Woody Allen's Breakthrough Movie

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

ANNIE HALL

Directed by WOODY ALLEN Screenplay by WOODY ALLEN and MARSHALL BRICKMAN

Comedians are supposed to shtik to their lasts: Harpo could never speak and Groucho could never be at a loss for words; Fields could never seem to draw a sober breath or a sunny moral. What, then, is Woody Allen doing starring in, writing and directing a ruefully romantic comedy that is at least as poignant as it is funny and may be the most autobiographical film ever made by a major comic?

Is he exercising an unexpected taste for self-destruction? Fecklessly proving his star's clout to impose himself on us any way he wants to? The answer is no. What he is doing is growing, right before our eyes, and it is a fine sight to behold.

Traditionalists need not worry.

There are plenty of one-liners about the classic anti-hero's copelessness in sexual and other matters as Allen dips once again into the comic capital that he has been living off for years. It is, however, the best measure of this movie's other strengths that even when these gags are very good, they often seem unnecessary and intrusive: mood busters.

What really interests Allen is the lady of the title and the relationship between her and a character called Alvy Singer. Alvy is a comedian whose style and career are not unlike those of Woody Allen, which is all to the good, since Allen plays him. Annie Hall is tall, blonde and pretty and, at least superficially, not unlike Diane Keaton, who for a few years was Allen's best pal in real life. This, too, is all to the good, since Annie is played by Keaton. It is not for the outsider to determine just how much these fictional figures resemble their real counterparts, but there is no doubt that this is a very personal film.

Food of Love. They are an odd couple as Allen envisions them, ill-matched in more than appearance. Alvy's comedy, like Woody's, is based on an all too realistic assessment of self and world. Most people succeed at romance because, for the length of time it requires to make a conquest, they can imagine themselves as different from what they are--tall, dark and handsome rather than short, reddish-haired and bespectacled. It is a state that Allen (more properly his public persona) can never attain. Similarly, most of us get through life by imagining that the machines and systems supporting us are humming along nicely, thank you.

Allen is always certain the drain will get plugged up and, sure enough, it does. Keaton has so far presented a less vividly defined image to the public, but there is something at once willful and flaky about her--she does not play realists.

What carries their romance in the picture is desperate insecurity, an unspoken belief that they had better cling to each other because no one else will take the trouble to find the virtues lurking beneath their rumpled psychological surfaces.

The arc of their love affair is a conventional one--first meeting and wary attraction, a fairly smooth sail into bed (art movies and paperbacks are the food of love), a mutual discovery of annoying foibles, which predicts the big breakup. It comes finally over her developing career and her cheerful acceptance of the lunatic notion that Los Angeles offers a viable setting for a civilized life.

Allen gives himself a wonderfully comic urban background, Jewish and lower-class; the family home stands --shakily--beneath the Coney Island roller coaster. It is all in hopeless contrast with her Wasp Middle Westernism. When the pair finally get to L.A., Allen refuses to see it, as most recent movies have, as merely spaced out. To him, it is actively malevolent--the biggest clogged drain of them all.

Personal as the story he is telling may be, what separates this film from Allen's own past work and most other recent comedy is its general believability. His central figures and all who cross their paths are recognizable contemporary types. Most of us have even shared a lot of their fantasies. Their world, however cockeyed, is our world. Without abandoning the private demi-demons that have been the basis of his past comic success, Allen has fashioned broad new connections with his audience. Ironically, his most personal film may turn out to have the widest appeal of all his movies. Richard Schickel

"Oh, ah, well, you know, I think it's, ah, it's not really, really that. Well, oh I guess not, but ah .. ."

Let's try it again, Diane.

"Yes, but, well, oh, I think that's ... well, maybe not. Oh, who can ... I suppose so."

Once more, Diane.

"There was a long time when I couldn't bear to look at myself at all on film. I'd sit there and say, 'Oh, no! Really? Really? I don't believe that.' But I am anxious to see Annie Hall. Woody has made a move into something else, a different style. Annie is a really coherent story, a more personal movie than the ones he's made before. The jokes in it come out of behavior rather than absurd circumstances."

Talking to Diane Keaton is a bit like playing a record with an unmarked speed: it takes time to get synchronized. At the beginning she will hem and haw, whistle and giggle, mumble and fumble, shrug her shoulders and contort her face. She will start a sentence the way she might climb a tree, worried that the branches will crack or that she will climb too high and not be able to get back down. Gradually, as she gains confidence, the mumbles turn into words, the words into full--and even funny --sentences. "Diane is always totally surprised when people find her amusing," says Woody Allen. "She is a natural comedienne, but she never quite believes she can do it."

Keaton's whole career, in fact, has been spent in convincing herself--nobody else ever seems to have doubted her --that she is a gifted actress. In 1968, when she auditioned for the original Broadway version of Play It Again, Sam, Allen's comic tribute to Humphrey Bogart, she was, she says with double underlining, "just sick. There were all these other women there to try out for the part, and I was scared to death." And she probably could not have walked on to do her bit--if it wasn't so obvious that Allen was scared to death too.

Mutual Jitters. Deciding to be scared together, Keaton and Allen set up housekeeping in New York City, and she went on to star in the movie version of Sam, as well as two subsequent Allen films, Sleeper and Love and Death. Aside from the mutual jitters, it was a case of opposites attracting: he was a stereotypical New Yorker and she was a model Southern Californian. "When I first met her," Allen remembers, "she was a real hayseed, the kind who would chew eight sticks of gum at a time. I talked to her on the phone once when she was in California, and she was about to drive to the supermarket--which was across the street, literally." Allen pauses and then emphasizes his point: "Very California."

Though many of the facts have been changed, Annie Hall is a fair portrayal of their relationship. Like Annie, Diane sees a shrink five times a week, and like Annie and Alvy, Diane and Woody decided to split three years ago. Diane now lives alone in Manhattan, in a bare, white-on-white apartment whose most prominent feature is a montage of 24 photos--Diane in all her moods.

Unlike Annie and Alvy, Diane and Woody still see each other constantly, and Woody continues to show all his scripts to her. If she says something is "neat," the most exalted word of praise in her vocabulary, he is convinced that it is good. When her two sisters also applied "neat" to the script of Annie Hall, he knew he had a winner.

Diane, 31, has acted in other movies besides Woody's--she played Al Pacino's wife in both Godfathers. But her greatest departure from form, and probably the hardest role of her career, is in Looking for Mr. Goodbar, which finished shooting last February. She worked without a break for 76 days, some of the time with a cracked rib, playing a sexually compulsive schoolteacher who travels from affair to affair in Manhattan singles bars and finally to her doom.

"Diane reacts best when she has some kind of stimulus," says Director Richard Brooks. "We would prepare a scene, and it wouldn't seem to work. Then we would play music, and she would become inventive, let herself go. It was like the old silent days when they would play sad violin music for a sad scene and happy violin music for a happy scene." Brooks believes her Muzak-inspired performance, close to perfect, is proof of her versatility. But Diane, reverting to type, admits that she was scared. "I was very anxious before I made this movie," she says. "I worried-worried. And I mean, I worried. "

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