Crimes and Misdemeanors. - movie reviews

National Review, Dec 8, 1989 by John Simon

And Justice for None

ONE THING THAT distinguishes a work of art from mere entertainment is that you can give away its ending without doing damage. It hardly matters whether you know how King Lear comes out: plot is the least important thing about it, and the surprise is only in the magnificence with which the work strikes you anew, every time. So let me give Woody Allen's Crimes and Misdemeanors the benefit of the doubt and call it art, which absolved me from discretion concerning its plot (which, indeed, has holes in it). The chief strength of the movie is its courage in aboarding grave and painful questions of the kind the American cinema has been doing its damnedest to avoid.

Allen tells, essentially, two interrelated stories. One is that of Judah Rosenthal (Martin Landau), a prominent ophthalmologist being feted at a testimonial dinner for raising the money for a new hospital wing, not to mention other achievements. But Judah--with a fine career, family, and reputation--has two secret blots on his scutcheon. He monkeyed around with the hospital funds, and had a two-year affair with Dolores, an airline hostess, who became threatening, wanted him to marry her, was about to break up his marriage, even reveal his financial machinations. Whereupon, despite considerable agonizing, he finally agreed to let his shady brother, Jack, have his underworld connections bump her off.

Judah has a patient and friend, Ben, a rabbi who is going blind. Ben is the link between the "Crimes" part of the film and the "Misdemeanors." In that story, Cliff Stern (Woody Allen) is a funny little fellow who makes high-minded cinematic documentaries that win footling awards and no audiences. He is married to Wendy, who will no longer sleep with him, partly because of his being such a flop compared to her two brothers: the saintly Ben, who takes blindness in his stride as the will of God; and the enormously successful and rich Lester, a TV-schlock producer who dictates his brilliant ideas into a tape recorder always at the ready in his pocket. Lester gives his brother-in-law, Cliff, the chance to direct a TV documentary extolling Lester's genius; it is produced by Halley, a young woman whom both men are after.

What the crimes are is obvious enough; what constitutes the misdemeanors is less clear. Lester's vanity, vulgarity, promiscuity, certainly; but Lester is not the one the film is about. The peccant fellow is Cliff, who cheats, or tries to cheat, on his wife (who, however, hasn't slept with him for a year--since April 20, he recalls exactly, because it is Hitler's birthday); Cliff, who tries to make an ass of Lester in the documentary (but, then, Lester is one); Cliff, who is consumed with envy of Lester. But what is all this compared to having a hysterical mistress rubbed out? Judah, as a boy, was taught by his father that "the eyes of God are on us always," which may be why, as he only half-jokingly says in his acceptance speech at the testimonial dinner, he became an ophthalmologist. But this is a non-sequitur: an ophthalmologist does not have a better, more godlike, eye than anyone else. And everything else in the film is similarly illogical.

Revisiting his childhood house, Judah sees a scene from his boyhood: a seder at which his father insisted that God was just and that all crimes were punished one way or another. A radical-feminist, chain-smoking aunt, leaning on the Holocaust, argues the opposite. The debate is unresolved, yet the vision somehow brings peace to the tormented Judah. Why? Cliff tries to impress Halley by showing her sequences from the documentary he is making about Professor Levy, an old Jewish philosopher and Holocaust survivor (a character based on Primo Levi), who argues that this is not a moral universe, but that we create the moral myths that act as a surrogate divinity. Levy sounds most compelling, and then, for no visible reason, he commits suicide.

Ben, the good, pious rabbi, can utter only comfortless platitudes when Judah spills out his guts to him; but that, surely, is no reason for him to be punished with blindness. Cliff's sister, a lonely divorcee, advertises for companionship in the personals, and gets a pervert who ties her to the bed and defecates on her face (true, as Cliff observes, he could have killed her, but still . . .). Only the worst people thrive: the ridiculous Lester (true, he has a certain fatuous charm, but still . . . ); Judah, who gets away with the murder he instigated and even manages to clear his conscience; coolly ambitious Halley, who throws over the nerdy but loving Cliff for Lester the lecher.

I have read several reviews of the movie; they al disagree about its meaning, which, to me, seems perfectly clear: there is no justice, no rhyme or reason in the universe, no God. And whether you agree or not, you must admire a filmmaker who tackles this subject and has the guts to come up with this answer. Of course, good intentions in themselves are not enough, but the film, though flawed, delivers more than that. It is, I think, Allen's first successful blending of drama and comedy, plot and subplot. It is the Shakespearean technique of making the subplot comically echo and comment on the main plot. Judah, the big man, can get everything: the mistress he wants, when he wants her; her removal by assassination (at the cost of a little distress) when she becomes a burden. Cliff, the little man--less charming than Judah, but better and wittier--gets nothing. Crime pays; misdemeanor, like innocence (Ben, Levy, Cliff's sister), is severely punished.