CRIMES AND MISDEMEANORS
Woody Allen’s latest, Crimes and Misdemeanors, contains some of the best sustained filmmaking the aggressively self-made auteur has turned out in years, at least since 1984’s Broadway Danny Rose. But the movie is as bitter as a two-day-old cup of coffee, and just about as cold. Allen’s vision, always self-centered, has turned ever more inward, until the familiar New York setting of his films has taken on the aura of a psychic landscape, a minefield of deliberately sprung moral booby traps.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
The funny narrative involves Allen as documentary-film maker Cliff Stern, struggling with a sputtering career and an unhappy marriage, both of which are made even more intolerable by the looming presence of his fabulously egotistical and successful brother-in-law, Lester. Hilariously played by Alan Alda (also making something of a comeback here), Lester is a mountain of insensitivity, utterly absorbed in propagating his own success.
All of this action unfolds with the maximum of verbal teeth gnashing. Rosenthal dithers and worries before he takes the big step, going so far as to discuss theology with one of his patients, a rabbi who is slowly going blind. This rabbi is one of Allen’s typically excruciating constructs, a symbolic straw man with no real dramatic function, a mere rhetorical presence. In fact, despite a tremendous performance by Landau and a pretty good one by Huston, this part of the film never amounts to much more than a catalog of behavioral tendencies meant to illustrate Allen’s perceptions of the contemporary bourgeoisie’s moral bankruptcy. Too often this condemnation of the exigent morality of modernity is expressed merely as a nostalgia for the certainties of childhood. Given that vapidity, any claims to tragedy–which are clearly explicit, thanks to Lester’s trite clues–seem merely boastful. Tragedy is a function of character, not a schematic variation of plot, and the characters in this narrative stream are incapable of resisting the currents into which Allen plunges them.
