[Woody Allen in Annie Hall] is—delightfully—in top form exposing the cultural stereotypes and clichés, the pretensions, fatuities, and hangups, and above all the jargon, of urban American pseudo-intellectuals…. His Alvin Singer brilliantly expresses the absurdity of a contemporary Everyman trying to enact the role of l'homme moyen sensuel in the form of an inadequate, self-deprecatory paranoid runt. ("I'm the only guy I know who suffers from penisenvy.") Woody repeatedly reminds us that the modern American male is a reductio ad absurdum quivering helplessly under the combined weights of Sigmund Freud and Women's Lib….
Annie Hall's satiric barbs lance a multiplicity of contemporary targets, but the film's essential concern is with the reworking of the old myth of Pygmalion and Galatea. At first, Annie forces a relationship with the reluctant Alvin; but gradually, despite his evident inadequacies, he assumes control and begins to transform her into an educated and self-confident woman. Soon the increasing success of the transformation produces a crucial dilemma: love or independence?…
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