Annie Hall

Released 1977
Stars Woody Allen, Diane Keaton, Tony Roberts, Carol Kane, Paul Simon, Shelley Duvall, Christopher Walken
Directed by Woody Allen

Structurally, Annie Hall resembles a Fellini film (Amarcord, 8 ½) in its biographical honesty and slyly comic picaresque quality. Annie Hall’s symmetrically alinear narrative flows according to the emotional whims of the narrator, a thinly disguised Woody Allen surrogate named Alvie Singer. As Alvie recounts the arc of his relationship with Annie Hall, his self-deprecating revelations (Alvie’s fifteen years of therapy reveal him to be, among other things, paranoid, neurotic, self-doubting, self-absorbed, xenophobic — about anything that’s not New York — and anally retentive) draw us empathetically into this romantic fable. Alvie’s obsession with the gradual deterioration of his beloved New York and absolute loathing for anything Californian provide the psychological setting for this tale of modern love amongst the ruins. Annie, the object of Alvie’s desire, is a jangling ball of nerves, a figure so skittish and scattered that it’s easy to see why she needs to smoke dope before bedding a partner. Their imperfections, so cleverly skewered in Alvie’s series of devastating one-liners, make them both appealingly human.

Mid-film, Alvie informs us of Allen’s purpose in the film – to arrange the events in his life so that everything will make sense and perhaps turn out well – which also stands up as a definition of good art. That Allen is able to do this in a film of such raw-nerved honesty is admirable. That he is able to also make a film that is so incessantly funny is remarkable.

Summary written by Dan Jardine