CRIMES AND MISDEMEANORS (76)

Directed by: Woody Allen (1989)

Starring: Woody Allen, Martin Landau, Mia Farrow, Alan Alda

The Pitch: Two parallel stories : a successful ophthalmologist contemplates murder as a way of dealing with his hysterical mistress ; meanwhile, an earnest loser tries to deal with his overbearing brother-in-law.

Theo Sez: Second viewing reduces - or, more accurately, complicates - a favourite film into an endlessly problematic one : it's easy to forget, now that Woody's recaptured the exuberant whimsy of his mid-80s work, that he ever went through his stagnant pseudo-Bergman phase - of which this was the final example, and so unequivocally superior to what preceded it (SEPTEMBER and ANOTHER WOMAN) as to seem probably better than it was. Which isn't to say I ignored its flaws (despite an 84 rating) on first viewing eight years ago : it's pretty impossible to ignore the blunt, literal-minded way it sets out its theme (the existence - or not - of a divinely-ordered moral universe), or the crashing obviousness of its symbols - "God's eyes" on an increasingly godless world represented by a rabbi who's going blind (but can "see" what's right) versus our hero, an eye-doctor whose soul is sick (the eyes being "the windows of the soul"). Yet subtlety has never been this director's forte - from the Jewish caricatures in RADIO DAYS to the Marx Brothers references in EVERYONE SAYS I LOVE YOU - and besides, the film's whole structure is designed to forestall easy answers. The religious interpretation of the rabbi-vs-doctor symbolism, as described above, could just as easily be reversed (according to the viewer's own beliefs) into a secular interpretation - the blind moralist versus the man who lives in the real, flawed world, and can see it for what it is ; similarly, the recurring motif of Life-vs-cinema (which of the two stories reflects the real world, and which its movie facsimile) is ambiguous - Landau's story is shot in artificially stark compositions, and his dilemmas shadowed by clips from old movies, yet by the end his amorality seems far more realistic than the other story's idealism. You can get lost in these metaphysical thickets - and, if the film seems overly crude on second viewing, maybe the crudeness is just a way to avoid getting lost, the directorial equivalent of a trail of breadcrumbs. It remains, almost in spite of itself, a haunting movie ; parts of it are awful, but it's more than the sum of its parts. It stays with you, reverberating in the mind like the memory of an impassioned debate : the more you think back on it, the more you want to do it all over again.