self-depreciations even when Woody is trying to lure us, as Alvy lures Annie, into his language-field. Alvy’s seduction of Annie is less sexual than terminological: he teaches her—trains her —to talk his lingo, the Village patois, and ridicules her Midwestern colloquialisms, like “neat,” even though these are clearly part of her charm for him. She learns the ropes too well and, her own woman, finally leaves him floundering in his own wry Weltschmerz. His antagonists are smoothies (like the recording mogul she leaves him for) and pseudo-intellectuals (he shows up a boor in a ticket line by magically producing Marshall McLuhan to confute the fellow’s phony explications of McLuhanism); the Prince of Darkness is a name-dropper, one who invokes the portentous frivolously. Alvy may not prevail, but he always has the privilege of the last word.
The whole movie, one feels, is his last word: it should have been called Alvy Singer. If Woody couldn’t make the kind of chivalrous homage to a woman that (say) Truffaut or Rohmer might have given us, he should at least have had the courage of his neuroses and given us a comedy of miscegenation. The old ethnic hierarchies persist furtively, as his anxieties attest, and sex is a form of upward mobility for men: courtship sues to mix stocks. The painful crossing of cultural lines, with humble monogamous yearnings, would offer plenty of scope to his wit, and it is territory almost unexplored and unexploited in movies; but he backs away from it like a scared crab. And anyway, it would have required some attempt to see people whole, including the antisemitic family but starting with Annie herself, who comes out so dull you wonder why his heart is broken: was there ever any future in her? What it finally comes to is ninety minutes of coitus interruptus, fun but fruitless. Annie Hall may look like a comedy or a romance, but it’s really a tsuris trap. □
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