Woody Allen’s Annie
Hall captures the full development of the director’s carefully constructed
persona. Like Chaplin’s Tramp, Woody is also the eternal underdog; his story is
undeniably funny, but also poignantly sad. Under the comedy lies a barely
concealed truth, a healthy amount of the tragic. Over the years, Allen has
become predictable, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. He has us laughing
before we ever hear the punchline, because we know exactly what it’s going to
be. Allen, like Chaplin, draws on his own life for inspiration, and always puts
feeling into his movies, whether they are dramas or the usual romantic comedy.
Alvy Singer is self-consciously a New Yorker, an egocentric intellectual, and
an overly anxious, death-fearing paranoid comedian made in the director’s own
image.
The film starts and ends with jokes, but we’re decidedly
less likely to laugh by the end, because we recognize the truth behind the
punchline. Alvy warns us in the beginning that life is “full of loneliness and
misery and suffering and it’s all over way too quickly.” He also spells out his
belief on relationships: he’d “never want to belong to any club that would have
[him] as a member.” About an hour and a half later, he concludes that
relationships are “totally irrational and crazy and absurd, but we need the
eggs.” What Alvy wants is something unattainable, and he’s an expert at making
it unattainable.
