Woody Allen's Best Picture winner. The romantic comedy that, in 1977, refused the form's basic premises and won four Oscars anyway.
Alvy Singer, a neurotic Brooklyn-born comedian in his early forties, has just broken up with Annie Hall. The film, narrated directly to the camera by Alvy, reconstructs the relationship from beginning to end. He meets Annie at a Manhattan tennis club. They date. They move in together. Annie pursues a singing career. Alvy's neuroticism progressively erodes her interest in the relationship. The film closes with them as ex-partners running into each other at a Los Angeles theatre showing The Sorrow and the Pity, the documentary Alvy had repeatedly insisted Annie watch when they were together.
Allen uses every structural device available — direct address to camera, split screen, subtitles displaying characters' real thoughts, an animated sequence, an actual cameo by Marshall McLuhan brought into the film to settle an argument Alvy is having with a stranger in a movie line. The film's 93-minute runtime is, structurally, an essay disguised as a romantic comedy.
Almost every romantic comedy before Annie Hall — and most after — is built around the premise that the central couple will, after various obstacles, end up together. Annie Hall opens with the announcement that the couple has broken up and uses the entire runtime to explain why. The structural reversal is the film's argument.
Allen and co-writer Marshall Brickman won Best Original Screenplay. The screenplay's central insight is that the conventional romantic-comedy structure (boy meets girl, complications, boy gets girl) is in fact the least-interesting period of any actual relationship. The interesting period is the period before the meet-cute (when the protagonist becomes the person they become) and the period after the break-up (when the protagonist reckons with what the relationship actually was). Annie Hall is structurally a romantic comedy entirely composed of those two periods.
Diane Keaton's Annie Hall won Best Actress at the 1978 Oscars. The performance is one of the most-influential in modern American comedy. Annie's distinctive register — the half-tentative speech patterns, the 'la-de-da' verbal tics, the menswear-and-vests aesthetic (which Keaton herself wore in real life and which became the film's costume signature) — has been imitated by performers for fifty years.
What's striking on rewatching is how much of the character is Keaton herself. Allen has been consistent that the character was written to inhabit who Keaton was at the time — her speech rhythms, her style, her ways of holding herself in space. The role is, in some sense, less a creative invention than a high-fidelity portrait of an actual person calibrated for fictional dramatic use. The Academy honoured both: the character and the actor.
Annie Hall is, by general critical consensus, one of the most-significant American comedies of the 1970s. Allen's subsequent career — including the public custody dispute of the early 1990s, the marriage to Soon-Yi Previn, and the accusations made by Dylan Farrow — has made writing about his films difficult for most subsequent critics. The work of separating the art from the artist is, in Allen's specific case, more contested than in almost any other major contemporary American filmmaker.
What we are doing here is reviewing the 1977 film. The 1977 film, on its own terms, is excellent. The reader has to make their own decision about whether to watch it now.