When I was about around seventeen I checked out Annie Hall from the library because I wanted to find out what film could possibly have outclassed Star Wars to take home the Academy Award for Best Picture in 1977. I was stupefied. As far as I could tell, the whole movie was based around some middle-aged nebbish jerk monologuing about how sex was complicated and no one was as smart as he was. How could that be a great film? Where were the wookies?
I’ve re-watched Annie Hall twice in the interceding decade, and it’s grown tremendously in my estimation since then. It’s a terrifically funny, insightful and inventive film that proves the Academy isn’t comprised entirely of seventeen-year old boys, and I’m sure I’ll enjoy it more as I get older.
The one thing I admired about Annie Hall when I was a kid was its nonlinear narrative structure, which makes me sound like a pretty nerdy kid I guess, but I had never before seen a film which played so fast and loose with the conventions of cinema. It strikes me now that the film isn’t so much nonlinear as it is conversational, making digressions and doubling back occasionally to explain and clarify things.
In this way I suppose it might be the Woody Allen film that works most like an extended stand-up comedy routine. Hell, it even opens and closes with him talking directly to the camera.
However, to describe it that way really does a disservice to just how well Annie Hall works as a film. Woody Allen has made a lot of good movies, but I think this is his greatest – it’s constantly funny, cinematically inventive and authentically heartfelt. Since Annie Hall he’s made roughly one film a year, and I can’t help but think that this was the movie that really set him up to be able to do that.
Allen deserves a lot of credit for Annie Hall, but for my money the film would not shine like it does without his muse, Diane Keaton. As Annie she is captivating, complex and often simply hysterical. Woody Allen made this a great film, but Diane Keaton is what makes it unforgettable.
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