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buy accutane online from canada Three years ago, for Valentine’s Day, the Fox Theater in Tucson was showing Annie Hall, which gave me the privilege of seeing it in a theater. It had been twenty years since I had seen it last, and it amazed me: its inventiveness, its consistently good humor, the truly impressive way that it brings you into a relationship so intimately that you feel sentimental about it when it comes to an end – even though it wasn’t that great a relationship, really. I was teaching at the time, which probably explains why I didn’t produce an essay about the movie, though I wish I had. But it proved something to me: two decades had been enough: it was a good time to revisit the great Woody Allen movies. I could bring relatively fresh eyes to them, even though they are relatively familiar movies.

Monzón Of these, the one that I had felt was best was Hannah and Her Sisters, and I was curious to return to it. As the title indicates, the film is about family, and its narrative structure is framed by three Thanksgivings. We had some idle days after Thanksgiving; it was the perfect time for it.

The film is characterized by impressive economy, which I find is the proper, respectful mode for an artist to take with his audience. Most work says too little, and that little too slowly. Hannah and Her Sisters, on the other hand, contains compelling, and indeed deep, portraits of five people (the three sisters and two of their husbands), while at least three more people are given brief but suggestive treatments (Hannah’s parents and the artist played by Max Von Sydow). For all of them the movie shows, with masterfully brief strokes, both their desire to be loved and the fatal flaws which will thwart their desire. It is deeply tragic, in the fullest sense: and for those with the eyes to see it, it is a sobering reminder of how little control we truly have over our lives. Privileged people such as Americans are often told they can do anything they want; and some go far too long believing it. After three or four decades of life, you realize that you can hardly even make yourself do what you want for a single day, even the things inside of you want something other than what you prescribe for them. Your nature requires something of you that you cannot, no matter how irrational or self-destructive it may be, will away to insignificance.

The first words of the movie thrust us right into one of these problems: the passion which Hannah’s husband, played by Michael Caine, feels for Hannah’s sister Lee. It is completely unacceptable, but he feels it, and so powerfully that he is incapable of remorse for it – until, of course, he has gained his object. As soon as that happens, his ardor begins to cool in the mire of the situation he has created. Allen relies on voiceovers, a technique he had used in Annie Hall, to show the gap between inner experience and outer show; and this becomes part of an intelligent portrayal of the lies adultery requires. Caine looks respectable enough on the outside, but adultery brings out his pathetic need, his uncontrolled impetuosity, his deceitfulness, and his use of anger to bully his way out of conversations he doesn’t want. Most impressive to me is how Caine portrays all these qualities while also giving an impression of his character being completely unaware of himself. This is generally true of all the actors in the film, in fact – they manage to dwell brilliantly inside a highly self-aware script without ever betraying any self-awareness. They get themselves into horrible situations and still manage to feel victimized by them. This is, of course, remarkably lifelike.

The most complicated and interesting example of this is Hannah, played by Mia Farrow, the central figure of the movie, though probably her two husbands (Caine and her ex-husband, played by Woody Allen) and Lee get more screentime. Hannah seems on the one hand to be the island of goodness in the midst of the moral muck around her: she is generous and caring, her acting career is successful, she has a huge New York apartment, has several children of her own and has adopted several more, she is the main comfort and confidante of her parents, and financial support of her less-successful sisters. But Allen manages to show – with truly admirably subtle strokes – how all this goodness is itself a problem, and also helps to create some of the problems around her. Her sisters are forced to compete with her, making her husband a tempting target; they feel humiliated by her ability to help them; her goodness creates an air of self-sufficiency, which turns her husband away from her; and it is in the end deceptive, and thus unsatisfying for her. But she can’t see this, and so she suffers alone, trying to be good.

I remember how this completely blew my mind when I first saw it as a teenager. It was impossible to my thinking mind – but I also intuited that it was correct. There is something factitious about our “goodness,” and it is the work of pride and it generally produces no more general benefit than pride does. My mother used to tell a story about this, of when she did “community service” by wheeling around a young disabled woman, who felt, at the end of the day, that my mother felt sorry for her, and told her off, saying that from her wheelchair she brought out the best in people, while my mother, who was smart and pretty, was really greeted by hatred and envy. When I was a teenager I thought of that as being the other people’s problem: they were small-minded and insecure. But now I see how much more complicated it is. And Allen shows it pretty well: Hannah is a successful actress, and is generous and beautiful and has beautiful children and beautiful things. But she is also divorced and her second husband is sleeping with her sister. The people closest to her respect her least. On earth light always casts shadow.

This is brought out especially by Hannah’s relationship with her youngest sister, Holly, played by Dianne Wiest. The art deployed here, both in the screenwriting and the acting, is truly extraordinary. Holly typically comes to Hannah hopeful and submissive, and then by gradations the conversation typically turns into an argument. The subtle transitions through disappointment, defensiveness, accusation, and anger are so effective that it is easy to feel, as Hannah does, that Holly is being unreasonable; but if you look at Hannah’s seemingly innocent suggestions and manner, it’s clear that implied in all is the sense that Hannah knows better and is superior, and Holly’s resentment becomes understandable. But in the meantime Hannah feels the conversations are out of control and unintelligible.

With Lee – the more distant, introverted sister – the conflicts are all internalized, and play out mostly in the form of guilt, which often comes in the form of defending Hannah. The tour-de-force of the sisterly dynamics is a roundtable scene which turns into an argument between Hannah and Holly, while Lee begins to cry – all a single shot going round and round the table. Roger Ebert has said of the acting in this scene that it is so good the volume is not required to understand all the dynamics between the sisters. And the roundtable shooting, showing each sister one at a time, each locked into their own experience and unable to truly access the experience of the others, is a perfect example of technique matching meaning.

And tucked into all this is Woody Allen’s own optimistic statement about the goodness of human life – despite how horrible it is. The Woody Allen character, now divorced from Hannah, after some health problems has to go through cancer testing. He is utterly terrified and sick, and is utterly overwhelmed by how terrible life is – and how after all the misery, we just die. He goes on a quest for metaphysical consolation, looking to become a Catholic, then a Hare Krishna. He ends up hitting rock bottom – literally putting a gun to his head – and finding his way back up by sitting in a movie theater and watching the absurdity of the movie Duck Soup. His is not the most resounding affirmation of life ever heard – “It’s not all a drag” – but despite the comic touches throughout, it is a convincing portrait of an earnest conversion experience. Its limited affirmation feels all the more real and appropriate. And it is a superb foil to the messiness of Hannah’s family, which is shown, as the movie progresses, to have deep roots (the parents were both flirts and philanderers in show business) and can more or less be taken as the real, fallen human condition. We will have to deal with husbands cheating on wives and sisters betraying sisters and lies and unhappiness. It can be terribly dark, and as Allen also portrays, so horribly, horribly lonely – and yet. It’s not all a drag.

It’s a superb movie. I didn’t, in the end, enjoy it as much as Annie Hall, which depicts much more closely the aspects of life which are not a drag. There are scenes in Hannah and Her Sisters which are awkward and difficult to watch, for all the obvious reasons. Annie Hall is also much funnier, and writing jokes that are funny thirty years later is quite an achievement. Even in Hannah we see Allen acting in a funny way without actually being funny (a staple of the later, worse films). The titles given to all the scenes are probably an unnecessary, intrusive technique. But all in all it’s a superb film, worthy of the acclaim it has received.