The movie Felicity Jones would watch forever: “I always come back to that film”
Currently causing a stir on the internet, thanks to a recent launch on Netflix is the Felicity Jones movie Train Dreams, starring Joel Edgerton as a railroad worker and his family in the deep forests of the United States more than a hundred years ago, the movie offering some total escapism, if not always peace, as the group goes through some painful ordeals.
It’s an adaptation of a Pulitzer-nominated novella by Denis Johnson and is getting plenty of Oscar buzz already, not least for Jones’ performance as Gladys Granier, Edgerton’s wife. She’s no stranger to award ceremonies, though, given she’s already been twice Oscar-nominated in her career, once for the Stephen Hawking biopic The Theory of Everything and again for last year’s sprawling Adrien Brody epic The Brutalist.
And one movie that Jones holds especially close is a classic comedy from the seventies that was also an Oscar winner in a big way, Woody Allen’s 1977 romance Annie Hall, starring the late great Diane Keaton, which she picked out to Red as her favourite film.
She said, “I love Annie Hall; I will always come back to that film again and again. Diane Keaton has been such an inspiration to me. She always brings humour, but complexity, and I love watching her on screen. She’s got real charisma.”
Annie Hall was actually originally a murder mystery comedy titled ‘Anhedonia’, which is a scientific term for the inability to feel pleasure in anything, something which could be levelled by modern viewers of any Woody Allen movie these days, let’s be honest.
In the end, though, the filmmakers realised the romance involved in the story was the strongest element, so they cut out the murder plot to revolve more around the relationship. The titular character was loosely based on Diane Keaton herself, whose real surname was Hall, and a lot of her personality in terms of charm and weird phrasing was used by Allen, having witnessed Keaton’s behaviour at close hand on previous productions.
The movie was influential for several reasons; Allen did plenty of fourth-wall breaking, which had been fairly unheard of in terms of American comedy at the time, and it also proved hugely popular in terms of Keaton’s fashion sensibility, especially her menswear-inspired outfits of baggy trousers with ties and hats that were soon seen across cities in the US.
A lot of the film’s comedy dialogue was improvised by the actors on set, and indeed Keaton and Allen had dated for many years before filming, which helped matters. One other interesting thing to look out for when watching the film for the first time is a very early role for future Pulp Fiction star Christopher Walken, who plays Annie Hall’s deeply intense brother Dwayne, who has recurring fantasies of driving into oncoming traffic in terms of awards.
Annie Hall is one of a few movies to have won ‘Best Picture’, ‘Best Director’ and ‘Best Screenplay’ at the Oscars (along with a ‘Best Actress’ gong for Keaton) in a year that was expected to be completely dominated by Star Wars, released the same year and which had revolutionised movie making and broken box office records.
Jones, meanwhile, has a Christmas movie on the way on Prime Video called Oh. What. Fun. with Michelle Pfeiffer of all people, as well as Wes Anderson’s favourite Jason Schwartzman and Denis Leary. It’s a comedy about a mother seeing how well her family would do at Christmas if she just up and left. Not very well at all is the entirely realistic answer.
