Pose Reviews A Movie. #26: Crimes And Misdemeanors (1989)

At its most basic, Woody Allen's Crimes and Misdemeanors is a movie about love gone wrong.

Horribly, horribly wrong.

But then again, why does it feel so right?

I liked Crimes and Misdemeanors a lot. In a recent discussion with a friend, I described it as a sort of renovation of Allen's 2005 feature, Match Point.

"It's sort of like Match Point done right," I said.

"But I liked Match Point!" said she.

"Then you'll love Crimes and Misdemeanors!" I said. "It's basically the same thing, except it's funny rather than ridiculously dramatic, and instead of Scarlett Johansson, you get Anjelica Huston."

My friend paused. "...nice." she replied.

And it is!

Although Match Point was made much later than Crimes and Misdemeanors, the latter feels like an improvement on the former.

You have the same essential storyline--a man has an affair with a woman who gets overly clingy, and angsty relationship drama ensues. But Crimes and Misdemeanors brings more to the table--to turn a phrase, it puts more in the soup.

For example, in addition to the primary story about an optometrist's infidelity, there's a parallel storyline involving a married documentary filmmaker Cliff Stern (Woody Allen), who falls in love with his new production assistant (Mia Farrow), who is sought after by the annoyingly charismatic Lester (Alan Alda).

And the primary storyline, which features the impeccably apt Martin Landau as the promiscuous Judah Rosenthal, also has component parts, including a rocky relationship with an estranged brother, and a successful optometry practice that brings him into contact with a contrastingly benevolent rabbi and a genuinely good man who is going blind. (Arguably one of the most philosophical aspects of the film).

But coming back to my original point about love gone wrong, the film is full of examples.

Everything you expect to work out in Crimes and Misdemeanors doesn't, and everything you expect not to work out, does.

It's a very poetic look at love and human relationships, because it presents the non-Hollywoodized and arguably more realistic view of humanity's strongest emotion.

The fact is, people get bored. Then they get lonely. Then they make poor decisions, and before you know it, things go completely awry.

This happens all the time, but so rarely does it happen in the movies without being carefully and brought back into balance.

In that regard, Crimes and Misdemeanors bravely squashes the Hollywood standard by refusing to pick a genre, resisting a nice, clean ending, and giving all the right outcomes to all the wrong characters.

...and the one-liners aren't bad either.

If you're interested in a movie that breaks the rules and doesn't apologize, I say look no further. You can find Crimes and Misdemeanors in the Woody Allen section, or on my Staff Picks shelf.

tm Does the QT 20 Part 1: Anything Else

A few months ago Quentin Tarantino celebrated himself by issuing his list of his 20 favourite films since 1992, when he became a film director. Witness!



tm harms, one of our loyal customers, was intrigued by the list, and how few of them he'd seen. He set out to review them, one by one. We shall be serially publishing the results.

Anything Else (dir. Woody Allen – 2003)

This movie joins the long list of Woody Allen movies that are rambling and semi-pointless. This doesn’t make it a bad Woody Allen movie - this movie is of middling quality and will probably be largely forgotten in light of his recent Scarlett Johansson-driven upswing with Match Point, Vicki Christina Barcelona, and Scoop - but you need to be prepared for a few things.

One is that Jason Biggs talks directly at the camera, adding insights and observations to the scene. Second is that it’s hard not be semi-creeped out by Christina Ricci pointlessly spending most of the movie in her underwear and/or without a bra; this is solely disturbing because she’s doing so at the direction of a 72 year-old man (a return of the same icky feeling from Mighty Aphrodite when a 60 year-old Woody makes out with Mira Sorvino). Third, and this is nothing new, that every character is basically a mini-Woody Allen, complete with obsessive/compulsive rants about the ennui-filled minutia of everyday life that was semi-funny 30 years ago, but getting is now tired.

Jason Biggs plays a burgeoning comedy writer and truthfully, he does pulls off a convincing mini-Woody. Christina Ricci plays Jason’s girlfriend who has relationship issues; she’s not a good mini-Woody and isn’t acting terribly well here; there are numerous long, dialogue-driven, single-shot scenes in this movie that give every appearance of being semi-improvised and Christina looks stiff and contrived while Jason seems a bit more at ease. Woody Allen plays a fellow comedy writer to Jason, who Jason admires and they pal around, trying to get a big break. Honourable mention goes to Stockard Channing, playing Christina’s mother that moves in with Jason and Christina.

The dvd’s only special features are text-driven bios of cast & crew and a spiel about the movie – all of which are pretty lame.


tm sez: 5/10