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Crimes and Misdemeanors by Richard Natale Clearly, Woody Allen wants to be a serious dramatist while the rest of the free world wants him to do comedy. Allen's acute perceptions of life's cosmic absurdity do not satisfy him; he continues to look for a meaning to the mayhem. And so, in a mature effort at reconciliation, he has given us Crimes and Misdemeanors, with two parallel tales, one serio-comic, the other unflinchingly dramatic. But strangely enough, the side-by-side sagas only serve to reinforce the argument that Allen is at his most serious when he's being funny. The part of the film that operates as a discursive morality play (starring Martin Landau), let's call it the Crimes section, is pat and maudlin, while the ostensibly more light-hearted Misdemeanors story (starring Allen himself) is far more illuminating and satisfying. Crimes, which suffers from underdramatization (as do all of Allen's "dramas," from Interiors on), tells the story of a respectable ophthalmologist (Landau) who sets out to rid himself of a troublesome, blackmailing girlfriend. The plot line could have been the basis for a stinging Monsieur Verdoux-like black comedy, but Allen's story is all talk, a virtual stand-up tragedy, as stuffy and arch as a '20s parlor melodrama. Allen never shows us what he can tell us. The characters articulate what's on their minds even at moments when most people would be at a complete loss for words. Ironically, the actors with the least to say are the most convincing (as the effortless Gene Hackman was in the otherwise leaden Another Woman). This may be because they're permitted the luxury of breathing life into their characters through acting, rather than dramatic recitation. Claire Bloom has only a few moments on screen as Landau's icy wife, but with dialogue that amounts to little more than asides, she becomes vivid enough through her behavior for us to believe it when Landau says she would never understand his affair. And when Landau tries to extricate himself from a dinner party to wrestle with his conscience, the stunned look on his face tells us more about his troubled soul than all his pretentious soliloquies. PAGE 1 | 2 |
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In the Misdemeanors story, Allen's writing is more relaxed, and at the same time more incisive, because there's a layer of affection here even for the most distasteful characters. Allen plays Cliff, his classic "loser" (a contemporary urban variation on Chaplin's tramp), who is pathetically out of step with reality. He is childlike and childish in his perceptions of right and wrong--in his career and in his love life. And this time Allen doesn't let his character off the hook as he's done even in his best comedies. Cliff's flaw is that his "either I'm crazy or everyone else is" attitude doesn't allow for the possibility that the truth lies somewhere in between. We start out seeing all the other characters through Cliff's eyes: his wife and brother-in-law (Alan Alda and Joanna Gleason) are solipsistic to the point of caricature, and the woman he loves (Mia Farrow) is an idealized perfection. And then, slowly, the characters turn. And finally we see that it's Cliff who is rigid, locked into a deluded image of himself, which makes Misdemeanors more revealing and sadder than Crimes. In a peculiar way, Cliff reflects Allen's off-screen dilemma as a dramatic filmmaker. A friend recently recounted a story about a reporter who asked Allen why he doesn't use stars of the caliber of Dustin Hoffman in his films. Allen's response was that if he worked with Hoffman, he'd have to talk to him--i.e. he wouldn't be able to use the actor as a mouthpiece for his ponderous dialogue. He'd have to work with Hoffman to pare down speech to its essentials, to locate the character's dramatic core. What did you think of this movie? Sound off in the Movie Forum. PAGE 1 | 2 |