Annie Hall Is Iconic

Rating: 9/10 (15 February 2009)

I am a Woody Allen nut but you don't have to be in order to love this movie. Winner of four Academy Awards, the film brought Woody Allen and Diane Keaton to the top of mainstream Hollywood. Woody Allen was already a successful filmmaker and actor so when this film won 1977 Best Picture becoming a better picture than Star Wars that was all he needed to skyrocket to the top. Even now he remains an acquired taste and a sort of love him or leave him filmmaker. With Annie Hall the quirky barriers were broken down and the movie crossed over into a blockbuster film.
There is little question that Woody Allen is a great writer and filmmaker. Even those that don't care for his high brow comedy will admit to his certain brand of genius with a camera and his keen scripts. Along with Marshal Brickman, Allen was also able to secure and Oscar for Best Original Screenplay and Best Director. Allen chose not to be present at the awards.
Annie Hall is about the romantic adventures of neurotic New York comedian Alvy Singer and his equally neurotic girlfriend Annie Hall. The story follows their relationship from first meeting and the documents their rocky romance while making comments about love during the 1970s. Throughout the movie Allen uses different and innovative ways to tell the story from speaking to the camera, entering other people's narratives and even the clever use of some animation.
Of course just like the later Manhattan, Hannah and Her Sisters and Radio Days, Annie Hall clearly has its share of semi-autobiographical elements. The film is total Allen representing the his socially inept and pessimistic view of dating and people bringing all his New York raised bias to bear. The relationship between the two main characters is also autobiographical as Allen and Diane Keaton dated and had a breakup in the early 1970s.
Annie Hall gave Woody Allen a chance to capitalize on the success elements from his previous films with the subjects of anti-Semitism, life, romance, professional angst, drugs and death, his obsessive love of New York. Themes that would continue in his films until present day. This film allows his neuroses to take center stage and along with his pessimism and distorted memories of his childhood creates an alter ego for the screen that he refines and which the public comes to think of as actual Woody Allen. This film along with other Allen work combined with his personal life he had chosen to make public come together and make up the true but sort of fictional Woody.
Few movies come through American culture and stand the test of time. Annie Hall is a fresh movie today as it was 30 years ago. The comedy is still just as relevant and the New York centeredness still exists 100%. The film has transcended just a flick at the metroplex and is now taught as part of film history at most universities. Annie Hall the character became an iconic figure in the late 1970s just as Annie Hall the movie has become an icon in film and American culture.