Starting with the film Annie Hall to Something’s Gotta Give: the actress Diane Keaton Emerged as the Definitive Queen of Comedy.
Many great performers have starred in love stories with humor. Usually, when aiming to earn an Academy Award, they need to shift for more serious roles. Diane Keaton, who passed away recently, took an opposite path and made it look disarmingly natural. Her first major film role was in the classic The Godfather, as weighty an film classic as ever produced. But that same year, she reprised the part of the character Linda, the focus of an awkward lead’s admiration, in a movie version of the stage play Play It Again, Sam. She continued to alternate heavy films with funny love stories across the seventies, and it was the latter that won her an Oscar for outstanding actress, changing the genre permanently.
The Academy Award Part
The award was for Annie Hall, written and directed by Woody Allen, with Keaton as the title character, part of the film’s broken romance. Woody and Diane had been in a romantic relationship prior to filming, and continued as pals until her passing; when speaking publicly, Keaton portrayed Annie as a dream iteration of herself, as seen by Allen. It would be easy, then, to believe her portrayal required little effort. But there’s too much range in her acting, both between her Godfather performance and her funny films with Allen and inside Annie Hall alone, to underestimate her talent with rom-coms as just being charming – even if she was, of course, incredibly appealing.
Evolving Comedy
The film famously functioned as the director’s evolution between slapstick-oriented movies and a authentic manner. Therefore, it has numerous jokes, dreamlike moments, and a loose collage of a love story recollection alongside sharp observations into a doomed romantic relationship. Keaton, similarly, oversaw a change in Hollywood love stories, portraying neither the screwball-era speed-talker or the bombshell ditz famous from the ’50s. Rather, she fuses and merges elements from each to invent a novel style that seems current today, interrupting her own boldness with nervous pauses.
Observe, for instance the sequence with the couple initially bond after a game on the courts, stumbling through reciprocal offers for a lift (despite the fact that only a single one owns a vehicle). The exchange is rapid, but veers erratically, with Keaton soloing around her nervousness before concluding with of that famous phrase, a words that embody her nervous whimsy. The story embodies that tone in the following sequence, as she has indifferent conversation while operating the car carelessly through Manhattan streets. Later, she composes herself delivering the tune in a cabaret.
Depth and Autonomy
These aren’t examples of Annie acting erratic. Throughout the movie, there’s a complexity to her gentle eccentricity – her hippie-hangover willingness to sample narcotics, her panic over lobsters and spiders, her resistance to control by Alvy’s efforts to shape her into someone apparently somber (which for him means focused on dying). At first, Annie could appear like an strange pick to receive acclaim; she’s the romantic lead in a story filtered through a man’s eyes, and the protagonists’ trajectory doesn’t bend toward adequate growth to make it work. But Annie evolves, in aspects clear and mysterious. She merely avoids becoming a more suitable partner for the male lead. Many subsequent love stories borrowed the surface traits – anxious quirks, eccentric styles – failing to replicate Annie’s ultimate independence.
Ongoing Legacy and Senior Characters
Perhaps Keaton felt cautious of that tendency. Post her professional partnership with Allen concluded, she paused her lighthearted roles; her movie Baby Boom is really her only one from the complete 1980s period. But during her absence, the character Annie, the character perhaps moreso than the free-form film, served as a blueprint for the category. Actress Meg Ryan, for example, owes most of her rom-com career to Keaton’s ability to embody brains and whimsy at once. This rendered Keaton like a timeless love story icon while she was in fact portraying more wives (whether happily, as in Father of the Bride, or not as much, as in that ensemble comedy) and/or mothers (see the holiday film The Family Stone or Because I Said So) than unattached women finding romance. Even in her comeback with Woody Allen, they’re a long-married couple brought closer together by funny detective work – and she slips into that role easily, beautifully.
However, Keaton also enjoyed another major rom-com hit in the year 2003 with that Nancy Meyers movie, as a dramatist in love with a man who dates younger women (Jack Nicholson, naturally). The result? Her last Academy Award nod, and a complete niche of romances where senior actresses (usually played by movie stars, but still!) reassert their romantic and/or social agency. A key element her death seems like such a shock is that Keaton was still making such films as recently as last year, a regular cinema fixture. Today viewers must shift from assuming her availability to realizing what an enormous influence she was on the rom-com genre as we know it. Should it be difficult to recall contemporary counterparts of those earlier stars who walk in her shoes, that’s probably because it’s rare for a performer of her talent to dedicate herself to a category that’s often just online content for a while now.
An Exceptional Impact
Ponder: there are 10 living female actors who have been nominated multiple times. It’s uncommon for any performance to start in a light love story, let alone half of them, as was the situation with Diane. {Because her
