AFI #35: Annie Hall (1977)

This is a version of a review airing on ABC Radio Ballarat and South West Victoria on June 11, 2021.

This is part of a series of articles reviewing the American Film Institute's Top 100 Films, as unveiled in 2007. Why am I doing this? Because the damned cinemas were closed and I had to review something, and I can't stop now until I finish.

(M) ★★★★★

Director: Woody Allen.

Cast: Woody Allen, Diane Keaton, Tony Roberts, Carol Kane, Paul Simon, Janet Margolin, Shelley Duvall, Christopher Walken. 

Queues. Am I right?

First things first. Yes, you have to separate the art from the artist. If you don't, you're doomed to miss out on a lot of great stuff, and that list seems to get longer every day. The art didn't do the bad thing. Whether the art is good or not is the important thing, right?

Anyway, I'm not here to talk about the sins of Woody Allen. I'm here to talk about how Annie Hall remains one of the funniest movies ever made. 

It's also a bold rule-breaker that takes rom-com tropes and gives them a shake. The guy doesn't get the girl, the couple spend more time fighting or apart than actually together, our "hero" is a flawed mess of complexes, and the whole relationship is dominated by a subtext of psychological issues that ultimately doom it. This is not your typical opposites-attract Will-They-Won't-They, capped off with kiss in an improbable location or under improbable circumstances. Bizarrely, it's far more realistic, despite taking a fantastical approach to the material.

While it's not the first American rom-com to undermine the genre - that credit likely goes to The Apartment - it's perhaps the most influential of the not-so-rom rom-coms. Its impact can be found in everything from When Harry Met Sally to High Fidelity to 500 Days Of Summer. But the real legacy of Annie Hall is that its influence extends beyond its own genre.

Allen's direction employed a kitchen sink's worth of 'meta' trickery - bold directorial elements rarely seen before in an often anodyne genre. His alter-ego Alvy breaks the fourth wall with regularity, subtitles and split screens are employed to wonderfully comedic effect, long takes abound, the timeline is fractured, characters visit themselves in the past, and even the Evil Queen from Snow White makes an animated appearance alongside a cartoonish Alvy. It's daring film-making, and it's part of what made the film such a hit with other directors, including William Friedkin, Harold Ramis, Rian Johnson and Rob Reiner.

But this cinematic rule-breaking is not just for rule-breaking sake. Every single one of these tricks serves either the story or the character or gets a big laugh or, more often than not, all three. 

And that's the other thing about Annie Hall - it's hilarious. Nearly every line is a laugh-out-loud winner or a fantastically droll absurdism. Out of context they don't work, but in the moment they're incredible examples of comedic screenwriting. "You're using this conspiracy theory to put off having sex with me", "Touch my heart with your foot", "We can walk to the kerb from here", and "Don't knock masturbation - it's sex with someone I love" are among the many highlights, although my all-time favourite is the jaw-dropping darkness of "My granny never gave gifts - she was too busy getting raped by the Cossacks". That's next-level cringe comedy, decades before the likes of David Brent, Alan Partridge and Larry David.

What's incredible about Annie Hall is its origin. Like that other great film of 1977, Annie Hall was saved in the edit. An amazing array of fantastical skits and a whole murder-mystery plot were left on the cutting room floor, as the film was whittled down from a sprawling three hours to a lean hour-and-a-half. Leaving out half the jokes meant only the good ones stayed, but more importantly the heart of the story became the failed romance between Alvy and Diane Keaton's titular dream girl.

Keaton is dynamite in this, deservedly winning an Oscar, and Allen, who was besotted with Keaton, is smart enough to let her have her moments. When she sings in a nightclub, the first time is played for laughs, but the second time, the camera stays on her and lets her shine, making sure the audience loves her like Alvy did. The meet-cute scene after the tennis match where she wears the now-iconic black hat and waistcoat and tells the going-nowhere story about George and the turkey is totally adorkable, and perfectly filmed - we fall for Annie, just as Alvy is doing the same thing. Film Magazine's Ryan Gilbey, in his summation of Annie Hall in the mag's 100 Greatest Films edition, cites "the magnetism of Keaton, la-di-dahing all over the place in her waistcoats" as one of the film's best assets.

Allen has derided the film as a disappointment in part because of the editing suite reworking of the story, but concedes it was a turning point. The film moved him away from the broader, sillier comedies of his early years and saw him edge closer to the emotional weight of his favourite directors, such as Fellini and Bergman. Karen Krizanovich, writing in 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die, called it "Allen's coming of age", noting that while his earlier films such as Bananas and Sleeper were "both extremely funny, neither has the emotional resonance or the zeitgeist-catching relevance of Annie Hall".

It's also the point where Woody Allen the writer/director became Woody Allen the caricature. Alvy is pretty much every lead character in every post-Annie Hall film Allen made, whether he plays the character or not. He's the highly sexualised and super intelligent funny man who stereotypes everything with snide, judgmental put-downs, all the while crippled by his own self-sabotaging jealousy, self-centredness, "nebbish" persecution complex, hypocritical nature, and his sad, middle-aged manipulativeness. It's a hard character to like - only his sense of humour and the fact that most of us relate to at least one of the items on his shopping list of psychological issues saves him from being insufferable. He's remarkably relatable, which seems almost impossible. It's the greatest trick of Allen's career, and it's one he's played time and time again.

Throw in a great one-liner from Jeff Goldbum, a scene-stealing Christopher Walken, the marvellous Marshal MacLuhan moment, Truman Capote's cameo, and an hilarious Shelley Duvall, and there is so much to love, admire and enjoy about Annie Hall. Incredibly, it's also important and groundbreaking at the same time. As Film Magazine's Gilbey put it, "Comedy didn't begin with Woody Allen, but it wouldn't be what it is without him".