Thinly veiled self-glorification

Rating: 1/10 (29 July 2001)

Woody Allen's puerile comedy reaches a true dramatic climax through a bit of unintended irony in the often-discussed "movie line" scene. In this scene we witness one pedant criticizing the pedantry of another in the middle of what is essentially a 90 minute diatribe. This scene sets up the remainder of an unbelievably hubristic film in which we will watch Woody (Why does he bother calling himself Alvy?) promoting the person he admires most. I'm still trying to understand how some might construe an assembly of self-consciously scripted one-liners as a coherent story. The humor in this film was so contrived that I began waiting for drumrolls after lines like "I never undress in front of a man of my own gender" and even began to wonder if a few years in Manhattan would see Rodney Dangerfield swapping jokes with Allen in an onstage partnership. By the time Woody uses all of the affect he can muster to pull off a suddenly sentimental closing scene, I refused to believe that he actually felt capable of evincing some sort of emotional response from the audience. Pathos is never a temptation for the viewer who is simply not interested in Woody Allen's life or those of celebrities in general.
As for the purported technical brilliance of the film (obnoxious postmodern pandering), I found it to be a hackneyed hodgepodge of Nouvelle Vague tricks pulled off with much less tact. For the sake of comparison, a film that does pull all of these elements together in a brilliantly funny and emotive package is Truffaut's "Shoot the Piano Player." "Annie Hall" was my first Woody Allen film and will probably be the last.