Crimes and Misdemeanors

Crimes and Misdemeanors; drama / comedy / crime, USA, 1989; D: Woody Allen, S: Martin Landau, Woody Allen, Alan Alda, Mia Farrow, Anjelica Huston, Sam Waterston, Jerry Orbach, Claire Bloom

Married eye doctor Judah Rosenthal is hiding a secret affair with his patient Dolores. But she demands that he should decide between her and his wife, otherwise she will tell everyone about the affair and his evasion of money from his work. Judah asks his brother, who has contacts with the mafia, to kill Dolores, which he does. Although everything went smoothly and nobody even suspects him, Judah is sad, tormented by guilt and begs God for forgiveness... Documentary filmmaker Cliff Stern gets the assignment to make a documentary which celebrates the rich TV tycoon Lester, a man he hates. They both fall in love with the producer Haley. Although Cliff and Haley become close, she chooses Lester. Cliff and Judah meet at a party and comfort each other.

Director Woody Allen made an interesting experiment: a movie with one story that's a serious drama and with the other that is a light comedy. Thus, the finale is crucial since the two stories interwined and became one when Allen's character Cliff, the symbol for the cheerful in the comedy story, and Landau's character Judah, the symbol of serious in the drama story, accidentally meet: Judah had an affair, and had his mistress killed to hush it up, but was not punished; whereas Cliff committed a far lesser crime, by just trying to cheat on his wife, and was punished with loneliness and no success. With small gestures, unobtrusive direction and simple but also demanding narration, Allen crafted one of his most ambitious films. The funniest elements in the comedy segment are shrill dialogues ("We have to make a movie about him. He is an American phenomenon." - "So is acid rain."; "But you love each other like brothers!" - "Yes, like Cain and Abel"; "Don't listen to what your teachers tell you. Don't pay attention. Just see what they look like and that's how you'll know what life is really gonna be like").

The most touching moment from the drama segment is when the eye doctor Judah looks at the dead lover who seems to "look" at him. Another surreal moment arrives when Judah visits the house where he grew up in, and watches an episode from his childhood, when his aunt was lamenting that there is injustice in the world ("Hitler killed 6 million Jews and got away with it"), realizing that he himself became a murderer, even though he ordered the murder of only one person. Some minor flaws are Allen's tendency to sometimes write schematic dialogues, obvious in the too banal way Judah has to speak out loud how he regrets his decision; the shaky embezzlement subplot which feels shoehorned; or when Cliff has a trite dialogue with Barbara ("Barbara, I'm shocked at what I'm hearing. You're my sister. You're this nice middle-class mother..."), whereas Lester is not such an obnoxious villain that he would warrant that Cliff inserts clips of Mussolini in his documentary. As with most films from Allen's second phase, "Crimes and Misdemeanors" also demand a lot of patience and restrain, but reward abundantly since it is a bitter-cynical and skillful work contemplating about fragile justice, inequity in the world and ethics, coming to a remarkable conclusion, that "we are the sum total of our choices". Despite its conventional approach, "Crimes and Misdemeanors" became Allen's great farewell to his inspired phase from the 80s, delivering one of the best movies from the 80s.

Grade:+++