The Reluctant Film Art of Woody Allen (26 page)

10

If You Want a Hollywood Ending

Crimes and Misdemeanors

Comedy is hostility…. What is it the comedian says when his jokes are going well? I murdered that audience. I killed ’em … They screamed … I broke ’em up.

—Daisy’s boyfriend, Jack, talking to Sandy Bates in
Stardust Memories

If it’s difficult to identify the Woody Allen film ending that least approximates the morally consonant, emotionally gratifying closure of
Broadway Danny Rose
, it’s not because there’s a shortage of candidates.
Manhattan
and
Stardust Memories
close on resonantly discordant notes of irresolution and human isolation, diminished chords. The most optimistic sentiment offered at the end of the unremittingly dour
September
is “Time will pass and you’ll forget this summer,” Allen’s second chamber film proving incapable of conceiving a more fortuitous conclusion to human affairs than forgetting them. The Great Irmstedt’s affirmation closing
Shadows and Fog
that people need illusions “like they need the air” invokes more compellingly the brutality of reality than the virtues of compensatory illusions, while Gabe’s question to the documentary interviewer at the end of
Husbands and Wives
—“Is it over?”—epitomizes the mood of enervated defeatism pervading that film, one widely interpreted as mirroring the anguish and turmoil of Allen’s personal life in 1993.

Allen’s oeuvre contains numerous candidates for antithesis to
Broadway Danny Rose’s
consonant close, then, but because it’s so much about endings,
Crimes and Misdemeanors
wins the anti-closure competition. If the mediating presence of the sentimental Carnegie Deli comedians imposes on
Broadway Danny Rose
a resolution conciliating human desire with morality, the complete absence of any such moral touchstones in the universe of
Crimes and Misdemeanors
renders that film’s ending the most striking contrast to the resolution of the Danny Rose cinematic fable. Because of its philosophical ambi- tiousness and its self-conscious investigation of the relationship between questions of morality and the generically determined resolutions of literary plots,
¹
Crimes and Misdemeanors
is a crucial work to the understanding of Allen’s conception of the value of art to life, a film which offers his most pessimistic judgment on the relevance of cinematic/literary constructs to the lives that people actually live.

To begin at the end of this film so preoccupied with endings: Judah Rosenthal (Martin Landau) and Clifford Stern (Allen) share a piano stool in a corridor outside the hall in which a reception is being held to celebrate the marriage of the daughter of Judah’s opthamological patient, Ben (Sam Waterston), a rabbi. Cliff is depressed by the revelation he’s suffered this evening that Halley Reed (Mia Farrow), a PBS producer he’s fallen in love with as his own marriage has been unraveling, is engaged to Lester (Alan Alda), his soon- to-be ex-brother-in-law and a slick, highly successful television personality for whom Cliff has nothing but contempt. Lubricated with alcohol, Cliff sourly contemplates the injustice of a universe in which, as he facetiously explains to his young niece earlier in the film, “great depth and smoldering sensuality don’t always win,” the resolutions of the 1940s Hollywood movies they’ve been watching together to the contrary. The outrage of injustice to Cliff’s ego in which the film concludes plays “misdemeanor” to Judah’s “crime.”
²

Judah has conspired with his brother, Jack (Jerry Orbach), to have his mistress, Dolores Paley (Anjelica Huston), murdered when she threatens to expose both their affair and the financial improprieties involved in his fund raising efforts for the building of an opthamology wing at his hospital, the completion of which has resulted in his being celebrated as a hero. Aware that Cliff makes films, Judah, his tongue similarly loosened by champagne, takes his cue from Cliff’s ironic comment that he’s “plotting the perfect murder”—that of Lester—to offer him a “murder story with a very strange twist.” Believing that he’s being told a fictional narrative, Cliff responds to Judah’s story as an inducement to philosophical speculation, one—for him—distincdy colored by the bitterness of his unjust rejection by Halley. For the audience of
Crimes and Misdemeanors,
Judah’s narrative provides the postscript to his story, describing the culmination of his weeks of suffering guilt over the deed he’d precipitated. The man responsible for the murder “isn’t punished—he prospers,” Judah tells Cliff. “His life is completely back to normal, back to his protected world of wealth and privilege… Oh, maybe once in a while he has a bad moment, but it passes. In time, it all fades.”

Responding direcdy through his trampled ego, Cliff replies with a phrase nearly identical to the one he’d used when Halley revealed that she was marrying Lester: “His worst beliefs are realized.” There is no principle of justice functioning in the universe, he takes to be the point of Judah’s plot’s “strange twist”: foul murder doesn’t out, killers prosper, and Halley dump serious documentary filmmakers for vacuous sitcom moguls. It’s dramatically inevitable that Cliff and Judah meet for the first time in the film’s final scene, since both have been debating the issue of universal justice with themselves and others throughout
Crimes and Misdemeanors
. Cliff’s entree to the issue is Professor Louis Levy (Martin Bergmann), a philosopher whose entire family was wiped out in World War II and about whose life and work Cliff is producing a documentary.
³
Levy’s existentialist philosophy emphasizes the coldness of the universe, its utter obliviousness to human happiness, and the necessity of human beings to project value into its moral vacancy, a central value being love. “It is only we with our capacity to love that give meaning to the indifferent universe,” Levy argues. “We define ourselves by the choices we have made—we are in fact the sum total of our choices.” Levy’s heartening message is abruptly nullified for Cliff by the philosophers suicide, an act of violent self-contradiction that simultaneously divests Cliff of a documentary subject and an intellectual/spiritual mentor. Levy’s fiercely ineloquent suicide note—“I’ve gone out the window”
⁴
—obsesses Cliff, its revelation of the ultimate unintel- ligibility and inarticulability of Levy’s final, self-defining choice negating for him all projections of human meaning.

Inhabiting the void left by this advocate of moral responsibility in the universe, Cliff experiences a final repudiation of Levy’s affirmation of love when Halley, informing him of her engagement at Ben’s daughters wedding, says that the love letters Cliff sent to her in London were beautiful; its just that he sent them to “the wrong person.” That “resilient little muscle”—the heart—which facilitates the happy ending of
Hannah and Her Sisters
by allowing Mickey Sachs to love Holly as he had once loved her sister, Hannah, is presented in
Crimes and Misdemeanors
as subject to woeful misperception and poor object choice. Both Cliff and Judah choose women the love of whom culminates not in “the giving of meaning in an indifferent universe” but in additional suffering: Halley is seduced by Lester’s wealth and success into believing she loves him,
⁵
while Dolores has made a far more calamitous romantic commitment. The outcome of Cliff’s sister’s desperate quest for love may represent the film’s most decisive comment on Levy’s celebration of human love: the man she meets through newspaper personal ads ties her up and defecates on her.

Judah, too, is haunted by ethical advocacy, his internal voices of con-science closely identifying themselves with the Jewish faith, which—ironi-cally, given his name—has largely ceased to have meaning for him. The memory of the words of his father, Sol (David S. Howard), “the eyes of God are on us always,” has stayed with Judah despite his lapsed religious beliefs. In a modal inversion of the comic
Annie Hall
scenes in which Alvy and Annie visit Alvy’s childhood, Judah appears at one of his family’s seders, witnessing a debate over the ultimate wages of complicity in murder between his father, who contends that even if the perpetrator isn’t caught, his evil deed will “blossom in a foul manner,” and Sol’s sister, May (Anna Berger), who concludes—prophetically, in terms of the film’s ending—“And I say if he can do it, and get away with it, and chooses not to be bothered by the ethics, he’s home free.”

Judah’s other interlocutor/advocate of the existence of universal justice is his patient, Ben, in whom he confides his affair with Dolores, and who encourages him to confess the transgression to his wife and ask her forgiveness. “You see [the world] as hard and empty of values and pitiless,” Ben tells Judah, “and I couldn’t go on living if I didn’t feel with all my heart a moral structure with real forgiveness, and some kind of higher power, otherwise there’s no basis to know how to live. And I know you well enough to know that there’s a spark of that notion in you, too.” That the proponent of the most eloquent religious sentiment expressed in Allen’s films loses his eyesight is an irony to which many reviewers of the movie strenuously objected, and it’s probably fair to say that Allen’s penchant for allegorizing his characters was overindulged in the creation of Ben, the film’s elaborate vision motif getting overextended in his affliction.
⁶
And yet, the closing scene’s juxtaposition of the sightless Ben, dancing with his just-married daughter, complemented by a Louis Levy voice-over commentary effectively links the two as spokesmen for philosophical positions contrary to the ethical reality dramatized by the film.

Judah’s explanation to Cliff of how “the man’s” spiritual ordeal following the murder resolved itself is practically no explanation at all. Describing the terrible period of self-incrimination he underwent, the dramatization of which takes up much of the last quarter of the film, Judah, echoing Ben, tells Cliff that

sparks of his religious background which he’s rejected are suddenly stirred up. He hears his father’s voice. He imagines that God is watching his every move. He’s plagued by deep-rooted guilt…. Suddenly, it’s not an empty universe at all but a just and moral one, and he’s violated it. Now he’s panic-stricken, on the verge of a mental collapse, an inch away from confessing the whole thing to the police. Then, one morning, he wakes up, and the sun is shining, and his family is around him, and mysteriously, the crisis is lifted. He takes his family on a vacation to Europe and he finds as the months pass that he isn’t punished. In fact, he prospers.

“Now,” Judah concludes, this time echoing his Aunt May, “he’s scot-free. His life is completely back to normal, back to his protected world of wealth and privilege.”

Whereas Judah is emphasizing what is, for him, the positive aspect—the crisis’s “mysterious lifting”—of his story, Cliff’s “his worst beliefs are realized” response to it focuses upon the universe implied by the narrative, which is, in Ben’s terms, “harsh and empty of values and pitiless.” Annoyed by Cliff’s misreading of his story, Judah asks him with derisive incredulity, “What do you expect him to do—turn himself in?” This is exactly what the filmmaker in Cliff would prefer: unsatisfied with Judah’s story’s conclusion’s moral indeterminacy and ellipticality, Cliff suggests that the “absence of God” dramatized in the narrative “creates tragedy. If [the murderer] turns himself in, the story assumes tragic proportions.” Good Louis Levian that he is, Cliff wants for the moral void where God’s judgment once existed to be filled by the perpetrator’s own ethical decision, humanity taking upon itself the task of imbuing the universe with its own self-projected moral imperatives even at the terrible personal cost of self-condemnation. Judah’s response to Cliff’s proposed revision of his plot is unhesitating and completely unequivocal, and represents a major aesthetic/ethical declaration in Allen’s films: “But that’s fiction, that’s movies … I mean … I mean, you see too many movies. I’m talking about reality. If you want a happy ending, you should see a Hollywood movie.”

At first glance, Judah’s conflation of “a story [which] assumes tragic proportions” with “the happy endings of Hollywood movies” seems contradictory. So complete is his repudiation of teleology, however, that any ending manifesting moral purpose is for Judah equally fraudulent. The point Judah makes about the disparity between the moral shapes that literary/cinematic genres impose upon narratives and the shapelessness of lived human experience is one that
Crimes and Misdemeanors
not only refuses to contest, but one which it deliberately reinforces by generating its own Hollywood ending in order to demonstrate the falsification produced by that mode of artistic resolution of human experience.

Throughout
Crimes and Misdemeanors
, the audience is made aware of ironic convergences between the plot of the film they’re viewing and scenes from Hollywood movies the characters watch. In the first of these juxtapositions, Judah’s efforts to persuade Dolores to release him from their affair cuts suddenly to a scene Cliff and Jenny are watching at the Bleeker Street Cinema from Hitchcock’s
Mr. and Mrs. Smith
, in which Carole Lombard complains that Robert Montgomery wants to “throw me aside like a squeezed lemon.” Judah and Jack’s conversation initially broaching the idea of killing Dolores elicits a scene from
This Gun for Hire
in which a woman’s murder is being plotted; “All I do is dream of you the whole night through” are the lyrics of a
Singin’ in the Rain
song Cliff and Halley listen to which echo his earlier description of his feelings for her; Judah’s secretary’s announcement shortly after Dolores’s death that a detective has made an appointment to speak with him seems to generate Betty Hutton’s energetically loopy performance of “Murder He Says!” from
Happy Go Lucky
. In the final instance, Cliff responds to Halley’s informing him that she’s going to London for four months by complaining, “I feel like I’ve been handed a prison sentence,” his language abruptly triggering a scene from
The Last Gangster
in which Edward G. Robinson sweats out his term laboring in the Alcatraz laundry. The passage of time, which the movie visualizes through the words “MONTHS” chasing each other across the screen, converges with the passing of the four months of Halley’s absence, so that once the clip ends, she has returned from England and the date of Ben’s daughter’s wedding has arrived. The absolute synchronicity of Hollywood movie reality and Allen’s characters’ reality dramatized by these artistic interspersions is comically effective, representing the most consistendy humorous element of the film, and might be said to reflect nothing beyond that were it not for Judah’s concluding insistence upon the complete irreconcilability of the endings of Hollywood movies and real life which constitutes the penultimate extended speech in
Crimes and Misdemeanors
.