Movie Log: Annie Hall

Yes, I admit it: I'd never seen Annie Hall before. I'm not a neurotic New Yorker -- I may well be neurotic, but not in that precise way -- nor did I ever date or marry one, and I was awfully young when it came around originally. (And the last time I tried to catch up on the "early, funny" Woody Allen movies I'd missed, I got Manhattan, which was good, but I'm pretty sure this is the one I was aiming for.)

I hadn't known about Annie Hall's structure before -- it's a complicated movie that doesn't move directly through its plot, but flashes backward and forward (and drops into less directly representational scenes a couple of times as well, such as one brief animated scene) -- but it gives the movie a weight and inevitability that most romantic comedies lack. (On the other hand, there's a bigger way that this is different from the average romantic comedy -- the audience knows from very early on that this relationship isn't going to, in fact didn't, work out.)

So Woody Allen plays a character named Alvy Singer -- who's Allen himself, possibly a little less successful, but otherwise the same -- and Diane Keaton, of course, is the corn-fed Midwestern girl Annie Hall who he falls for, gets even more neurotic about, and eventually breaks up with. Singer narrates the story -- at times addressing the audience directly, or stopping the action, or dropping back to his childhood to explain things.

Look, you don't need me to tell you this is a good movie -- it won the Oscar for best picture, despite being a 93-minute-long comedy starring Woody Allen. So I'm really just saying that I finally saw it, and I agree with everybody. But I'll probably want to see it again before another thirty-nine years pass.