The Reluctant Film Art of Woody Allen (28 page)

Crimes and Misdemeanors
would very likely have been a schizophrenic film had its subplot involved a humorous, likable protagonist (Mickey Sachs, for instance) whose narrative represented comic relief from the progressively dark trajectory of Judah’s story. The Clifford subplot isn’t that, and although it is less heavy than the Judah plot, what it primarily demonstrates is the capacity Allen had developed to dramatically manipulate his persona away from comedy toward an unprecedented depth of characterization. Cliff’s narrative, backed by the familiar Dixieland jazz and pop standards of other Allen soundtracks, is where the script’s few jokes are found and where conflicts have more modest and purely personal consequences. The mutual contempt and antipathy Cliff and Lester feel for each other is a primary source of the film’s consistently sardonic humor, their competition for Halley constituting a comic parallel to Judah’s grim quest to restore himself to home and reputation, the outcome of their contest proving equally unjust and as inevitable as Dolores’s fate. (A characteristic joke of
Crimes and Misdemeanors
is Cliff’s self-deprecatory one-liner about his love letter to Halley having been plagiarized from James Joyce, which explains all of its references to Dublin. If the joke elicits laughter, it’s laughter born of bitter disappointment and the acknowledgment of romantic unfairness. It’s one of many such ironies in the film that the fatuous Lester is right in claiming “comedy is tragedy plus time,” the movie’s chosen form of humor corroborating the idea that only once the pain stops can we laugh.) One of the film’s most striking achievements is that the Cliff subplot seems less like comic relief than like a minimalist version of Judah’s, the documentary filmmaker’s parallel egotism and want of spiritual faith culminating not in tragic conflict but in ignominious personal defeats. They are comic not so much because they’re funny than because they’re less than fatal.

Although he resembles earlier Allen protagonists in a number of ways, Cliff seems an attenuated, more ineffectual version of them, their virtues becoming deficiencies in his embrace. He is the only Allen protagonist whose attraction to old movies appears to embody the characterization of movie theaters as “temples for cowards” which Allen offered in an interview, Cliff’s description of seeing movies in the afternoon with his niece as “playing hooky” substantially juvenilizing him. The gift of a book of pictures of old New York he gives to her similarly seems to express a futile nostalgia for a lost world which he’s attempting to inculcate in Jenny,
¹¹
a failed filmmaker’s substitute version of Allen’s
Manhattan
. When he’s not playing hooky with her, the documentaries he produces about acid rain and leukemia reflect good, liberal, humanitarian values, but their limited distribution and tiny audiences seem to corroborate the highly unsympathetic judgment of his wife, Wendy (Joanna Gleason), that Cliff has “these fantasies about changing the world, he’s a man who thinks he can change the world. He makes these films, and in the end they come to nothing.”
¹²
(
Crimes and Misdemeanors
potendy dramatizes Yeats’s “The Second Coming” plaint that “The best lack all conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”
¹³
) As Richard A. Blake argued, Cliff’s involvement with the Lester biography epitomizes the deeply conflicted nature of his moralistic impulses, his merciless satire of Lester ultimately exposing the bad faith of his undertaking the project in the first place.
¹⁴
Cliff’s fecklessness generally feeds narcissistically on itself, his Judah-like want of personal spiritual moorings leaving him nothing to affirm except himself and his erotic needs; he is
Manhattan’s
Isaac Davis with less energy and talent, more bitterness, and a heightened capacity for self-pity. As Sam B. Girgus suggested, Cliff loses his love to a moral inferior as does Isaac,
¹⁵
their failures in love dramatically rebuking their shared penchant for a self-righteousness that serves to conceal their resentment of other’s success.
¹⁶

Cliff manages to locate an external object for his resentments in the media success of his brother-in-law, Lester, who provides him with the means of gaining revenge. By offering Cliff the job of directing a PBS biographical film on himself, Lester implicitly becomes the target of the subplot’s comically constructed murder correlative, Cliff’s film doing everything he can to annihilate Lester’s reputation by visualizing him in compromisingly predatory sexual circumstances, by likening him to Mussolini, and by having his ersatz show business wisdom spouted by Francis the Talking Mule. Lester is to Cliff as Dolores is to Judah: a dalliance in something beneath him, his agreement to direct the documentary constituting an act which adulterates his better self and which he must ultimately repudiate by transforming his adversary into an ass.

It is plain to see that humor doesn’t count for much in
Crimes and Misdemeanors:
so ineffectual is Cliff’s version of homicide-by-satire that its wouldbe victim can simply annul the attempt by firing him from the project, leaving the director with nothing to do but haplessly voice the complaint with which Dolores repeatedly rebukes Judah: “But you
promised
” That Cliff is absolutely right in his assessment of Lester’s egotism, the shallowness of his values, and perhaps even about the tendency his sitcoms have to “deaden the sensibilities of a great democracy” doesn’t count for anything in the movie, either; they’re just more evidence in a film full of proofs of the lack of causal connection between human virtue and cultural success, between the embrace of positive, life-affirming values and the capacity to act effectually in the world.
¹⁷

That Halley chooses Lester over Cliff is, in Cliff’s eyes, the culminating manifestation of universal injustice, the clinching evidence that success matters more than elevated moral vision and humanistic concern. Compared to Judah’s getting away with murder, it’s a trivial instance of the want of an ethically centered universe, and only a disaffected but still hopeful romantic—which is what Allen’s protagonists generally are—could attempt to transform that grim truth into the grounds of tragedy. Here too, Cliff sucks it up: his attempt to affirm the imposition of human meaning upon a Godless universe is derisively bounced back at him (by a conspirer in murder, no less) as being equivalent to the happy ending of a Hollywood movie. That Miriam Rosenthal (Claire Bloom) arrives to gather up Judah and return him to “his protected world of wealth and privilege” in Connecticut is the only kindness Allen’s script’s conclusion extends to Cliff’s battered idealism.

Consequently, Cliff is left on the piano bench to contemplate the sour, central joke of the film: that his belief in a scheme of universal order is just a symptom of his having spent too many afternoons playing hooky at the Bleeker Street Cinema. Similarly galling is the fact that Cliff’s humanistic desire that Judah’s narrative be elevated to “tragic proportions” through the introduction of human responsibility has been mocked by Lester’s reading of
Oedipus Rex,
which finds in Oedipus’s discovery that he is himself the murderer he has sought to expose “the structure of funny.”
Crimes and Misdemeanors
drama-tizes more effectively and unequivocally than any other film Allen’s fear that his favorite autobiographical protagonists’ penchant toward philosophizing is pointless, that meditating on the human condition produces nothing more substantial than Hollywood happy ending illusions—or generates instead the despair Cliff experiences which no Hollywood montage could ever transform into felicitous resolution. That both Judah and Cliff undergo parallel educations in the absence of what Ben terms “a moral structure with real forgiveness” in the universe is what unifies the two plots of
Crimes and Misdemeanors
into an engrossing and coherent film narrative, and if Cliff’s education seems surprisingly short on laughs for a Woody Allen part, it’s probably because Woody Allen doesn’t find Cliff’s lesson very funny, either.

11

Everyone Loves Her/His Illusions

The Purple Rose of Cairo and Shadows and Fog

I want what happened in the movie last week to happen this week … otherwise what’s life about anyway?

—Woman in audience of
The Purple Rose of Cairo

Stardust Memories
dramatizes the contradictory agendas of artistic purposes from the maker’s perspective;
The Purple Rose of Cairo
delineates them from the vantage point of the viewer. As one of the most infatuated of the millions upon whom screen illusions are intended to work their magic, Cecilia is con- fronted in
Purple Rose
with many of the same conflicts between reality and illusion which besiege Sandy Bates—the issue of movies as a desperate evasion of an insupportable actuality in particular. The Allen protagonist even better suited than Bates to playing counterpart to the self-effacing, illusion-pursuing Cecilia, however, is Kleinman, the clerkish, nebbishlike central character of
Shadows and Fog
. So alike are the beginnings and thematic resolutions of
The Purple Rose of Cairo
and
Shadows and Fog,
in fact, that it is useful to discuss the two films together in order to point out the similarity of the conclusions they reach in their emphatically hedged affirmations of art as consolation, of art as refuge.

At the beginning of both movies, the character played by Mia Farrow (Cecilia/Irmy) discovers that her husband/lover has been unfaithful to her—Monk (Danny Aiello) with a friend’s sister, Paul (John Malkovich) with Marie (Madonna), a trapeze artist in the circus in which he and Irmy are performers. Cecilia packs a bag and leaves Monk, immediately encountering a prostitute (Dianne Wiest) plying her wares in the New Jersey streets. Terrified that this is the inevitable fate of a woman on her own, Cecilia seeks refuge in the Jewel Theater, where
The Purple Rose of Cairo,
a romantic movie she’s seen numerous times, is playing. She watches it again, the champagne comedy facilitating her repression of the dismal awareness that once the last show has ended, she’ll be fulfilling Monks prediction: “Go on, go on … You see how it is in the real world … You’ll be back!” Irmy’s first encounter after she’s fled Paul and the circus in
Shadows and Fog
is, likewise, with a prostitute (Lily Tomlin), but instead of fleeing her, Irmy is taken by the woman to Felice’s, the brothel where she is the madam, for shelter for the night. She’s fed by Felice’s goodhearted whores, and the wine she drinks loosens her inhibitions enough that she beds down with a college student for the $700 he has won this night from gambling.

In
The Purple Rose of Cairo,
Tom Baxter (Jeff Daniels), silver screen exile, plays the naif who blunders into the brothel and receives a similarly sympathetic welcome from the lively prostitutes; otherwise, the parallel plot trajec tories of the two films diverge after Irmy’s brothel experience, though both movies remain thematically devoted to exploring the relationship of life to art—in
Purple Rose
, the art of Hollywood movies, in
Shadows
, the allegorized arts of the circus performers. In both films, too, the nature of that relationship is profoundly influenced by the existence of a cultural extremity so menacing it renders the ministrations of the arts more than normally emotionally needful: the Depression in
Purple Rose
, a crazed murderer in
Shadows
. It is against the backgrounds of these manifestations of human subjection that
Purple Rose,
in mimetic terms, and
Shadows
, in allegorical ones, work out their shared vision of the markedly dubious necessity of art to the lives of men and women. These two films constitute the quintessential cinematic dramatizations of Allen’s favorite thematic conflict between “the seductiveness of fantasy and the cruelty of reality.”
¹

Tom Baxter’s departure from the screen, and thus from the plot of
The Purple Rose of Cairo,
to court Cecilia, Hollywood filmdom’s dizzily ardent fan, gives Allen the opportunity to examine dramatically what Hollywood movies have meant to their audiences. The fact that Tom walks off the screen into Depression America not only creates comic contrasts between his jet set socialite assumptions about the world and the slough of economically dictated demoralization he’s entered, but given the heightened dependency of viewers upon Hollywood’s medium of distraction and reassurance during the era, it also focuses and intensifies Allen’s film’s investigation of the inherent human need for the consolations of escapist art. Tom is, however, only half of the story: Gil Shepherd (Daniels), the actor who plays Tom, is lured from Hollywood to the New Jersey town in which Tom fled the screen in order to attempt to compel his errant character back into the plot of
Purple Rose,
and basically replicates Tom’s courtship of Cecilia.
²
In choosing between them at the end of Allen’s film, Cecilia is only apparently choosing between silver screen images and real life; in fact, Tom and Gil confront her with a choice not between fantasy and actuality but between two different modes of illusion.