Annie Hall

 

Welp. 

When I decided to rewatch Annie Hall, I knew I didn't want the detailed reckoning of streaming services to say I had, nor did I want a single penny to return to its director's wallet. I don't take a particularly hard line on art/artist, but I know what artists I don't want getting my money, and he's on that list. (I wrote about this years ago, after Weinstein but before so many others, rattling off a list of men who had behaved badly and more or less assessing them.) So I borrowed it from the library, which in America does not pass on royalties or residuals. 

I don't think it's possible to accept Annie Hall without baggage. I think it's possible to enjoy Annie Hall, and not to feel guilty about that but instead to understand that life is big and long and wide and weird, full of good outcomes to bad actions and terrible people who make wonderful things. I went into it clear-eyed, knowing its creator is a monster, finding it necessary to listen to the monster's monologue for a while. 

I must report that Annie Hall is a very good film. It's not as smart as it thinks it is, but I thought that the first time I saw it, too - mistaking good taste + existential anxiety for actual intelligence is a mainstay of this director's films. The two characters, complex shapes, bounce around inside the frame of the film and leap against the moving polygons of the film's metatextual ideas - for such a talky film, it's got tremendous energy. The director uses every cinematic trick he can think of (De Palma's split screen, Ophuls's ringmaster storytelling, the artificiality of extras) to tell this relatively simple story of a couple whose relationship can't work. The result is pretty magical. 

What matters about this film is multiple. First, what a huge leap forward it represents for its creator, who was popular, but whose movies had all been farces, some with Buster Keaton-esque chases. After this film, he became a columnar force in the highbrow arts and remained that way for decades. Second, between Scorsese's work and his, New York City became beloved on film, a subject of its own rather than a mere setting - and Scorsese was making stuff like Taxi Driver, which showed the nastiness of the city, while he was making this and Manhattan, love letters to it. Third, it was funnier and better than other comedies of the time, by a lot. Everything else seems like a cheap kids' movie. (I don't know how comedies got so terrible by the end of the 70s; maybe TV was siphoning off the funniest people? but a look at my list shows things were GRIM.) Fourth, it's one of the best films of the year, and it's the rare triple crown of a film that's liked by audiences, lauded by awards shows, and deemed worthy by critics as well as the test of time. 

The director shoots this film unusually for its time: long takes, the people in the frame but not dominating it, a fairly static camera unless movement is necessary to stay on its subject. I believe there were two shot/reverse shots in the entire thing; this technique is a staple in conversation-heavy films, but he almost never uses it. This makes the film feel a bit documentary, and it emphasizes the surroundings almost as much as the people. TV had infiltrated movie technique by then, so there were a lot more medium shots and close-ups, but he bucked that effectively. 

The nature of the 1977 project is aggregate: watching as many movies from this year as I can. But I started doing the project because of a dozen or so movies from this year I already knew were significant, either to me personally or to film history. Annie Hall is one of the latter. It's a crucial film, not only because the Academy deemed it the Best Picture of this fascinating year, not only because the long, productive, influential career of its director essentially begins here, but because it shifted both audience desire and studios' awareness of that desire toward comedies that were more than the sum of their parts. It made almost $40 million in 1977 dollars; that amounted to a sharp poke explaining that audiences wanted more than junk (sometimes). (Then again, Smokey and the Bandit was #2 at the box office that year.) 

Does its landmark status have anything to do with its director being a monster? I tend to think not; I think it's possible to study Annie Hall's significance, especially to the year 1977, without studying its director's faults. (This is not true of, say, The Last House on Dead End Street, in which its creator's sadism bears directly on its content and impact. It would not be true if we were talking about Manhattan.) One of the closing scenes does have a line about an adult male actor having sex with sixteen-year-old twins, though. That line brought to the front of my mind what had been lurking at the rear all along: no matter how exceptional his work is, the man who made it cannot be redeemed.