Annie Hall (1977)

For the past few days, I keep hearing about Annie Hall for some reason. The most recent was in that trivia stuff they show before the movie starts at the theater. I've been aware of this movie for a while, well aware of it since it won an Oscar for Best Picture among others. Besides its critical acclaims though, I was blissfully unaware of the plot going in to it. After the jump you'll find my thoughts on what I discovered in this Woody Allen classic.


In terms of story, it's just the history of a relationship between the titular Annie Hall, played by a very young Diane Keaton, and Alvy Singer, played by Woody Allen (who also wrote and directed it). That's it really. The only tricky thing is that the moments in time that it shows of the overall relationship are all jumbled up so they don't happen in chronological order.

Annie and Alvy first meet over drinks

Now, I need to tell you that I've sat back and thought about this movie long and hard before I attempted this write-up. This movie won Best Movie, Best Actress, Best Directing and Best Writing from the Oscars. It's on almost everyone's "Top Whatever" lists, or at least considered a favorite to countless people. So why is it that I didn't like Annie Hall?

I honestly can't put my finger on it. I'm still not even really sure if I even dislike it really. It's not that I hated it or despised it, or thought it was arty or pretentious. I just know I didn't really like it. There were some amusing bits, and the tricks with the storytelling methods and playing with the chronology of events was certainly different, I just didn't really care for any of it. At the end of it all, I guess the best word I could use to describe how I feel about the film is "indifferent".

Alvy steps out of the scene breaking the 4th wall to talk to the audience.

While that's how I feel about the film, the best word to describe the work itself would probably be "weird". Many times in the movie, Woody Allen utterly shatters the fourth wall by having Alvy step right out of the scene he's in and start talking to the audience directly. Usually no one in the scene notices him doing this, it's sort of like the asides characters would have in Shakespeare plays. In the scene in the picture above, Alvy can't stand the view point of a stranger talking in line behind him at the theater. Eventually he steps forward and talks to us, but the man notices him and now, separate from the scene, they have a brief argument, which Alvy ends in the best way possible. This not only breaks the 4th wall, but it's like I was watching the very universe of this world crumble before my eyes. This one moment is probably the only one I found mildly entertaining, but really only the very end, reality-tearing moment. The rest of that scene made me want to rip my hair out.

Alvy is suddenly in his grade school classroom defending his younger self for kissing a girl on the cheek

Other similar moments have more to do with Alvy remembering/reliving his memories. It's in these moments that we see parts of his past, like when he was a child. What makes these scenes WTF inducing are when adult Alvy, and sometimes even his friends, appear inside the memory and then start interacting with the characters around them.

The romance and actual relationship part of the movie didn't ring true to me and I simply didn't care at all. I didn't really like any of the characters very much either. I'm not sure if this is partly due to the messed up chronology of the scenes or not, but it certainly didn't help me. I believe it is revealed later in the movie exactly why the scenes are in such a disjointed order, but in the end, it just didn't matter to me.

This is a favorite film to many, and I'm pretty sure I'm in the vast majority in that I don't utterly LOVE it. Or should I say "luff"? Anyways, I don't think I really get Woody Allen's style of humour, it's just not for me. It's certainly a unique movie, but I doubt I'll be watching it anytime soon. Although, I wouldn't be opposed to it if someone wanted to watch it with me, as I said, I'm really just indifferent about it. To each his own.