Annie Hall movie review & film summary (1977)

Alvy: Sure. Which way you goin'?

Annie: Me? Oh, downtown.

Alvy: Down ... I'm going uptown.

Annie: Oh well, you know I'm going uptown too.

Alvy: You just said you were going downtown.

Annie: Yeah, well, but I could ...

This is not merely dialogue, it is a double act in the process of discovering itself. The more we listen to Annie and Alvy talk, the more we doubt they meet many people who can keep up with them. When Alvy expresses reluctance to let Annie move in with him, and she complains that her apartment is too small and has bad plumbing and bugs, who but Alvy could take "bugs" as his cue, and observe, "Entomology is a rapidly growing field." And only Annie could interpret this as, "You don't want me to live with you."

Alvy: I don't want you to live with me!? Whose idea was it?

Annie: Mine.

Alvy: Yeah, it was yours, actually, but I approved it immediately.

There are of course other women in Alvy's life, including the Rolling Stone correspondent (Shelley Duvall) who is a Rosicrucian (Alvy: "I can't get with any religion that advertises in Popular Mechanics"). And the liberal Democrat (Carol Kane) who Alvy marries but later splits up with because of their disagreements about the second gun theory of the Kennedy assassination. That Annie Hall is the great love of his life is immediately clear, and the movie is a flashback from the opening monologue in which he sadly notes that a year earlier they were in love; the movie is his analysis of what went wrong, and his answer is, he found happiness, but couldn't accept it. Groucho's line "is the key joke of my adult life, in terms of my relationships with women."

Lore about "Annie Hall" on imdb.com includes the revealing detail that Diane Keaton, who lived with Allen at the time, was born as Diane Hall, and her nickname was Annie. The movie originally contained a murder subplot, entirely dropped; a 140 minute rough cut became a 95 minute film in a process described in editor Ron Rosenblum's book When the Shooting Stops.

Viewing the final cut, I sensed not only how well the remains hold together but how miraculously, since the parts would seem to be an ungainly fit. Consider Allen's astonishing range of visual tactics, including split screens in which the characters on either side directly address one another; a bedroom scene where Annie's spirit gets up during sex to sit, bored, in a chair by the bed; autobiographical flashbacks; subtitles that reveal what characters are really thinking; children who address us as if they were adults ("I'm into leather"); an animated sequence pairing Alvy with Snow White's wicked witch; and the way Alvy speaks directly out of the screen to the audience.

This is a movie that establishes its tone by constantly switching between tones: The switches reflect the restless mind of the filmmaker, turning away from the apparent subject of a scene to find the angle that reveals the joke. "Annie Hall" is a movie about a man who is always looking for the loopholes in perfection. Who can turn everything into a joke, and wishes he couldn't.

Quoted dialogue is from Tim Dirks' invaluable www.filmsite.org.

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