The Reluctant Film Art of Woody Allen (27 page)

The final speech of the film is reserved for Louis Levy, whose philosophical musings initially provide a voice-over background to the deeply moving image of the sighdess Ben dancing with his daughter. Then Allen resorts to the traditional Hollywood ploy of a retrospective silent montage of scenes from the film, a device which, in movies such as
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
and
Thelma and Louise,
tends to raise the emotional ante of the ending by evoking earlier moments of the film, often of carefree joy, now past and irrecoverable. Allen’s closing montage diverges from the Hollywood convention (and from his own use of the device in
Annie Hall)
by reprising scenes of more equivocal import: Levy’s voice-over continues as we shift from the wedding to Dolores and Judah arguing in her apartment, Cliff kissing Halley, Judah learning from Jack that the murder of Dolores has been completed, and so on.
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Allen is not interested in using the montage fraudulendy to milk the audience’s emotions by creating nostalgia for scenes past; instead, he presents the highly conventionalized ending to mock its own pretensions to resolution and determinacy, the silently reprised images on the screen often contending with the existentialistically optimistic conclusions of Levy’s philosophizing which are their aural backdrop. The cinematic layering of Levy’s words, the film’s reprised images, and the playing of the mordant “I’ll Be Seeing You” on the soundtrack of
Crimes and Misdemeanors
create Allen’s most densely textured and thematically complex film conclusion, one which deliberately contests its own pretensions to resolution.

Admittedly, there are moments in the montage in which Levy’s voice- over and the on-screen images converge and reinforce each other: his assertion, “It is only our capacity to love that gives meaning to an indifferent universe,” accompanies a brightly lit, immaculately composed shot of Ben’s daughter and her fiance at the ceremony approaching the rabbi who is about to marry them. More typically, however, Levy’s message and the content of the dialogueless scenes being contrasted with it create disjunctions invoking the film’s unresolved conflicts. His argument that “we define ourselves by the choices we have made. We are in fact the sum total of our choices” overlays Judah’s receiving the phone call from Jack telling him the murder has been committed. “It’s over and done with—no problems—so you can forget about it,” Jack is telling Judah in the wordless scene reprised in the montage, “It’s like the whole thing never existed. So, go on back to your life and put it behind you.” For Jack, and subsequently Judah, we are the sum total of the choices we are able to forget making. Judah’s account to Cliff of the aftermath of the murder suggests that it’s Jack’s gangland realism rather than Levy’s moralistic existentialism which prevails in
Crimes and Misdemeanors
.

Levy proceeds to argue, “Events unfold so unpredictably” [image of Jack and Judah first broaching idea of murdering Dolores], “so unfairly” [Sol at seder listens to his sister challenging his spiritual beliefs by insisting that “might makes right”], “human happiness does not seem to have been included in the design of creation,” the final clause contrasted with the image of Dolores walking home to her apartment, carrying a wine bottle in a bag. The bottle traces the shot to the scene in which she leaves a liquor store and walks home, unaware that she’s being followed to her apartment by the hit man Jack has hired. Dolores’s “human happiness” is clearly not an issue if she’s about to be murdered, so Levy is evidently right about this, but beyond that, the interplay of voice-over and images calls attention to the fact that Levy’s abstract conceptualizing of the human condition practically omits the role or significance of human agency in the fates of people. Individuals’ fates may be beyond their control, in other words, but occasionally others—Judah and Jack—can become the self-appointed instruments of fatality. Jack’s brutal pragmatism, articulated in the scene where he initially advocates to Judah the solution which is Dolores’s murder, again enacts its practical superiority to the existentialist rationalism of Levy: “That’s what I’m saying, Judah—if the woman won’t listen to reason, you move on to the next step” of eliminating her.

Levy’s closing paragraph, with its evocation of the small satisfactions that keep human beings choosing life over death, accounts for whatever good feelings the film’s conclusion affords its audience, though a consideration of the content of the images accompanying his words again complicates his message’s reassurances. Cliff is walking with Jenny in the city streets, affectionately placing his arm around his niece’s shoulders as Levy affirms that “most human beings seem to have the ability to keep trying and even to find joy” [return to image of Ben dancing with his daughter at the wedding], “from simple things like their family, their work, and from the hope that future generations might understand more.” The silent image of Cliff and Jenny walking together appears more positive when their conversation about Cliff’s unrequited love for Halley is muted, and Cliff’s loving gesture is his response to the girl’s naive and ultimately wrongheaded assertion that Lester “is no competition to you” for Halley’s love. Levy is correct that people draw sustenance from family, but in
Crimes and Misdemeanors
it is “waking to find his family around him” that allowed Judah to overcome guilt and subsequently to celebrate his recovery by taking them off to Europe, following Jack’s counsel by “putting it [the murder] all behind him.” Again seeming to affirm family in this late-1980s era of family values movies, Judah tells Miriam in his final line in the film,” We’re going to make a wedding like this for Sharon,” the immediate cut to Ben dancing with his daughter summarizing a central injustice dramatized by
Crimes and Misdemeanors
. Ben, the good man stricken with blindness, celebrates his daughter’s marriage, while Judah, complicit in murder but restored nonetheless “to his protected life of wealth and privilege” within a family completely deceived about his character, will soon replicate this occasion of familial happiness and conciliation. There are surely no sentimental stand-up mythmakers mediating in
Crimes and Misdemeanors
to ensure that the righteous prosper while the wicked are punished.

If “family” as a value to live for is presented equivocally in
Crimes and Misdemeanors
, “work” is depicted as equally corrupted. Cliff is out of a job, Lester having fired him from his directorship of PBS s “Creative Mind” Lester biography. Here and everywhere else throughout the film, the world of work is dominated by Lester’s values. Cliff’s serious film projects on subjects such as leukemia, toxic waste, and starving children earn him only an honorable mention at a documentary film festival in Cincinnati, while Lester is pulling in cash and Emmys for making sitcoms whose political conscience is epitomized by one about a sexy bimbo ACLU lawyer whose husband writes for rightwing magazines, the couple’s divergent politics allowing the show, as Lester has it, “to get into issues.” While offering Cliff the job of directing his biography, Lester has a brainstorm for a new show inspired by their conversation, the show reflecting the humanistically inverted values which prevail in the world of work in
Crimes and Misdemeanors:
“A poor loser agrees to do the story of a great man’s life,” Lester tells his dictaphone, “and in the process learns deep values.”

As for Levy’s concluding “hope that future generations will understand more,” the philosopher’s own myopias, combined with the film’s consistent dramatization of the complete domination of action over reflection, materialism over idealism, cast doubt upon even so hedged a prospect. Halley’s final judgment on Levy’s suicide constitutes what might be construed as Allen’s ultimate conclusion on the human attempt to subject world to idea, to mind: “No matter how elaborate a philosophical system you work out, it’s gotta be incomplete.” Much the same thing might be said for Allen’s view of the “elaborate philosophical system” which is the conventional ending of the Holly-wood movie.

The concluding montage of
Crimes and Misdemeanors
utterly fails to enact the neat emotional resolution that such endings traditionally generate, largely because the articulation of values superimposed upon it is constantly contradicted by the content of the images that voice-over projects. What the comedians of the Carnegie Deli manage to do through their sentimental re-construction of past events in
Broadway Danny Rose,
creating a story with an ending consonant and heartwarmingly resolved, Levy’s philosophical musings fail to accomplish in
Crimes and Misdemeanors,
because the later film focuses so consistently upon the great disparity between human projections of universal values and reality as the film has defined it. “I mean, you see too many movies. I’m talking about reality,” Judah dismisses Cliff’s advocacy of tragic closure, “If you want a happy ending, you should see a Hollywood movie.”
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It’s difficult not to see Judah’s contemptuous dismissal of happy endings as Allen’s way of rebuking himself for seeking in Hollywood movies—e.g., the
Duck Soup
scene in
Hannah and Her Sisters
—resolutions life itself doesn’t offer.

Cliff’s faith in aesthetic and ethical resolution is chastened as well by Lester in response to his sister’s scathing denunciation of Cliff’s documentaries with their aspirations to “change the world.” Articulating a network television version of Jack’s brutal pragmatism, Lester argues, “He’s got to grow up, this is the real world, this is the big time; they don’t pay off on high aspirations—you got to
deliver” Crimes and Misdemeanors
begins at a major public function celebrating Judah’s generosity and professional accomplishments and closes with a massive public wedding ceremony generously financed by Lester, a ceremony which Judah will soon recreate for his own daughter. The film’s two unambiguously prevailing figures embody a wealth, successfulness, and savage realism as radically at odds with Levy’s optimistic existentialism—or Cliff’s ineffectual moralism—as the song superimposed upon Ben’s concluding dance with his daughter is with Ben’s personal circumstances—“I’ll Be Seeing You.” At the risk of partaking in the film’s proclivity for overplaying visual motifs, I’d suggest that through its dramatically effective interplay of movie reality and actuality,
Crimes and Misdemeanors
is Allen’s darkest—and most compellingly dark—film.

Crimes and Misdemeanors,
obviously, is a serious film—so much so, in fact, that the foregoing discussion of the movie threatens to sound as if the movie were scripted by Dostoevsky rather than Woody Allen. It seems undeniable that in this movie, more than in any of his others, Allen allowed himself to directly articulate the philosophical questions that arise elsewhere in his work in more fragmentary, tentative, or self-parodic terms. However, the film did not draw the virulently negative critical attacks which Allen’s chamber films—
Interiors, September,
and
Another Woman
—tended to attract. The film’s reviewers didn’t consistently agree on the effectiveness of the film’s dramatization of its moral issues, but practically none of them invoked the arguments raised against the earlier serious films: that the filmmaker was out of his depth or was creating an artwork that he is temperamentally ill-suited to achieving. If
Crimes and Misdemeanors
is Allen’s most effective serious film, as most reviewers suggested,
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its success is the product of its individual synthesis of gravity and Woody Allen comedy, the movie demonstrating—as do
Stardust Memories, Broadway Danny Rose, The Purple Rose of Cairo, Hannah and Her Sisters, Bullets Over Broadway,
and
Deconstructing Harry
—that Allen is always at his best when his films are epiphanizing the very profound psychological tension in him between humor and solemnity. It’s worth briefly considering how
Crimes and Misdemeanors
manages to absorb its Woody Allen comedic features into the remarkably uncomedic business of a murder without consequences for the murderer. What emerges from such scrutiny is a film that, in both content and form, displays little respect for the power of humor to accomplish anything worthwhile in the world.

The mixed-genre trick is accomplished largely through the structure of the script, which dictates that the central characters of the film’s two plot lines—Judah and Cliff—never meet until the final ten minutes of the film, the separation tending to compartmentalize the film’s two dominant moods. The Judah plot plays itself out largely without humor, its mood undergirded by classical music on the soundtrack. Judah’s anxiety about his mistress, Dolores, is established even before he delivers the speech that represents his professional apotheosis as doctor-as-Jewish-cultural-hero. The viewer has only the briefest opportunity to perceive him as the moral exemplar that he is presented as being to the audience at the opening testimonial dinner in his honor before his guilt-ridden erotic double-dealing is revealed. Martin Landau’s performance emphasizes both the basic dignity and decency of Judah as well as the want of spiritual values, which makes him vulnerable to the temptation of easy self-indulgence with which Dolores confronts him. Dolores’s emotional desperation and possessiveness, portrayed with such frighteningly escalating neediness by Anjelica Huston, constitute the only inducement that could compel Judah toward considering even the most extreme measures to preserve his reputation. For all the guilt Judah expresses after Jack’s hit man has completed the killing, his cold-blooded visit to Dolores’s apartment to clear away signs of their relationship before her body is discovered epitomizes the egotism and heartlessness which will subsequendy allow him to live with the murder “as if it never happened.” The closing scene’s dramatization of precisely how (in his Aunt May’s phrase) “home free” Judah is comprises the most chilling moment Allen has filmed.
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