Crimes and Misdemeanors

Saw Crimes and Misdemeanors, a Woody Allen film that alternates between the story of an ophthalmologist with an uncooperative mistress he's trying to ditch and another, totally separate film, following Woody Allen some guy named Clifford who is a frustrated documentary filmmaker who wants to make dense, complex, My Dinner With Andre-style think-fests but of course can't make a living off of that. The two stories are thematically held together by a theme of (in)fidelity and by a similar friction between the way these two protagonists wish their lives had gone vs how they actually shook out, both themes Woody has no doubt pondered many a time.

The film is fairly restrained. It's witty, urbane, and very dry. It has blink-and-you-miss-it references to James Joyce's filthy love-letters and to the trial of nuclear spy Ethel Rosenberg. The moral dilemma at its center is compelling and is really hit out of the park in one scene, but is also fairly dry. I was never really at the edge of my seat. It's clearly very clever but I have to admit I didn't really find it that entertaining. I mean, it's not bad in a dinner-party kind of way, but it lacks serious tension. The dry smolder of the ophthalmologist's story is great but undercut by Woody Allen doing the Woody Allen show and creepily hanging out with his teenage niece and making all these oh-so-clever allusions and witty observations of upper-crust dickery. That's fine and all, but these two separate movies fail to be more than the sum of their parts.

It didn't surprise me however. I knew coming in that I wasn't in the mood it, that it would be clever and sophisticated and like the most charming intellectual you ever met, but that it would have nary a shock. There were a few dynamite scenes with the ophthalmologist, but then we'd inevitably sink back into a repeat of Manhattan or Annie Hall. Both good movies, sure, but ones I've seen already. I feel like if he'd stuck to the ophthalmologist story and kept his self-insert character out, it might have been a shorter but better film.