And The Loser Is... #4- Just another Monday night at Michael's

When Annie Hall was announced as the surprising winner of the Best Picture award in 1978, its director, Woody Allen, wasn't on hand to share the celebrations. Allen had earlier been named Best Director for his signature film, but instead of Los Angeles, Allen was hundreds of miles away, in New York, playing with his jazz band at Michael's Pub, just like he did every Monday night. Allen had been resistant towards the whole awards process, at first refusing even to allow the production company, United Artists, to campaign for the film. "If it were a special occasion or something, I might do it," he said of his decision to snub the ceremony.

This is typical of a man who has done things his own way throughout his professional (and personal!) life. However, this attitude towards the Academy Awards (and all awards ceremonies) is clearly not reciprocated, as Allen's films have notched up a number of nominations over the years. This edition of ATLI... will be the first of a two-part look at his various successes.

I became a big Woody Allen fan pretty much from my first exposure to his work, and he soon became my most beloved filmmaker. I have seen every one of his films, up to and including Midnight In Paris (which I'm hoping I'll be talking about in a future blog after this year's nominations are announced), and am rarely disappointed, able to get some enjoyment out of even his weaker efforts (and there have been some). I think my love of Allen comes down to a few key elements. Firstly, he reveres a lot of the same filmmakers as myself (notably Ingmar Bergman), and you can see that reverence play out in his own films, sometimes subtly, sometimes not so. Secondly, he is obviously a very funny man, and great comedy writer. I often think that comedy and beauty are the only two areas of true subjectivity in life. If you find something funny, who am I to say it isn't? Likewise if you find something, or someone, beautiful. And Allen's brand of humour just jives with me in a way that, say, Mel Brooks' doesn't. Finally, I see certain similarities between myself and the Woody Allen persona. Certainly, the themes that he seems preoccupied by, and that recur in his films, as well as certain neurotic elements to his character. I won't go into any more detail about it than that, because the purpose of this blog isn't to talk about myself. It's to talk about films. And, with that said, let's begin this look at Allen's work with the film talked about above, Annie Hall.

As mentioned above, this film won awards for best picture and best director. It also earned Diane Keaton an award for best actress, Allen and Marshall Brickman the award for best original screenplay, and Allen a nomination for best actor. It is really the quintessential Allen film, and the perfect starting point for novices, as it brings together a lot of the elements of his work, framed around a romance, which is a central device in Allen's films. Keaton is the titular Hall, a girl from the Midwest of America who Allen's typical New Yorker, Alvy Singer, meets and falls in love with. The two start a relationship, and the film simply documents that, from their first meeting, to their eventual break-up.

What makes the film so endearing are the different devices Allen uses throughout, which is not something he's done too much of in his career. He plays with the structure of the film, telling the story in flashback, often jumping back and forth in the relationship, and even going back to his childhood. He uses fantasy sequences, such as Annie having an outer-body experience as they prepare to make love, and even uses animation for one scene.

Annie Hall's balcony scene.

Another classic scene shows subtitles appear at the bottom of the screen informing us what the characters are really thinking, as they try to impress each other in the early stages of their relationship. It is this playfulness which I think makes Annie Hall such an enduring film, but its importance in Allen's oeuvre goes beyond that. The director uses the relationship between Alvy and Annie to relate his feelings about New York City, and what it is to be a New Yorker. First, he tries to make Annie into what his idea of a New Yorker is; he encourages her to see an analyst, and to take adult education classes. He has this cerebral idea of the city, and tries to mould Annie to fit this. This backfires, however, when Annie decides that she wants to move to Los Angeles to further her singing career. At this point, we are treated to Allen's far-from-favourable vision of L.A (and, of course, life imitated art when Allen snubbed the Oscars to play jazz in NYC). To Allen, L.A is vast and bright and fake, whereas New York is intimate and honest. He shoots the city in greens and browns, giving it an Autumnal warmth, and uses locations like apartment balconies to show the intimacy of the city. So, as well as the dichotomy between Alvy, the intellectual New Yorker, and Annie, the folksy, oddball Mid-Westerner, you also see Allen's comparison of his own city to Los Angeles. While Manhattan (1979) has often been cited as Allen's love letter to New York City, a grand romantic gesture of a film, this is more like the pillow talk between a happily-married couple, totally at ease in each other's company.

This is a film that I can watch again and again. The number of great lines is endless, from Woody's memorable defence of masturbation (it's sex with someone you love), his comparison of relationships to sharks (they need to be moving forward or they die), to my personal favourite, his reaction to a movie theatre patrons assessment that Marshall McLuhan's writing doesn't hit him on a gut level ("I'd like to hit HIM on a gut level"). Keaton is also fantastic in her much-deserved award-winning role- it's hard not to love her here. This is the perfect romantic comedy. 5 stars.

The next Allen film to gain Academy attention was Interiors, released the year after Annie Hall. This marked a different direction for the director, as it was his first dramatic film and it earned best actress nominations for Geraldine Page and Maureen Stapleton (leading and supporting, respectively), and another best director nom for Woody (also best original script and best art direction noms). This is Woody's homage to Bergman, and it tells the story of three sisters, and their reaction to the divorce of their parents. The main focus of the film is on Mary Beth Hurt's Joey, who tries to make her mother face the reality that her marriage is over. Joey is herself plagued by feelings of inadequacy when she compares her life to that of her two successful sisters (this is a theme Allen would re-examine in Hannah and Her Sisters), and struggles to find a creative outlet to express herself. Key to the film is the relationship between the sisters, and their father's new beau (Stapleton), a lively, almost vulgar woman, in stark contrast to their restrained, intellectual mother. One thing I find interesting about Allen's work is that, despite generally populating his films with intellectuals, and obviously revering high art, his films often look down on intellectualism, or present it as a dead end in terms of finding happiness and true meaning. That is again the case here. It's interesting to see Allen direct a film like this, mimicking a lot of Bergman's framing devices, shooting the film almost entirely in interior locations (which the title suggests), and dealing in familial relationships the same way that Bergman did in many of his films. This is an experiment that pays off, as I think this is a fantastic film. 4 stars.

I'm going to wrap this up by talking briefly about what I consider two of Allen's weaker films, Broadway Danny Rose (1984), and Mighty Aphrodite (1995).

A lesser Allen film.

Allen actually cites Broadway Danny Rose as one of his favourites amongst his films, and it garnered him a best director nomination (as well as the obligatory best orginal screenplay nomination). Shot in a nice black and white by Gordon Willis, this is a light film which begins with a bunch of New York talent agents sharing industry stories in a deli. One of them relates the story of a hapless agent, Danny (Allen), whose one good act was a philandering lounge singer who had taken up with a gangster's moll. Danny is asked to act as a beard for the girl (played by Mia Farrow), which causes the gangster to assume that he is the one that she has been cheating on him with. The set-up is very funny, but for some reason the film just didn't make much impact on me. It's part of a period, really between Manhattan and Hannah and her Sisters, where the director seemed to hit a lull in terms of taking chances with his films, or looking to make films which were a little deeper in theme. This is light, and while at certain points it might recall the zaniness of his early comedies, it doesn't get there often enough for me. It's more a friendly nudge in the ribs of the New York entertainment business (which Allen is obviously very familiar with), which just didn't grab me. 3 stars.

3 stars also, for Mighty Aphrodite, which won Mira Sorvino the best supporting actress Oscar in 1996. Sorvino plays Linda, a prostitute marked by her stupidity, who turns out to be the biological mother of the genius son that Lenny and Amanda (Allen and Helena Bonham-Carter) have adopted. The really interesting thing about this film is that Allen uses a Greek chorus to link together scenes (something he used in an earlier play he had written). This conceit delivers some humour, such as the chorus deliberating on why children don't call home more often once they move out. My problem with the film is in Sorvino's performance. I just didn't like it. I found her annoying to the point that it almost ruins the film. Evan Rachel Wood gives a much better performance of dumb broad in a Woody film in Whatever Works (2009), in my opinion. Now, this is one that I've only seen once before, so at some point I will give it another watch to see if things change. Like with all Woody films, I want to love it.

I'll be coming back to Woody Allen in a later blog, but in ATLI... #5, I'll be talking about the best American film of the last 30 years, and the film that beat it to the Best Picture award. Until then, here's looking at you.