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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