Everything You Always Wanted to Say About Woody Allen* (*But Were Afraid to Admit)

Ticket Stubs #11: Remembering Diane Keaton in her roles in “Annie Hall” and “Looking for Mr. Goodbar”.

Diane Keaton (1946-2025) was one of the leading ladies of New Hollywood, a brief moment in American filmmaking in which the studio system’s control of Hollywood was challenged by young directors, writers and actors who believed movies could be both art and mainstream entertainment. From the mid-1960s until the late 1970s, they rewrote the rules of how, why and for whom movies were made, and introduced subject matter and perspectives overlooked by the old studio moguls. Diane Keaton starred in a number of major movies that defined or were otherwise significant to New Hollywood. Below, I consider two very different examples. Keaton won an Oscar and a Golden Globe for one of them (Annie Hall) and was nominated for a Golden Globe for the other (Looking for Mr. Goodbar). She died at Saint John’s Health Centre in Santa Monica on October 11, 2025. She was 79.

Ticket Stubs is a movie column reviewing new and not-so-new releases, Hollywood classics, nostalgic trash, and more obscure cinematic fare. This is Ticket Stubs #11.

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Annie Hall

Woody Allen, 1977

I’m going to admit something that I’m very self-conscious about and just take a chance that you won’t judge me.

I don’t get Woody Allen.

Never have.

Not Manhattan, not Hannah and Her Sisters, not Stardust Memories. No, not even Bananas. When I attempted to review 2011’s Midnight in Paris, all I could muster was this:

It’s Woody Allen so this will either do it for you or it won’t. Owen Wilson’s hacky screenwriter Gil wants to become a literary novelist so he moves to Paris, dons a Tweed jacket, and makes fashionable noises about the war in Iraq and the ‘lunatic’ supporters of ‘the right wing of the Republican Party’. His wife Inez’s (Rachel McAdams) tendency to ditch him to spend time with people who are (marginally) less tedious and self-regarding sees him fall in with a sparkling set of young writers with very familiar names. I’ve never ‘got’ Woody Allen but I suspect with this movie there’s less to get than usual.

Those 108 words could just as easily have been four: Please ask someone else. (Most critics raved about Midnight in Paris, incidentally.)

Allen’s humour leaves me cold and his movies leave me anxious. Was that a joke? Should I be laughing right now? How am I supposed to feel about these characters? Is it weird that I don’t feel anything? Maybe if I just nod wisely and throw in the occasional smile no one will be able to tell I’m none the wiser.

I can’t rightly explain my problem, though I accept it’s a problem and that the problem lies with me. I have an M.A. in film studies; my favourite era and oeuvre is New Hollywood; there is no city I love watching on film more than New York; and I enjoy Jewish and especially Yiddish humour. Set aside my unfortunate but inescapable goyischeness and I am the textbook profile of an Allen fanboy.

And yet I leave every one of his movies feeling frustrated and, worse, not really able to articulate why. This poses something of a dilemma since I’m supposed to be telling you what I think of Annie Hall. So I review the notes I took while watching. Most of them are just jottings of my favourite one-liners. ‘The food here is awful — and such small portions.’ ‘I’m a bigot, but for the left, fortunately.’ ‘I heard that Commentary and Dissent had merged and formed Dysentery.’ (I’ve written a few book and movie reviews for Commentary over the years, so I’ve always enjoyed that line.) My favourite: ‘Hey, don’t knock masturbation. It’s sex with someone I love.’

The rest is tentative observations that curl into self-doubting question marks. Ordinarily I’d be able to turn to the highest authority for a ruling but unfortunately Pauline Kael didn’t review Annie Hall. She did, however, make passing reference to it in other reviews. Kael had been favourable in her assessments of early Allen but as the Seventies progressed she soured on him. In reviewing Stardust Memories (1980), she bracketed the movie with Annie Hall and Manhattan as an example where ‘the protagonist’s high moral tone is often out of scale with what he’s indignant about and he just sounds like a crank, but we can’t tell when Woody Allen means to sound like one and when Woody Allen really is one’.

Diane Keaton’s titular character was ‘full of thoughts that wilted as she tried to express them, and her lyrical, apologetic kookiness gave the film softness, elusiveness’. Earlier, in musing on Looking for Mr. Goodbar (Richard Brooks, 1977), Kael opined that Keaton’s Annie had been ‘a fuzzy sweet neurosis’ who ‘redeemed the flustered confusion of urban misfits’. This hints at what we will say explicitly: Annie Hall is all that makes Annie Hall halfway bearable. The movie purports to be stand-up comedian Alvy Singer’s (Woody Allen) meditation on why his relationship with Annie doesn’t work out, but this self-involved dweeb isn’t trying to understand Annie so much as indulge his life’s work of contemplating his own navel.

Some leads are unsympathetic, others are downright loathsome, but Alvy is a one-man pity-party forever being gatecrashed by his own ego. He tries to control how Annie thinks, what she eats, what she reads. He can’t get off if she smokes a J before they have sex because if she’s stoned, he’s not in control of her. The guy makes out like he’s a self-effacing intellectual but he’s more of a coercive sociopath than any number of grunting alpha jocks. A girl had to be careful on the streets of New York in 1977: she could run into that nut with the .44 or, worse, Alvy Singer.

Annie Hall is often said to be about how relationships break down, how it’s hard to pinpoint exactly when or why, and the search for answers or apportionment of blame is futile because love is too fragile and ephemeral to bear the weight of rigorous analysis. That is, after all, Alvy’s critical error: he places his relationships on the analyst’s couch and interrogates the life out of them. It’s a tempting conclusion but I think it’s wrong. Alvy doesn’t have relationships, at least not with other people, and how could he? No one lives up to his standards. Annie Hall is a movie about one man’s inability to shut the fuck up and let someone else speak.

When she does speak, Annie is smarter, funnier and more compelling than Alvy and the longer the movie goes on, the more you wonder what she ever saw in him. Maybe those of us who don’t quite know what to think of ourselves learn something from those who don’t know how to think of anyone but themselves. Maybe they are an object lesson in the value of self-knowledge and the cost of self-obsession. Self-obsession, even to egomaniacal levels, is what afflicts Alvy. When Annie relocates to Los Angeles he takes it as an abandonment not only of himself but of New York and therefore of himself. For Alvy, l’East Side, c’est moi.

Diane Keaton is Annie Hall. If you are watching this movie for a reason other than its inclusion on every top one-hundred list of American cinema, that reason is very likely Keaton. Underneath that nimble kookiness and facial wit there lie guts and intelligence. It is a performance at once naturalistic and loose but also precise and controlled. It is acting working on all levels from an actress who makes the work look effortless. In a movie that makes a virtue, nay a fetish, of doubt, only Keaton knows what she’s all about. No Alvy Singer could possess her. She is in full possession of herself.

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Looking for Mr. Goodbar

Richard Brooks, 1977

Looking for Mr. Goodbar adapts Judith Rossner’s 1975 novel of the same name, a fictionalised, though not all that heavily, account of the death of Roseann Quinn, a young Catholic schoolteacher whose rape and murder in her Manhattan apartment by a man she took home from a bar on New Year’s Eve 1972 became a sociological Rashomon that, depending on your perspective, was a moral on the excesses of the sexual revolution and the risks to young women of the permissive lifestyle, proof that women’s liberation had not gone far enough and ought to extend to self-defence training, or another headline reporting the city’s descent into sleaze and criminality.

Theresa ‘Terry’ Dunn (Diane Keaton), like the woman who inspired her, is a good Catholic girl from a working-class Irish American family. Her mother (Priscilla Pointer) is quiet but pious. Her father (Richard Kiley) is a bigot who likes the sauce and the catechism and reviles abortion and free love. The term has not yet been invented but he is an almost archetypal Reagan Democrat. Her sister Katherine (Tuesday Weld) is the golden child but only because their parents don’t know about her secret life of extramarital affairs, drug use and abortions.

Terry, who was born with scoliosis but underwent corrective surgery as a child, has her own secret life, one drenched in yearning for romantic adventure and sexual risk, and which takes her into the bed of her married college professor (Alan Feinstein). When he isn’t using her for his own gratification, he’s smoking a pipe and feeling tortured by the burdens of intellect — he and Alvy Singer would get along — until he abruptly ditches her.

Terry eventually graduates, moves to Manhattan, and gets a job teaching deaf children at a Catholic school, where she patiently draws students out of their shells and cajoles a liberal welfare officer into cheating the system to secure more government cash for their parents. That is when she isn’t rushing to the aid of her sister after yet another failed relationship or unplanned pregnancy. She’s the Mother Teresa of the Upper West Side.

Only, she’s not. For while her days are spent tending young minds, her nights are given over to prowling the Manhattan singles scene, scouring divey hook-up bars for her next fuck, the sleazier the better — just as long as they don’t ask about the slashing scar across her lower back. She attracts the attentions of Tony (an early turn from Richard Gere), a gigolo with a long record and a short fuse, and James (William Atherton), the aforementioned welfare officer, an ex-seminarian who delights her parents but whom Terry has no interest in. Her aspirin-popping habit develops into a diet of cocaine and Quaaludes and she spirals into liaisons in cheap motels with men who mistake her for a hooker.

Looking for Mr. Goodbar was a commercial hit and inspired many a ripped-from-the-headlines think piece about the limits of sexual liberation. Some critics, however, saw a morality play about single women’s sexuality, an opportunity for educated liberals to tut over post-pill, post-Roe America without sounding gauche or stuffy like all those Nixonites and priests and respectable suburban housewives. Pauline Kael (her again) called it ‘a windy jeremiad laid on top of fractured film syntax’.

The syntax is not fractured so much as hyperactive. Terry constantly flashes back, forward and to imagined conversations, and it’s not always clear what is happening in her head and what is happening in the world around her. What we are never in any doubt about is the final five minutes of the movie. Those are real, and they are among the most difficult scenes to watch in a mainstream 1970s drama.

Writer and director Richard Brooks wants to have it both ways, bathing Terry’s sexual escapades in the sultry, smoky blues of an erotic thriller while having her resolve to mend her ways before heading out for one last, fatal night on the town. On their own, neither the prurience nor the priggishness are as objectionable as the earnest alternation between the two. If you’re going to make an exploitation movie at least make an honest one instead of pretending it’s a sociological or moral exercise.

And this is an exploitation movie. We see Diane Keaton from every angle but a human one. Terry is a madonna and a whore but she never amounts to a character. Late on in the movie it is revealed that her aunt Maureen also suffered from congenital scoliosis and was secreted away by the family and never spoken of. The movie is mightily sniffy about this when it scarcely treats its heroine much better. Terry is just another mad woman in the attic, and while she escapes she pays the price in the end.

Brooks is a more gifted director than he is a screenwriter. Some of the dialogue here is trying too hard, such as Terry’s rat-a-tat-tat film noirish narration of her final weeks. She recounts a furniture salesman leaving a $20 tip on the nightstand, only for it to be stolen by the police detective she subsequently sleeps with, saying: ‘Dick Tracy disappeared and so did my $20. Talk about amateur. Played for a hooker by a square and ripped off as a sucker by a dick.’

Similarly hokey is a scene near the climax where Terry, having resolved to get clean, walks in the direction of church bells only to be waylaid by the welfare officer who by this point is borderline stalking her. If only she had made it to Mass, Brooks seems to hint, she might have been spared the fate of a sinner, but it goes no further than a hint because that would mean saying something and it’s not clear Brooks wants to say anything.

Despite Brooks’ best efforts, Diane Keaton gives an absorbing performance that rescues Terry from caricature and plays her as a tough-vulnerable New York broad. Keaton draws us in, makes us root for Terry, which makes the final scenes so gut-slugging. Brooks might not give a damn about his heroine, but we do.

Watched almost fifty years on, Looking for Mr. Goodbar seems both of its time and de nos jours. Its ambivalence on the sexual revolution, troubled by some of its consequences but unwilling to confront their origins, mirrors contemporary anxieties about progress and its drawbacks. It’s a movie that starts a conversation but contributes nothing to it.