The Oscar Project #50: Annie Hall (1977)

by Chris Marshall:

I went into this expecting to like Annie Hall. I really did. But while it had its moments, I wasn’t the biggest fan. I think that most of the problem is my aversion to Woody Allen himself. I’m willing to give him a chance—when my Director of the Week project starts, I’ll devote a week to him—but there’s just something about his on-screen persona that grates on me.

And I do think it’s just a persona. While there are undoubtedly similarities between Allen the human being and the characters he plays, here and elsewhere, I’ve heard that he’s not quite as crazy in real life. Then again, there was all that unpleasantness with his adopted daughter Soon-Yi, so there are still plenty of doubts about how nice of a guy he really is.

But I’m not in the business of criticizing a film based on the director/ac tor’s personal life[1]. There are plenty of examples of people who are infinitely more stupid in real life than their work is. My main problem with Annie Hall is that I just didn’t like any of the characters. I found both Alfie and Annie to be pretty annoying.

I understand that his humor lies in the whiny, neurotic demeanor, but I rarely found myself laughing. This isn’t a straight comedy, of course; there are dramatic elements to it. But at the same time, it is primarily a comedy, and most of it is supposed to be funny. Mostly, I thought he was grating.

Then there is Annie. I commented in my Rocky post yesterday that few, if any, actresses had had the same kind of run that Talia Shire had by appearing in three Best Picture winners in five years. That still might be the record for all I know, but I soon realized that Diane Keaton, who plays Annie, appeared in three winners in six years, and John Cazale appeared in three in seven years. In other words, Michael Corleone’s sister, wife, and brother co-starred in the next three Best Picture winners, while Al Pacino himself never again appeared in one.

Anyway, Annie is more tolerable than Alfie, but not by all that much. She has plenty of insecurities and eccentricities of her own, though they aren’t as obnoxious as Alfie’s were. Their craziness makes them a perfect match in some ways, but ultimately, they also tear them apart. Nothing can satisfy Alfie. He convinces Annie to see a shrink and then complains when she tries to implement some of the things she learned in her sessions. He persuades her to take adult education classes and then complains after she does. She can’t win.

Bless my stars, that's Jeff Goldblum!

I don’t want to make it seem like there was nothing good about Annie Hall, or that it was a terrible movie. It’s just not my style. I can totally understand why people would really like it. Where else will you hear Fellini’s name dropped in a theater line or see an animated sequence involving Woody Allen and the wicked queen from Snow White?

Unfortunately, that wasn’t enough to make me love it. I had too many negative feelings toward our protagonists. There was one moment, though… Toward the beginning of the film, Alfie is bothered by two autograph-seekers while he is waiting on Annie to arrive. When she shows up, she claims that she’s in a bad mood.

Alfie says, “You’re in a bad mood?! I’m standing here with the cast of The Godfather!” And then it hit me. I’ve already mentioned the connection in this blog post, but it took me a few moments when I first watched it. Annie/Diane really was in the cast of The Godfather! So this movie takes place in a world where The Godfather exists, and presumably Alfie would have seen it and realized that his girlfriend, Annie Hall, is actually Diane Keaton, who played Kay Adams-Corleone in the movie that he just referenced.

Then the universe, and my head, exploded.

*****************************************

Because this is my 50^th “proper” Oscar Project post—that is, not counting interludes—I wanted to take a moment and examine my statistics so far. I realize that I’ve written a fearsome amount of text in the last couple of months, which is pretty cool; I’ve never had the discipline to do such a thing before.

In 50 posts so far, I’ve written a grand total of 34,057 words, an average of 681 words per post. For the sake of comparison, my master’s thesis, which I was writing concurrently with this blog, was 12,265 words—and that counts all the appendices, references, table of contents, and even the title page. If we assume a page is around 300 words, The Oscar Project would fill 113.5 pages. Add in the 56 pages of my thesis, and I’ve written almost 170 pages since April 24. That’s over three pages per day. What a ride it’s been.

[1] See, for example: Gibson, Mel and Polanski, Roman.