Woody Allen's film Annie Hall, set in Manhattan, focuses on the relationship of the aspiring singer title character with stand up comedian Alvy Singer.
Most films happen to start in the present time frame instead of beginning with a childhood flashback like
Woody Allen's Annie Hall. Considering the film's references to
Freud and the two main characters' frequent visits to their
psychoanalyst, its not at all suprising that
Woody Allen would show "the child is the father to the man" by explaining how his protagonist's whole personality was influenced by the early years of his life. Thus from the film's first scene, we are already a given a hint of Alvy Singer's
depressive nature. In that scene, Alvy's mother calls in a doctor because her son's morbid thoughts about the expansion and eventual
death of the
universe have
depressed him to the point where he stopped doing his
homework and thinking about anything else. The doctor called in to talk to Alvy tells the child that the universe will be around for billions of years and that he should stop
worrying about its collapse and enjoy his life instead.
Apparently Alvy ignored the
doctor's advice, since his morbid and obsessive thoughts and inability to enjoy life because of them continued well into his
adulthood and eventually irritated his girlfriend Annie Hall, who tried to love him at first but eventually became too fed up with him. The first time we see Alvy together on his
date with Annie, we clearly see how
exasperated she is with his obsessive and joyless nature. Not quite the master of courtesy during dates, Alvy scolds Annie for arriving late to the movie
theater. He then ruins the date by refusing to see the movie altogether. But why? He
confesses himself to be an obsessive compulsive who cant stand missing the beginning of a film. Therefore, when he finds out that he and Annie are two minutes late past the start , he absolutely refuses to go into the
screening room.
The most
annoying thing about
Alvie however is not his
obsession with being to a
movie on time, but rather his constant need to
whine and
complain about things that most people wouldn't even notice. While in line to purchase tickets at the cinema, Alvy whines constantly about a pretentious guy standing behind him who makes banal
academic comments about
Fellini's movies. "I think I am going to choke," he tells Annie and then dismisses the guy as an over-
intellectual type who met his date through the New York Times Book Review personals section, where he stated his interest in meeting a
Mozart loving, book reading
sodomite. Annie of course is quite peeved that her boyfriend is driven to
eavesdrop and make
vicious comments about a stranger, all the meanwhile looking for
sympathy because it was him who was supposedly inconvenienced by the
stranger's presence. ( Note: Alvy's habit of making fun of strangers also irritatingly transfers to a hobby of mocking Annie herself. But that's a point to be discussed later in paragraphs six through eight.)
Obsessing about things and complaining about them is a character trait of Alvy's that spills over into many facets of his life. The effect of this on Annie is that everyday tasks that should be fun and stress free become intolerable
hassles because Alvy finds them so
threatening and
troubling. When he and Annie get together to cook live lobsters by boiling them, horrified Alvy tells Annie that he finds these creatures extremely dangerous and will not touch them. When she coaxes him to pick one up and drop it into the boiling pot, he expresses such
fear and
squeamishness as he drops the lobster into the hot water, that you would think he was handling a
bomb about to explode. However, it would be unfair to say that dealing with Alvy is all pain and no pleasure for Annie. Sometimes Annie does find his quirks rather charming. During the lobster cooking, she has a fit of laughter about his fear of
lobsters. Rather amused, she asks Alvy to pose for a picture holding a big
stick that he had just reached with behind the refrigerator to make the
lobster crawl out towards him so that he wouldnt have to carry the
icky thing with his hands and risk being hurt by its claws. Her funny bone is also quite tickled, when Alvy tells her, serious and straight faced, that he would never
shower at the gym no matter how sweaty he was, become he was afraid of what could potentially happen to him while he was naked in the company of another likewise
naked man.
In fact, it is not really Alvy's quirks that are his biggest flaw with regard to his relationship with Annie. The quirks are merely symptomatic of a bigger problem. They merely reveal that Alvy is self obsessed, only
attentive to his own
needs and
fears, while being
insensitive and completely unsympathetic to those of Annie. When Annie and Alvy have sex, Alvy tells her that he absolutely can't put up with her smoking
grass because it would make her
sexual performance fake. Alvy thinks that if she smokes grass, the pleasure that she gets during sex wont be attributable to his presence and sexual performance, but to the stimulation effect of pot instead. According to him, it would be as if during a
comedy show, he knew that his laughing audience had smoked up and they were laughing not because they found his
jokes funny but only because they were high on
drugs.
Alvy's need to bolster his
ego and to be certain that it is him and not the drug that is causing Annie's pleasure completely makes him insensitive to her insistence that she needs to
smokepot in order to
relax during
sex. She believes that she would otherwise be too tense, which would inhibit her and make her unable to make love freely and joyfully. Alvy's
insensitivity certainly ruins the sex at that moment. Feeling that Annie is unusually listless during the lovemaking session, he says to her: Why do I have the feeling that you are somehow removed? His searching gaze around the room confirms his
suspicion. The movie veers to surrealism as Alvy at that point notices Annie's soul - an exact replica of her body wearing the same clothes but only dimmer looking - sitting on the
chair with a
sketchpad, thinking about what she should draw. Rather dismayed, Alvy tells Annie's
soul to return to the body and be together with him during the still continuing sex session. Annie's soul sarcastically replies, "You still have my
body!"
What makes
Alvy an aggravating boyfriend for Annie, as far as love goes, is the combination of two characteristics. These are his constant propensity to
make fun of and to insult his dates as well as his habit of impulsively and insistently begging for
sex when the desire comes without taking no for an answer. In one
hilarious scene, we witness the simultaneous manifestation of both of these
traits. At an evening get together of Manhattan illuminati such as
professors and j
ournalists, he absconds away from everyone to a deserted room with a television and turns on a
basketball game of the Nicks. Robin, a
woman who was earlier talking to him about her writing sees him watching
sports and marvels at how he can waste his time watching the meaningless
non-intellectual activity of men competing to throw a
ball into a hoop. Alvy's answer is insulting to the intellectually-minded woman. He tells her that unlike intellectuals who are stuck in thoughts, physical activity is productive and accomplishes something real. Immediately following his insult, Alvy decides to show her the merits of physical activity by pushing himself onto her, locking his arms around her, and passionately french
kissing her. After thus seguing from insult to kissing, Alvy implores the woman to have
sex with him right there although they could be walked in on anytime by their mutual intellectual
acquiantances in the next room. She certainly doesn't want to ruin her reputation by being caught in a public sex act and eventually throws him off of her. Alvy, however ignores her
pleas against
having sex for as long as possible, unwilling to allow her fears of humiliation to dissuade him from indulging his sexual
desire.
Dialogue:
Alvy: No, it'll be great! It'll be great, be-because all those Ph.D.'s are in there, you know, like ... discussing
models of alienation and we'll be in here quietly humping.
Robin: (Pulling away again) There are people out there from The New Yorker magazine. My God! What would they think?
With regard to Annie, Alvy doesn't insult her right before impulsively and insistently trying to talk her into having sex with him. With Annie, Alvy is forunately considerate enough to space out the insults and the sex begging. Alvy's
mocking of Anny revolves around her supposedly unsophisticated
language skills. He tells her that her expression
la-di-da is something only
uneducated Wichita Falls,
Wisconsin folks would say and that the use of the word "
neat" to mean praise is outdated. When she refers to her grandmother as
grammy, he derisively asks her if she lived in a
Norman Rockwell painting. (For those who don't know, Norman Rockwell drew idealized portraits of 1950s America that glorified the family and always depicted them in cute and loving moments. His work has been often criticized by detractors as overly
sentimental.) Unlike his constant mocking of his girlfriend, Alvy's pushy demands for sex that won't take for an answer are often not directly shown. Rather, they can be inferred from Annie's conversations with her
psychoanalyst. She tells the therapist that she would often comply with Alvy's insistent requests for sex even though she told him she didn't want to make love and tried to talk her way out of it. However, Annie says she later began to stand up for herself and refuse.
There is one specific scene at the beginning of the movie that corresponds to Annie's description to her psychotherapist about how Alvy would beg for sex and how she would respond to his entreaties by trying to talk her way out of it. In this scene, Annie and Alvy are lying in bed and Annie answers Alvy's request for sex with several excuses. First she simply tells him that she doesn't want to make love. Seeing his visibly upset response, she then produces an excuse by saying that she has to be well rested and save her
voice for the next day's singing at a
nightclub. Alvy, of course, doesn't quite become the
sensitive guy and easily let her
off the hook with no sex. Instead, he debunks her
excuses and argues back to her.
Dialogue:
Annie: I don't wanna..
Alvy: What - What - I don't.. It's not natural. We're in a bed together
Annie: I know, well, it's just that-you know, I mean, I-I-I-I gotta sing tomorrow night, so I have to rest my voice.
Alvy: It's always some kind of an excuse. It's- You know, you used to think that I was very sexy.
Quite frankly, that should be no surprise to the reader considering that Alvy wouldn't allow the presence of a whole
party in the next room to stop him from trying to have
sex with intellectual socialite Robin. If a crowd of people did not scare him away from sex, why would his
girlfriend's flimsy excuses. When Alvy wants sexual satisfaction, he will not bother to allow the unwillingness of his partner to stop him. A childhood scene from the beginning of the movie already forecasts Alvie's sexual impulsiveness. He gets up in the middle of the classroom to run to a girl to kiss her on the cheek. The teacher calls him up to the blackboard and tells him to be ashamed of himself. "What for? I have a healthy sexual desire," Alvy answers her cheekily.
One may wonder how Annie was able to put up so a long with such a derisive,
sexually impusive, insensitive, and
obsessive compulsive boyfriend for so long. But if their relationship continued for a long while despite all of these traits of Alvy's, what ultimately killed it was his insensitive response to Annie's
career needs. When Annie's nightclub singing session inspired
Tony Lacey, a recording agent to take interest in her talent, Alvy made Annie decline the agent's inviitation to an evening of drinks that would potentially include contract negotitations for her record. He said that he and Annie could not attend the social event because they already had plans for the evening. Later, when
Tony Lacey offered Annie to move to Los Angeles to begin recording her first album for his label, Alvy insisted that she not go and stay with him in
New York City instead. Alvy's insistence on never moving to L.A. forces Annie to choose between Alvie and her career. That was precisely the breaking point where Alvie's selfishness and insensitivity have shown themselves to be intolerable.
Singing was a
talent Annie had nurtured and cherished by frequently performing in Manhattan's
nightclubs. She would not allow
Alvy's
objections to stand in the way of her chance at
stardom.
Annie Hall was released in 1977 and received major acclaim at the Academy Awards, being nominated for four awards and winning three of them.
Awards Won
Best Film
Best Director - Woody Allen
Best Actress - Diane Keaton
Nominations that didn't win:
Best Actor - Woody Allen