by Woody Allen, 1977.
Starring: Woody Allen, Colleen Dewhurst, Shelly Duvall, Carol Kane, Diane Keaton, Janet Margolin, Tony Roberts, Paul Simon, Christopher Walken.
Rating: 9/10, 9.5/10.
I love Woody Allen. The man is a genius. Some people say they don’t like him because his personal life is a bit creepy (OK, so maybe it is, but that doesn’t change his work at all), or because he’s a misogynist (which he isn’t—he always seems to play pretty misogynistic characters, but that aspect of their personalities is never portrayed in a very positive light), etc. Whatever. He’s brilliant. Take Annie Hall, possibly his best movie (though not my favourite, which is Everyone Says I Love You). He’s telling a simple, traditional love-then-breakup story, and yet he acheives true genius. How does he do it?
For one thing, all of the acting is dead-on perfect. For another thing, the dialogue is so amazingly realistic it seems almost surreal at first on the movie screen (no one has ever had as good an ear for natural dialogue as Woody Allen does). But I think the most important thing is that he has brought post-modern timescales and non-realistic techniques to the genre of romantic comedy. Take, for example, the scene where Allen’s character is eating dinner at Annie Hall (Keaton)’s family’s house, and Allen decides, hey, I think we need to compare this dinner with family dinner at my house, so in comes the splitscreen, half for each family—and then the two families start to interact. Or the bit where the kids in his elementary school class stand up and say the horrible things they’ve become as adults.
Another important thing is that the movie doesn’t feel the need to be funny all the time. Or, that is, it doesn’t feel the need to be movie-funny all the time, if that makes sense. When Keaton and Allen are sitting on the park bench and Allen is making up stories to go along with all the people they see, we don’t think, "this was written to be a funny part in a movie," we think, "this is real, and it’s funny because sometimes people say funny things." That we get scenes like that in the same movie where we hear a random person say, of his sex life, "We use a large, vibrating egg," makes the whole thing even better.
Annie Hall is famous, rightly so, as a breakthrough in style. No one had done anything like it before, and really it hasn’t worked all that well for anyone else imitating it since. The film is genius, pure and simple, though genius on such a low-key level that you almost don’t notice it at first.
read roger ebert's essay on annie hall