The Movie Book (Big Ideas Simply Explained) (2016)

IN CONTEXT

GENRE

Romantic comedy

DIRECTOR

Woody Allen

WRITERS

Woody Allen, Marshall Brickman

STARS

Woody Allen, Diane Keaton, Tony Roberts

BEFORE

1933 The Marx brothers, a huge influence on Allen, make Duck Soup. He later uses a clip from it in his movie Hannah and Her Sisters (1986).

1973 Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage shows a married couple’s ups and downs in a hyper-realistic way.

AFTER

1993 Allen and Keaton reunite on screen for the last time to date in the director’s Manhattan Murder Mystery.

Woody Allen’s 1977 movie Annie Hall is a New York romantic comedy with its two elements in perfect balance. Allen himself plays comedian Alvy Singer, and Diane Keaton, Allen’s girlfriend at the time, plays Annie Hall. The movie is imbued with Allen’s trademark neurotic humor, and may have been a comic reflection of the ups and downs of his real-life relationship with Keaton.

It is also very much a document of its time and place, focusing as it does on the preoccupations of the late 1970s Manhattan intelligentsia, with their long-winded, competitive opining on the meaning of art, film, and literature. Alvy lampoons their pretentiousness while at the same time reveling in it.

As a New Yorker, Alvy is dismissive of Los Angeles, which he sees as a cultural wasteland. Upon receiving an invitation to present an award on TV there, he replies: “In Beverly Hills, they don’t throw their garbage away. They turn it into television shows.” And when Annie expresses a desire to go to LA, Aly sees it as a defect in her personality. At the same time, however, he recognizes that he is trapped by the persona that New York has given him.

The self-absorption of the New York set is central to Annie Hall, and Alvy epitomizes it. In many ways the movie is an evolution of Allen’s stand-up routine, in which he made comedy out of his own insecurities and preoccupations. The movie opens with a monologue to camera in which Alvy sums up his problems with women by quoting Groucho Marx’s famous comment: “I would never want to belong to any club that would have someone like me for a member.” Of his first wife Allison, Alvy later says: “Why did I turn off Allison Portchnik? She was—she was beautiful. She was willing. She was real… intelligent. Is it the old Groucho Marx joke?”

Allen’s movie stole the Best Picture Oscar from Star Wars, a rare example of a small, intellectual movie beating a major blockbuster to the coveted prize.

“A relationship, I think, is like a shark. You know? It has to constantly move forward or it dies. And I think what we got on our hands is a dead shark.”

Alvy Singer / Annie Hall

“We need the eggs”

Throughout the movie, Alvy explores what makes a successful relationship and why relationships fail, even asking people randomly on the street. But it seems that his search is futile, since the relationships he encounters are fleeting and not particularly meaningful. One couple attributes happiness to their mutual shallowness and the fact that they have “nothing interesting to say.” In the end, Alvy has to admit that relationships are “totally irrational and crazy and absurd… but I guess we keep going through it because most of us need the eggs.” This is a reference to a joke in which a man goes to a psychiatrist and tells him that his brother thinks he’s a chicken. “The doctor says, ‘Well, why don’t you turn him in?’ And the guy says, ‘I would, but I need the eggs.’” In this case, the eggs are love, and Annie is the love of Alvy’s life. Annie Hall is Allen’s analysis of how love goes wrong—how the eggs get broken.

Alvy (Woody Allen) keeps being drawn back to Annie (Diane Keaton), but he is doomed to fail in all his relationships.

Born Allen Konigsberg in Brooklyn, New York, in 1935, Woody Allen’s New York Jewish background would become a key theme in his movies. He started out writing jokes for newspapers and television before becoming a stand-up comic in the early 1960s, creating monologues that drew on his mix of intellect and self-doubt. By 1965, he was making movies, starting with slapstick comedies before developing works that were influenced by European art-house movies. Allen continues to make a new movie almost every year.

1977 Annie Hall

1979 Manhattan

1986 Hannah and Her Sisters

What else to watch: 8½ (1963) ✵ My Night at Maud’s (1969) ✵ Scenes from a Marriage (1973) ✵ Sleeper (1973) ✵ Manhattan (1979) ✵ Hannah and Her Sisters (1986) ✵ Deconstructing Harry (1997) ✵ Blue Jasmine (2013)