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.
“Those who can’t do, teach and those who can’t teach, teach
gym. Those who couldn’t do anything were assigned to my school,” he explains. By
elementary school, in 1943, Alvy had already discovered women. The teachers
told him he should be ashamed of himself, but he knows he “was just expressing
a healthy sexual curiosity.” Contradicting Freud, Alvy never went through a
latency period. We meet his classmates, who now own profitable trust companies,
have become plumbers, turned from heroin to methadone addicts, or are really into
leather, respectively. As we return to the present tense, he admits he
sometimes has difficulties extinguishing reality from fancy. That’s not hard to
believe.
Alvy has always lived in New York. The country scares him,
because he doesn’t like crickets, and sunny L.A.’s “only cultural advantage is you can
make a right turn on a red light.” Not that he has much faith in New York City, whose
residents he is convinced are “looked on like left-wing communist Jewish
homosexual pornographers,” which is what he sometimes thinks as well. Like Manhattan, Alvy is an
island. He wants to find love and happiness, but doesn’t have much faith he
ever will. When his relationship to Annie gets serious and she moves in, he
still encourages her to keep her apartment, as a “free-floating life raft.” He
has been seeing a therapist for “just fifteen years.” He can’t go to a movie if
he misses the first minute, because that would be walking in in the middle.
Politicians are a notch above child molesters. Nothing in life really seems
okay to Alvy.
A wonderfully inserted split screen between Annie and Alvy’s
families show exactly how different the two characters and their backgrounds
are. Annie comes from a different world, is an outsider in the city, and looks
like she “grew up in a Norman Rockwell painting.” She is “polymorphously
perverse,” and a far cry from the other, painfully superficial, snobbish women
Alvy has seen, who call things “transpledid” and describe sex as a Kafkaesque
experience. Alvy’s relationship to the title character is seen almost entirely
through flash-backs, and the attention to detail is what really sets the film
apart from other romantic comedies. Far apart. Both Alvy and Annie are
three-dimensional characters, with natural, although rarely rational, feelings
and emotions, and sometimes black soap and spiders in the bathroom, or bugs and
bad plumbing. They are real people, with problems and shortcomings.
Both Allen and Chaplin were quintessentially symbols of
their time. Annie Hall’s style, as
well as its content, is indicative of the seventies’ “new cinema.” A radical
departure from the conventions of classical cinema, Allen’s film presents a
loose, episodic structure, at once modern and postmodern. Asides right into the
camera are extensively used. Strangers on the street share in Alvy’s
conversations. Marshall McLuhan stops by. The plot is not exactly conventional,
as in there’s not much of a plot to talk about. The director chooses instead to
explore the complexity of his characters. Annie
Hall is deeply personal, and passionately straightforward about love, sex,
and relationships. Its ending is neither happy, nor sad, but inconclusive. We
don’t know what will become of Alvy and Annie, but we are better off for having
met them.
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