Annie Hall

Rating: 8/10 (1 May 2006)

Woody Allen and Diane Keaton star in this film about two lovers who appear as complete opposites. Woody, who plays Alvy, is a man consumed by depression and sad thoughts. He is a Jewish man in New York who seems to have every characteristic possible of the stereotyped people in the city. He thinks the worst of himself, and yet expects the best of everyone around him. Diane, who plays his girlfriend, Annie Hall, is an upbeat girl from an upstanding family. She uses phrases such as, "La-dee-da" and "neat," and she even tells a story of death as if it were a big joke. She is happy with the world, and sees no reason to be sad. However, both of these characters border on neurotic. Alvy has been seeing a therapist for 15 years, and encourages Annie to see one as well under his payment. These sessions proved an outlook on how each one deals with things. In a split screen, Woody Allen shows the difference in their thoughts on the same events. Eventually, Annie notices that Alvy and she are not the right mix for each other, and they split up. In the end, Alvy has written his own play where he gets to decide the ending of their love story, which concludes with them staying together. Interestingly, they might not have been made for each other, but she has provided him with the means of looking at something with an optimistic eye. Annie Hall is a film that broke out of the norms and the linear approach to film making. The actors began addressing the audience, even in fantasy sequences. They crossed the invisible line of the audience silently watching the movie as disconnected from reality. Woody Allen expertly combined the actual with the fantasy. He introduced the novel notion of speaking to the camera, and letting the viewers "see" his thoughts. There are people on the streets that know intimate details of Alvy's love life, his girlfriend's spirit leaves her body and talks to them as they have sex, and he is suddenly drawn into a cartoon when he mentions his love for the witch in Snow White. He shows the parallel between his jokes and his life story. The opening comic scene provided humor, with an underlying truth in terms of his life, such as, "Those who don't know nothing, teach. Those who don't know how to teach, teach gym. And those don't know even that, teach at our school." This film serves its audience intellect as well as humor which is an admirable quality of that time. Just after the conspiracy films, realistic endings, and serious links to history, Woody Allen offers a comical view which is said by his viewers, not by him, to be autobiographical. The original name for the film was "Anhedonia" which is the inability to feel pleasure. This name does not seem entirely accurate though. While Alvy initially has this inability, he has shown that with Annie Hall he feels passion (wanting her to experience love-making without the use of drugs), and he is sappy enough to end his play with the two of them getting together. The name was compromised, and rightfully so, since this movie shows how his anhedonia was cured by Annie Hall.