Thursday, July 31, 2025

Crimes and Misdemeanors (Woody Allen, 1989)

 

An ambitious fusion of cold-hearted murder drama and poignant romantic comedy, Woody Allen’s Crimes and Misdemeanors often feels on the edge of overreaching, but is ultimately as satisfyingly resonant as any of his pictures. One narrative strand follows Judah (the piercing Martin Landau), a successful ophthalmologist whose comfortable life is threatened by the demands of a mistress, Dolores, he’s grown tired of, turning to his shadier brother for help. The other strand (barely linked until the very end) has Allen as Cliff, an unhappily married documentary filmmaker commissioned to make a film about a successful brother-in-law he hates, falling for an associate producer on the film (Mia Farrow, naturally). Crimes and Misdemeanors is surely among Allen’s most ruthless works, his own character ending up in what seem like dire financial, professional and emotional straits, the look on his face when his greatest dream becomes a cruel taunt quite chilling. The film’s focus on sight, potentially a glib notion, becomes hauntingly multi-faceted here: for instance, Judah recalls in a speech how unnerved he was a child by the concept of an all-seeing God, but then half-jokes it may have had something to do with his choice of a career in ophthalmology; later on, the most formally unnerving shot links his horrified eyes and Dolores’s dead ones; another of the main characters, a moral centre of sorts, is going blind. The film has some of Allen’s most precise writing and imagery, and one of its strongest casts, and its musings on religion certainly surpass the trite: ultimately, Judah becomes almost frightening to contemplate, having traveled from the depths of guilt and self-revulsion to a near-gloating self-satisfaction, such that one can imagine further transgressions, the evolution of a sociopath, even a despot, a sense amplified by the suicide of another of the film’s lodestars, leaving behind a pitiful note that’s at once bleakly funny and utterly discouraging regarding humanity’s collective prospects.

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