In the "misdemeanor" half of the story, Allen plays Cliff, a documentary filmmaker who's too high-minded to be successful. His pet project is a tribute to Louis Levy, a psychology professor who sees affirmation in all experience; Cliff has endless unedited footage of Levy expounding. Cliff gets a paying job from his brother-in-law Lester (Alan Alda), a wealthy sitcom producer whom Cliff looks down on as a crap merchant and blowhard. During the shoot Cliff is taken with Halley (Mia Farrow), a beautiful producer on the project, and believes he's bonding with her by ridiculing Lester behind his back. Halley also thinks she can get Cliff's footage on Professor Levy broadcast. When Halley hears about Levy's unforeseeable suicide, she arrives to comfort Cliff, who makes a pass at her. Rejected, Cliff turns in an openly offensive cut of the documentary about Lester, who fires him and wins Halley besides, which comes as a shock to no one but Cliff.
Cliff learns that Halley is with Lester at the same party at which Judah, a stranger to Cliff, later wanders in where Cliff is sitting and anonymously proposes his own crime as a potential movie plot. Cliff disagrees with Judah's premise, that a man could commit that crime and not be damaged by it internally, but Judah, secretly speaking for himself, insists it's possible. Judah then joins his wife, with whom he displays a renewed connection. Cliff represents the naïvely romantic moralist inside Allen, but with Crimes and Misdemeanors Allen is siding with Judah against Cliff. The movie is an attempt to illustrate the proposition that good things happen to bad people on a regular basis, and God is not keeping tabs. (The movie could just as easily be said to prove that for atheists there is no bar to murder, but I don't think this can be intentional.)
Allen intends the movie as a chilling retort to Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, in which the commission of a pointless murder by a student who believes himself to be above common morality causes psychological disintegration such that he can't help but incriminate himself to the police. But Dostoevsky's work gives us extraordinary access to the protagonist's mental processes. Crimes and Misdemeanors does not because Allen has not found an equivalent in the medium of film to the internal access to character or the encompassing narration possible in prose fiction.
Instead, he writes his proposition up essentially like a stage play; all we know of what's going on inside people is what they say about it to other characters, and what they say doesn't advance the concept much (and is woefully lacking in poetry). A large part of the problem is that Allen writes dialogue in three modes: one is a stammering comic patter that makes characters sound just like him and the second is a stilted form of self-analysis that makes them sound like nobody you've ever known. (Speaking about themselves they sound like they're reading off the author's notecards.) The third is naturalistic background chatter, which is all Judah's wife Miriam gets (a waste of the great Claire Bloom). This turns Miriam into an extra, although Judah's motivation in killing Dolores is entirely bound up with Miriam's character, i.e., he says she'd never get over his infidelity, which we learn solely from Judah talking to other people. This is an especially odd failing considering how much time is given to scenes of the increasingly overwrought Dolores. You may wonder if Allen thinks it's necessary for us to feel that we, too, would kill Dolores in Judah's position, which would, of course, be gaga.
Article comments
1 - Ruvy in Jerusalem
ENOUGH ALREADY!! Who would have thought that a poor putz who wrote comedy sketches for Sid Caesar a half century ago and did stand-up comedy in the Village FOUR decades ago would get reviews SOOO long? Did Allen die? Were you writing a eulogy, maybe?
Honey! Get me the Tylenol! PLEASE!
2 - Alan Dale
Presumably if Allen had died he'd have stopped making and releasing movies, though you can never be sure.
3 - Andy Marsh
the planet would be a better place if this child molestor had died!
4 - Penny Woods
What's wrong with the long review? I thought it did justice to how bad Match Point was.
5 - Alan Dale
Thanks, Penny, for the back-up. In fact, the review covers four WA movies, so its length is that much more justifiable. (The fact that WA has been working for half a century, as Ruvy points out, is only more reason a review of his work would be longer--there's more work to talk about.)
The question of length comes up for me on Blogcritics periodically, so let me lay out my defenses of the in-depth reviews I post here:
1) some people actually like the fuller discussion possible only by writing more;
2) while the average reader may want no more than short-form consumer advice about what to see this weekend (i.e., thumbs-up/thumbs-down), I'm not writing for the average reader;
3) there's no particular reason any individual reader's attention span should set a limit on the length of movie criticism--i.e., you can stop reading at will, it's a review not homework;
4) this isn't a market so readers can't bring economic pressure to bear on me and thus don't have the complaining rights that a paying readership would; and
5) there's not limited space on Blogcritics as opposed to a print or online magazine, so I'm not squeezing anyone else by writing longer pieces.
6 - Rodney Welch
On the other hand, the enormous length of a review may indicate that the writer is simply long-winded, has no particular talent for persuasion, cogency or boiling an argument or point of view down to its essence, or has simply never heeded the advice "If you can say it in fewer words, you probably should."
7 - Alan Dale
This comment addresses personality rather than principles--it's inherently subjective. "Long-winded" doesn't decide anything; it's just another way of saying you personally think the review sucks. As for heeding advice, what's the difference between "talent for persuasion" and "cogency" (Chambers dictionary defines the latter as "convincing power")?
8 - Ruvy in Jerusalem
Alan, this is going to sound terribly selfish and self-centered.
Allen Koenigsberg is the most famous graduate of Midwood High School (so far, anyway), and a fellow alumnus. I can't admire how this man has lived his life. I'd LIKE to admire his art. But you have tken a long time to say it isn't worth admiring.
Your article may be cogent and display immense talent for persuasion, even if it is a TAD long. But I'm disappointed. Not davka, with you, but with yet another possible hero with feet of clay...
9 - Alan Dale
Hey Ruvy,
I'm not judging WA the man--with the possible exception of his making a second movie about killing an ex-girlfriend, in which the man inevitably crosses the boundary from life into art. And I am not at all saying that his art is worthless. Apparently the review was long enough that the first paragraph hasn't lingered in your mind! In the '70s WA was a hero of mine, my family's, and friends', entirely for aesthetic reasons--we loved his early comedies, we read his books out loud on car trips, and, as I hoped to make clear, I think that The Purple Rose of Cairo, Bullets Over Broadway, and Sweet and Lowdown are classics. By his own admisson he's not an intellectual or a great director. Unfortunately his ambitions lie in areas that require more talent of a certain sort than he's blessed with. That still leaves him with an impressive legacy. (If you rewatched his movies in reverse order you'd probably feel better about his career.) So take heart--one foot of clay, at most. Maybe only four toes.
Thanks for writing.
10 - V
I can't help but be reminded Woody's commentary on that idiot's pretentious rambling in Annie Hall...
"You know nothing of my work...how you got to teach a class in anything is beyond me!!"