Note: By the time this posts, I will be on the roof of the new place with the chimney man getting things ready for the new woodstove. I had the flue inspected and that is fine, but the cap needs attention and I am having the flue cleaned just to be sure. The following is a post from behind the green door to hold everyone over until I return, assuming I do not fall off the roof. If there is no Friday post, it has been fun.

If I were tasked with writing a summary of the classic Woody Allen movie, Annie Hall, I would be hard pressed to get past a paragraph. It is film starring a neurotic Jewish man, played by Woody Allen, and a mentally unstable woman, played by Diane Keeton, who wander around New York for ninety minutes speaking to one another as if they swallowed a 1970’s pop-psychology textbook.

The movie reminds me of the old quip about the James Joyce novel Ulysses. “A Jewish man who wanders around Dublin and nothing happens.” That is not a criticism. In fact, it is the best thing I can think of to say about the film. There is a chance that Allen was inspired by the Joyce novel and was attempting to recreate it for a New York audience, from an entirely Jewish perspective. Joyce is mentioned in this scene.

I did some digging around to see if maybe that was what Allen was doing with this film, but I found nothing to suggest it. Despite its status as a classic film and one of Allen’s best works, there is not much in the way of critical analysis. That is because there is not much to examine when it comes to things you expect in a story. It is just two neurotic Manhattanites wandering around for ninety minutes.

The film is classed as a romantic comedy, but it is probably better to call it a character study or perhaps an anthropological study. It is primarily about two people, presented as representative of the cultural elite of the time, as they struggle with their various insecurities and disconnectedness. Comedian Alvy Singer, (Allen) and Annie Hall (Keaton) are struggling with alienation in the modern age.

Alienation is the subtext of the film, but it is not entirely clear that Allen had the self-awareness to know this. Alvy Singer is the typical Jewish character struggling with his otherness in a world dominated by non-Jews. Allen hams it up quite a bit to the point where Alvy Singer is a satire of the Jewish guy who is sure that around every corner there could be a gang of Nazis ready to haul him away to the camps.

Once you get past the hyperbole, you get to the essential reality of the Jewish condition, at least as Jews see it, which is that they are always a people who dwell alone, regardless of where they find themselves. Who they are is defined by their outsider status so they must remain as outsiders or risk losing their identity. It is the essential contradiction at the heart of Jewish identity in the diaspora.

Alienation takes on a different form with Annie. She is presented as from a standard issue white middle-class family. At one point, Alvy jokes that she grew up in a Norman Rockwell painting. She is the modern atomized female, a creature of both feminism and the modern economy, who sees a therapist and spends most of her time dwelling on trivialities to escape from the loneliness of her life.

The two of them sort of fall in love, but their relationship does not work because of the self-absorption rooted in their alienation. Alvy only thinks about sex, while Annie has no interest in sex. In both cases, this leads to endless self-examination that is entirely superficial and pointless. These are two people who are alienated from themselves, so it is why they cannot have a normal human relationship.

Sadly, that analysis is far more interesting than the film version. Both characters are boring and self-indulgent. There is no reason to care about them because you have met these stock figures loads of times in film and real life. Annie is a neurotic dingbat who every man over thirty has met a thousand times. Allen is the classic Jewish guy who thinks his endless complaining makes him seem interesting.

That is the main problem with the film. It wants to be a social commentary, but it has nothing to say about the things featured in the film. You get some pithy commentary from Alvie who breaks the fourth wall throughout the film, but those are just gag lines that Allen used in his stand-up. Otherwise, you have no reason to care about the people, so you have no reason to think about their dilemma.

In this regard it is like other movies of this decade in that they were made by people who held themselves in high regard, so they just assumed anything they did or said was important by itself. They made films that were supposed to lead the horse to water, but it was hard to care about the horse, so the water never came into focus. Whatever Allen was trying to say about his time and place in this film remained unsaid.

That said, the film is visually interesting. Even after fifty years it feels like you are there in Manhattan with Alvy and Annie. You often think you can smell the stench of the urine-soaked hobos, which were a feature of the city at the time. This may be why the film shows up on the top-100 list, rather than other Woody Allen films which were graded higher at the time in terms of artistic merit.

In the end, Annie Hall feels like a professionally made film school project in that it is self-indulgent and the person doing the self-indulging is not that interesting. Woody Allen’s hang-ups and insecurities are interesting to no one but Woody Allen. A film about them, not matter how well done, is still just a film about a boring Jewish man who spends ninety minutes walking around Manhattan with an equally boring shiksa.

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