Woody Allen (1989)
In the film’s opening sequence, Judah Rosenthal (Martin Landau), an eye specialist, is attending a public dinner in his honour, seated beside his wife of twenty-five years, listening to a speech praising his good works and philanthropy. In his own speech to the gathering, Judah explains his religious upbringing and how, although he’s no longer a believer, he’s never forgotten his devout father’s words to him as a boy: ‘The eyes of God are always upon you’. “Perhaps”, says Judah, “that’s how I came to be an ophthalmologist”. The dinner guests chuckle politely. As he heard his praises sung, Judah seemed a little uneasy and preoccupied. We, like his wife Miriam (Claire Bloom), assumed he was apprehensive about the prospect of the speech he’d have to deliver in response. But Judah has more on his mind than that: Dolores (Anjelica Huston), the mistress he’s had for the last few years and whom he’s managed to keep secret from Miriam, is an increasing problem. Judah thinks it’s time to end the affair; Dolores thinks it’s time she got some reward, and to discuss the situation with Miriam. One of Judah’s patients is Ben (Sam Waterston), a rabbi who is rapidly going blind. Judah confides in him more than once about the difficult woman in his life. Doctor and patient (but which is which?) have morally searching conversations in more and more tenebrous settings – expressing the increasing physical darkness in which Ben lives and the spiritual dark night of the soul in which Judah doesn’t believe but which he can’t get out of his mind. Although Ben’s eye condition might symbolise the declining moral authority of Judah’s religion, things aren’t as simple as that. Judah becomes so desperate that he asks his disreputable brother Jack (Jerry Orbach) to help him out. (Judah and Jack appear to represent what Jewish parents see as the dream and nightmare of what their sons could grow up to be – or what a Jewish writer assumes to be specifically Jewish: surely they’re the dream and nightmare of any moderately ambitious parents.) Jack arranges for a hit man to murder Dolores and the hit man does his job. From this point onwards, the eyes of God are on Judah in a way they haven’t been for years. But Judah doesn’t get found out or punished, except by his conscience, and he gets the crime and his guilt out of his system. The film ends with the wedding of Rabbi Ben’s daughter. In the closing shots, black-spectacled father and the daughter now invisible to him dance together while the band is playing ‘I’ll Be Seeing You’.
In other words, the ocular imagery in Crimes and Misdemeanors is strong, not to say obvious. Woody Allen knows perfectly well how obvious. He is letting us know that he knows when Judah delivers that mild joke at the dinner about what led to his interest in eyes. He’s doing a similar thing when he cuts from a row between Judah and Dolores to a scene in a black-and-white movie in which Bette Davis is complaining to a man in the same terms as Dolores has been complaining (though in a different register); Allen is acknowledging that we’ve heard it all before – that, in a sense, he’s being unoriginal – but the knowing wit is meant at least to compensate. The movie clip introduces the other main part of the story. Its viewers in the cinema include Cliff (played by Woody Allen), a minimally successful documentary filmmaker, and his teenage niece (Jenny Nichols). Cliff promised the girl’s father, his dying brother, that he would educate her culturally, although it turns out to be in one art form only: they go to the movies just about every day. The tone of the Cliff part of the story is cautiously comic; that of the Judah part almost straight drama (if not quite Interiors). Cliff is hired by his brother-in-law Lester (Alan Alda), a successful television producer, to make a documentary about Lester’s triumphant life. In doing so, Cliff tries to expose Lester’s egomaniac idiocy but he not only fails; Lester ends up engaged to one of his associate producers Halley (Mia Farrow), with whom Cliff had earlier fallen in love. Cliff is dismayed by the cosmic injustice of Lester’s unstoppable success but, until Judah and Cliff get into conversation at a party near the end of the film, their two stories don’t really complement each other.
Woody Allen uses as a tragicomic bridge between them the character of Professor Levy, a moral philosopher whom Cliff reveres and about whom he’s making a documentary at the same time as he’s working for Lester. Before Cliff’s film is complete, Levy commits suicide. (The character – or at least his death – may be based on Primo Levi.) The intersecting figure of Levy is one of the most interesting elements, certainly the most puzzling, in Crimes and Misdemeanors. He’s played by Martin S Bergmann, in real life an eminent academic clinical psychologist (who, according to Wikipedia, will celebrate his hundredth birthday in February 2013). Bergmann’s heavily accented English might suggest, in a Woody Allen movie, a parody Jewish intellectual; and the final clip of Levy, extolling the supreme importance of love in human life, seems to have been exposed as a pious delusion by what we’ve watched happening on screen. Yet Allen appears to admire what Levy is saying as completely as Cliff does. The bifocal structure of the movie is mirrored in the selection of music – jazz as usual, Schubert more unusually. In a splendid cast, Anjelica Huston is outstanding: her combination of size (which emphasises how big a problem she is for Judah) and fragility is powerful. I’m not sure what the ideas in Crimes and Misdemeanors add up to but it’s wonderfully entertaining.
13 November 2012
