Touching Story of Failed Romance.

Rating: 8/10 (11 September 2010)

Woody Allen meets Diane Keaton in New York and they fall in love, move in together, try a separation, move back in with one another, and finally split up -- Allen to remain stuck in New York City with his neuroses and tunnel vision of life, Keaton to move to Los Angeles in search of tofu and fresh air.
It's arguably Woody Allen's best film. Yes, he's a version of his usual self-centered character, filled with ontological dread, paranoid, frightened. And, yes, Keaton is a naif from Chippewa Falls, self conscious to the point of nail biting, undergoing a course in Sophisticated 101 from Allen. But both characters are explored in enough depth to flesh them out and give them more than one dimension. They're not stereotypes. They don't have just one shtick.
Before "Annie Hall", Allen produced these reckless and relentlessly funny comedies. Afterward, instead of one dyad, as here, the films dealt with so many characters and their multiple misunderstandings that it became hard to keep them straight or, frankly, to care very much about any of them. Allen's mind was still that of a tribal whirling Dervish but instead of flinging out gags he was flinging out puzzles and mazes, most of them not very amusing.
"Annie Hall" is a nicely integrated story. It follows Allen and Keaton from their first meeting to their last, and it's filled with comic lines. At a party of extremely wealthy nobodies in Beverly Hills, the camera slowly glides past Jeff Goldblum, looking very concerned and speaking into the phone, saying, "I forgot my mantra." (There are lots of recognizable faces among the bit parts.) In fact, as is often the case, Woody endorses his own life style as the worthiest, though he's not blunt about it. It's just that everyone around him seems so dumb, so phony, so suicidally deranged, that he comes closest to representing normality. That's not saying much because he makes fun of himself routinely.
Anyway, the result of all this is that we can identify with both of the leads. Woody's position makes sense. Beverly Hills is full of rich, gibbonous morons who are mahogany colored and festooned with jewelry. As Allen remarks, Beverly Hills is so clean because the people don't throw out their garbage, they turn it into entertainment.
At the same time, the movie makes clear in sometimes unexpectedly subtile ways (a fleeting expression) that Allen is smothering Keaton. He tells her to take night classes, buys books for her to read, pays for her analysis. And when she grows up enough, she's able to make her own choices despite Allen's objections. If she wants to go to Los Angeles and live in a Day-Glo purple mansion with minarets and garden gnomes, that's her business.
The movie ends with a hoar-encrusted but poignant comic observation that neatly encapsulates the atmosphere of the movie itself. We all need the eggs.