to a pompous professor pontificating about the
theories of Marshall McLuhan. Alvy turns toward the audience to ask for our help. The
professor, seeing this, walks over to make his own appeal to the audience. They argue, and
then Allen produces expert testimony in the form of McLuhan himself, conveniently standing
behind a billboard. Chapter 12 shows Annie and Alvy’s first get-together. Allen has
them chattering some small talk, but subtitles show what they’re truly thinking. In
chapter 22, as Alvy watches Annie’s Jew-hating grandmother, he turns into a bearded,
traditionally garbed Hassidic Jew who then addresses the audience as we continue to hear
Annie’s family talk. Alvy begins to compare Annie’s family with his own, who
show up on a split screen. Eventually, the two families have a discussion about guilt.
Chapter 36 contains a split-screen scene in which both Alvy and Annie visit their shrinks.
Each psychiatrist asks about frequency of sex. Alvy: "Hardly ever -- maybe three
times a week." Annie: "Constantly-- I'd say three times a week."
The DVD of Annie Hall has 49 chapters, and I could
point out something creative and unique in nearly every one. Allen’s artistry is
revealed by the fact that, unless picking a film apart like this is your idea of a good
time, you may never notice that he’s done anything out of the ordinary. But unless
you were an aficionado of the films of Ingmar Bergman or Orson Welles in 1977, much of Annie
Hall was revolutionary.
Allen also had a keen eye for the past. I wonder how much
of a coincidence it is that, at the time, he was making most of his movies for United
Artists, the company founded by Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, D.W. Griffith, and
Charlie Chaplin. The similarities between Chaplin and Allen are striking. Both adopted a
lifelong character that was sadly pathetic yet scrappy enough to try anything. Both
appeared to be nebbishes, but each also saw himself as a lady’s man.
Chaplin had to do most of his communication to the audience
through pantomime. In a way, so did Allen. Why do you think he hides behind such a thick
wall of intellectualism? In his films he constantly refers to Bergman, Fellini, and
Ophüls, yet how many people ever see those directors’ films? For writers, he talks
about Ernest Becker's The Denial of Death, Jacques Choron's Death and Western
Thought, and Sylvia Plath’s Ariel. These devices don’t draw an
audience in, they shut them out. But, like Chaplin rolling his hat when he likes a girl,
these defense mechanisms indirectly tell us something about Allen’s character.
Allen got around the potential pitfall of being too
intellectual by always going back to sex. Alvy’s various partners in the film are all
oddballs (played by Carol Kane, Shelley Duvall, Janet Margolin, and, in a distant cameo,
Sigourney Weaver), but he stops at nothing to get them into bed. In this company, Annie
starts to look downright wholesome and normal. But sex is also where Allen has the chance
to do what I think is the real work of Annie Hall.
Allen is notorious for being a follower of psychoanalytic
theory, especially the Freudian variety, and I’m tempted to see this whole carbuncle
of love as a nine-way fight to the death between Alvy’s and Annie’s egos,
superegos, and ids. If you watch the film carefully, you’ll find earnest coverage of
all three mind states: id as sex, ego as reasoning, superego as intellectualized guilt. I
can almost imagine Allen sitting around, thinking how he could incorporate all of his
favorite obsessions (sex, death, persecution, guilt, New York, pomposity) into one flick
that people would like. The fact that he pulled it off is more amazing than you might
think.
In the entire 75-year history of the Academy Awards, only
four other romantic comedies have ever won a Best Picture award: It Happened One Night,
You Can’t Take It With You, The Apartment, and Shakespeare in
Love. Annie Hall has the distinction of being the only Oscar-winning romantic
comedy with a sour ending. It was also the first comedy of any kind to receive an
Oscar for Best Picture since 1963. Annie Hall received five nominations and won
four: Best Picture, Best Actress, Best Director, Best Writing. (The fifth nomination was
for Allen as Best Actor.) Only one other film has had one person nominated for Best Actor,
Best Director, and Best Writer -- Citizen Kane. Annie
Hall’s awards are something of a miracle.
I would love to see the Criterion Collection get hold of
the rights for Annie Hall. First of all, they’d fix MGM’s fuzzy
letterboxed picture. Where MGM provides no extras, perhaps Criterion would get someone
interesting (co-writer Marshall Brickman? Diane Keaton?) offering a commentary. Criterion
might have given us a documentary on how Allen used the works of Bergman to come up with
ideas, or why he was influenced by Ophüls père et fils. Oh well. At least MGM has
the price right. Even Amazon.com sells it for only about $11 -- money well spent for a
masterpiece such as Annie Hall.
Woody Allen has been nominated for Best Writer a record 13
times. The reason is his ability to take tough times and make grand comedy. Watching his
best films (Annie Hall, Manhattan, Bullets Over Broadway, Hannah
and Her Sisters) is never comfortable, but they always make you laugh. Similar to
Alvy’s opening monologue, quoted at the top of this article, Annie Hall is
filled with "loneliness and misery and suffering and unhappiness, and it's all over
much too quickly."
Happy Valentine’s Day . . . I think.
...Wes Marshall
wesm@hometheatersound.com |
