Woody Allen was a prolific filmmaker who shared with two other prolific filmmakers, Billy Wilder and Rainer Werner Fassbinder, a preference for character and plot over spectacle, which is what most American directors do instead, even though through his career he was particularly good at filming places such as New York City, Paris and Barcelona. What stands out about all three of these directors is that they were adept at tussling with moral dilemmas, Wilder was the most cynical of the three, as when he dealt with the fine points of the moral ambiguities to be found in “The Apartment”. Sure, Fred MacMurray was a louse, but was the Shirley Maclaine character any better even if Jack Lemon fell for her? Or was that just another side of his weakness as a human being? Fassbinder gives away that his movie “World on a Wire” is about the nature of identity in that most of the people at a party at the beginning of the movie seem like mannikins. So the question is what is a mannikin and what is a human being. “Crimes and Misdemeanors”, which is one of Woody Allen’s most memorable films, has a message, as do many of them. In this case, it is not the claim that there is no justice, which is what some critics at the time of the release of the film in 1989 said was the case. The thesis of the movie is that people can be forgiven for their crimes but are never forgiven for their misdemeanors. That is a morality far harsher than any other I know of, and is very carefully arrived at and so, I would suggest, Allen makes a contribution to thought far greater than film directors are usually credited with, however much Allen himself has many times said he only retails what he has read in one book or another during his career of self-education.
“Crimes and Misdemeanors” abandons the Bergmanesque and Expressionist techniques Allen had used for his earlier serious works, as well as the romantic lushness of New York City that had been so important in creating the texture of “Manhattan” and “Hannah and Her Sisters”. In their stead, Allen uses mostly what he has developed on his own for his comedies: situations which are embarrassing and complicated and force characters to say very meaningful things as attempts to grasp the nature of their emotions and their circumstances. Allen has moved to the stage of his career where he is less concerned with artistic tours de force than with problem plays: how it is that people face a conundrum recognized in philosophy as well as in life.
Allen's usual dramatic structure involves intersecting two ways of life, one of which is superior to the other. That is the case with most drama, the comic plot of the downstairs family counterpoised against the tragic plot of the upstairs family. A comic reversal occurs when the downstairs family is seen as more serious than the upstairs family. Allen did that in the episodic “Radio Days”, where the life of radio stars is compared to that of ordinary people and found not to be so very different, except that some ordinary people are raised into the firmament of stars so that they can serve as models and reference points for ordinary people, not so much important in themselves but as reifications of idealized virtues. This humanistic and Stoic message is presented in the form of a memoir, so that there is an essay-like quality to the way episodes are introduced and built upon one another and refer back to one another before reaching a moral epiphany. The recognition earned by the narrative is, in this case, the importance of family love, something much more realized in the extended family in Coney Island than it is by the stars who celebrate on the same rooftops on which they were debauched and with people who are less pretty than those they left behind.
The comparison in “Crimes and Misdemeanors” is different. Allen is less concerned with the contrast between the successful and the unsuccessful, the "class" division which Allen had repeatedly used to separate those who are saved and those who are damned. “Crimes and Misdemeanors” purportedly shows that the class division is unfair because the successful are not damned for their crimes, while the unsuccessful suffer for their misdemeanors. That is an inaccurate formulation. The two stories that are set side by side in “Crimes and Misdemeanors” invoke, instead, human exigencies and qualities of the human character that go beyond social class. Fancy surroundings are merely the accoutrements used by black and white film makers working both with and without sound and by playwrights going back to the Greeks to make the events that their characters are caught in seem more important than those of mere groundlings. Allen uses, instead, the contrast between cinematic and theatrical conventions to set up an apposition between two stories where the differences of class are important only to Cliff, the character played by Allen, who revels in the fancy dress of Thirties comedies.
Cliff’s smug friend Lester, played by Alan Alda at his smarmy best, serves as the counterweight to Allen's character within the comic and cinematic story they share. This story uses timing to turn melodramatic and tragic material into comedy, which is exactly what Lester asserts in one of those pronouncements Cliff holds in contempt. As if to demonstrate the point—and Allen always delivers a piece of creative business to exemplify the principles of art that his characters enunciate--Cliff tells his sister that it is disgusting that a lover she met through a singles column defecated on her. (Cliff, who can’t get over this event, later refers to it as involving “shit”, one of those four letter words that Allen did not use very much in his films, however much he described the nitty gritty of life.) Cliff’s outrage at her embarrassment has the effect of mitigating the damage to her because his condemnation of her foolishness at having made herself vulnerable is out in the open, the event no more than a demonstration of the foolishness and embarrassment everyone has to cope with in the course of life. Allen sets the story within the old joke of asking how terrible a revelation could possibly be, and then giving a pained reaction to what she tells him, which is why Lester, at another point, tells the disbelieving Cliff that he thinks the story of Oedipus is funny.
Cliff's own story is also comic. It is told through movie conventions, especially those movie conventions having to do with movies. There are quick cuts between bits of flirtatious talk, rather than sustained romantic encounters. And, most of all, there is the overuse of what has become a cliché of movie making: repeatedly showing films being made. Cliff moves back and forth between old film clips, moviola machines, filming Lester, showing the film he made of the man whose documentary he would prefer to work on, rather than the one he is making for Lester and, of course, having himself impersonated by the filmmaker Woody Allen.
The more important alter ego for Cliff, however, is not Lester. It is a person who has a parallel story of his own, this one theatrical and tragic. That is Judah Rosenthal, a successful ophthalmologist who arranges to have his mistress killed despite his knowledge that the action is morally wrong, but who had allowed himself to be convinced by his hoodlum brother that the real world is different from the fictional world of religion. Rosenthal had carefully weighed the alternatives. A patient of his, Ben, who happens to be Lester's brother, is a rabbi who believes that there is a moral structure to the universe and that Judah's family will forgive him for his transgression, or at least recommence their lives together on a new, more mature basis. But Rosenthal does not believe his wife will be strong enough to stand the humiliation of his sexual and financial escapades coming to light, and so decides to go ahead with the murder, even though it sickens him to contemplate it and it sickens him to think about it once the murder has been done.
Allen is not morally neutral. He presents the rabbi as right and the hoodlum as wrong. He undercuts the satanic interpretation offered by the hoodlum in a number of ways. Right off, there is the matter of self-interest. The brother, who had no light from God at all, was the unsuccessful member of the family who had turned in times of need to his successful brother, and so, by his lights, was not only paying off his obligations but reducing his brother to his own level. But Judah, in an old and still serviceable play on what it means to have vision, retains a troubled sense that the Rabbi, who is going blind, is correct to think that, in some way, God does see everything that goes on. Allen not only comes up with new images; he also recycles old ones, once again treating tragedy as akin to comedy, in that in comedy the jokes haven’t changed since Aristophanes.
Judah, one of the most sublime of Allen’s characters, even as he has to serve also as a symbol of sublime characters, Allen, refusing to have to make him very different from other sublime characters, recalls a Passover Seder where, true to the Haggadic liturgy, four kinds of people are used to define successively more profound theological positions. There is the Leninist who thinks that God could not exist since there is such evil in the world, and so religion and God are, for her, a fiction that amounts to a lie. There is an uncle who believes in God but does not understand how evil is permitted, and so is indulgent of religious truth as merely a fiction. There is another uncle who does not believe but continues ritual observance as a matter of custom, and so treats religion as a communal fiction, no longer believing in it. And there is, ultimately, Judah's father, who prefers believing in God even if He is a fiction, because the fiction is more important than any fact.
The Seder discussion suggests that the important question is not what is real and what is fictional but, rather, the nature and stature of that fiction which is under discussion. Why is it a compelling fiction? The answer to this, which is perhaps best available through Ben, a modern rabbi who knows all about the symbols of reality and the reality of symbols. He believes that there is a transcendental structure of morality, which is real even if it is not visible and even if it is often violated.
Judah's story is treated by Allen as a compilation of self-conscious fictions, and so evil is like a bad dream -- or a bad movie -- from which it is possible to emerge. The conversations between Judah and his mistress are burdened by theatricality. The dialogue extends a thought for longer than the audience needs for the thought to become clear, as if the characters had to work out all the steps in the derivation of their feelings and their situation, as that is summed up when the final statement of the thought is neatly put. Cinema dialogue, on the other hand, works best when it is clipped and off-hand, a different convention for the rendering of normal speech.
There is also a soap opera quality in the accumulating tension between Judah and his mistress, each of them taking themselves much too seriously, and both missing the obvious about their predicament and awareness of which would reduce their situation to that of a comedy about a foolish affair. How could she contemplate that he would come back to her after she has threatened to expose his affair and his embezzlement of funds? How can he expect such an emotionally driven woman, with whom he took up because she was vulnerable and was taken with his education and success, to be able to sensibly negotiate a way out of their mutual dilemma? Neither can see that they are each being simply ridiculous.
The conversation in which Judah and his brother first discuss the murder is particularly false, since it is obvious that Judah knows from the beginning what it is he wants to have arranged. Judah is simply taping a pre-set dialogue that he can replay so as to distance himself from what he is arranging, as if God did not have access to an unedited tape. Another clue to the fraudulence of the conversation is that it takes place in winter at a dressing cottage near Judah's covered swimming pool. The silent conversations Michael Corleone has with himself before and after he has his brother murdered also take place in a boat house overlooking a lake in winter.
The whole construction of the murder story is therefore fictional. Allen, however, does not supply inter-cuts with old movies to show that murder for adultery can be contemplated in a comic vein, or have Cliff comment on the attractive modernish surroundings in which the old movie plots take place, which would make of them attractive worlds of imagination, whatever the motives of the people involved, and so to remind the audience that the murderer also seems to luxuriate in his taste for Schubert, refined living, and modern bathroom fixtures, as if these were the substance of life. Such cinematic effects are appropriate in the other tale, that of Cliff and Lester, which Allen wants to be comic. Rather, here, using the conventions of the theatre, the affected discussions of vacations in Italy, which might be taken as merely passing for the substance of life, in fact represent the reality of the love within Judah's family. The family transcends its own fictionality, people more real and significant than the fictions they think their lives to be, which is a way of saying that morality is also more real than the fiction people like Ben's brother take it to be, although Allen knows, of course, and expects his audience to know, that cinema and theatre are both forms of fiction, that dyad allowing Allen to construct his art in the English manner, as an apposition of forms, just as Shakespeare did when he contrasted poetry and prose, tragedy and comedy, high born and low born.
The resolution of the murder story occurs through a realization of its fictionality. Judah persists in thinking that he is trying to live in a real world of dread and horror. He talks about the extent to which he has suffered, been affected by the murder he ordered, waiting for his punishment. Judah finds, however, that his punishment does not come and that a vacation with his family helped the guilt, fear and dread to pass, and now he lives with the murder as an event in his past, as if it hadn’t happened, as if it were a fiction.
Judah meets Cliff and narrates his story to him as if it were a fiction. Cliff says that the murderer in this fictional story might turn himself in, but Judah says such things do not happen in real life, as if that shows that life is somehow worse than God, the fiction, could contemplate. But Judah has made himself into a character out of fiction, obviously Raskalnikov, and does not understand why there is no Russian ending. Dostoevsky finds some kind of natural justice where the damage to the soul of the criminal warps every aspect of his life, making him feel a natural guilt and so unworthy of any love, official punishment a consummation that relieves the endless burden of not having been punished. And so critics wondered whether Woody Allen was proposing a world where there was no punishment for transgressions, where God had so far abandoned the world that criminals went free.
But morality can exist even if not every criminal will meet the punishment administered by civil authorities. Judah mourns over his own evil, and is restored, to some extent, to ordinary life by the warmth and love of family life, in spite of what he has done. He has achieved some kind of atonement through his suffering, some kind of redemption through the love of his family, which is all that any religious imagination might require.
Judah's evil, after all, was the result of his temporary inability to imagine that his cherished family could handle his vices, and so felt forced to live within his secret and to do terrible things to preserve his secret. The secret fed upon itself, making the external world ever more of a stage set in which he played a role, and from this theatricality he can only be gradually released through re-experiencing unmediated feeling and trust.
Cliff’s problem is different. He knows he needs people to share his inner longings, but, unlike Judah, does not believe they are capable of appreciating his virtues. Cliff is driven by his jealousy of all successful people, his certainty that they are all part of the stage set of illusion while he himself is one of the few that contemplates reality. For Cliff, the world is a secret to everyone but himself and a few chosen others; for Judah, a secret is what you keep from the rest of the world. Cliff is so imprisoned in his private world that he cannot see that it has poisoned his life, while Judah can only wonder that the murder has not poisoned his life more than it has.
Cliff has driven away from him the people he loves. He alienates Lester who, for whatever reasons, is doing him a favor by hiring him to work on his film. Cliff treats doing honest hack work to provide himself with a grubstake as a challenge to his integrity. Cliff is very full of his integrity since he defines no one, not even public television stations, as having enough integrity to recognize his genius. He also alienates his wife, who is sick of hearing him feel sorry for himself. And he imagines himself to have built up something of a relationship with a production associate on the film he is making about Lester, when she has never encouraged any sexual advances, and who any but the blind can see will land up with Lester. Cliff is so engrossed in his own seriousness that he cannot foresee this easily surmised conclusion. The pain he feels when he finds out about it may partly redeem him in the eyes of the audience, but is for him only a reminder of his continual shortcomings as a person.
Cliff does think one person has integrity. That is Dr. Lewis Levy, a humanist philosopher seen only in scraps on a moviola, but to my ear, at least, someone who issues epigrams that seem rather incisive, considerably beyond the fortune cookie platitudes that are provided by all the Yoda-like characters in movies. Those scraps alone turn Dr. Lewis into another of the large number of fully realized characters whose stories are related and intertwined in this movie, another accomplishment of Allen’s, along with his self-conscious use of theatrical and cinematic clichés, for which he is given insufficient credit, these virtues usually noted by critics as vices: he can’t do more than recite a legend or a story apprehended as a legend; he can’t make his characters sound natural.
But while Cliff can attend to Dr. Levy's integrity, he has difficulty attending to Dr. Levy's content, not really courageous enough to see Dr. Levy as anything but a refuge from what he perceives as Lester's platitudes, even though Lester's pronouncements have as much wisdom as any large scale adages do for those who care to listen and are not blinded by Lester's success. Lester says that Oedipus is funny, and so does Dr. Levy, who simply describes Freud's tragedy as a comedy in which we want to both grow up and never grow up at the same time. Lewis Levy, whose name and biography raises Primo Levi to mind, kills himself, and Lester takes this as proof that the man is no longer a fit subject for a portrait of a wise man, and so self-censors himself into yet another failed project because of his own lack of imagination, rather than because circumstances have one again provided an excuse by failing him.
Levy's life, in fact, is tribute to one of Lester's most repeated epigrams, that comedy bends, but tragedy breaks. Cliff is comic because he and his sister recover from their embarrassments and their narrowness of character. Judah Rosenthal, on the other hand, is healthy minded enough to be tragic. He does break, but his fracture is healed. He has recognized the seriousness of what he has done, in the midst of the plentitude of his life, and is capable of loving his wife and his family even if he has done something awful, though the point to be made is that it is clear that he was pushed to murder, that his mistress would have been willing to do nothing less than ruin his life, and so that however wrong it might have been, it was an act of choice, rather than a fatal attraction resolved through a plot device.
Critics misread “Crimes and Misdemeanors” as primarily about crime. Rather, the portrait of crime is the baseline against which to compare the true subject of the movie: misdemeanors compared. We are all well aware that criminals do go free in this life at least, and so that is hardly a question, even though it is the one that was on the front page of the New York Times Art and Leisure Section when the movie first came out. The point is that God does provide forgiveness for criminal acts, and not only in an afterlife or for the state of one's soul. David was favored by God even after he had arranged for the death of Bathsheba's husband. And if God can forgive a person, why can’t that person be prosperous afterwards? Otherwise they would not have been truly forgiven.
The fact that people get away with murder and are even, in most respects, good people, does not shatter the moral order of the universe, anymore than does the blindness of the Rabbi, a good and loving man who does not mock God. Allen is simply reminding his audience of Biblical truths, that good people do suffer, and for no good reason, while people who do bad can prosper, because God does forgive. The moral order of the universe is not equivalent to its natural order. It does not pay off, sooner or later, like some honest slot machine, which keeps only some small surplus of the world's goodness for itself.
The framing moral truth for the morality play made up of the contrasting stories of Cliff and Judah is provided by the first moviola scrap heard from Dr. Levy, who serves as the voice of God while Ben serves as His best example. Dr. Levy says that God shows concern for mankind while yet requiring that mankind be moral, and yet God goes on to require the sacrifice of Isaac, even though that does not seem to be moral nor an expression of great concern for mankind. Dr. Levy concludes that it is beyond our capacity to imagine a completely compassionate God, which strikes me as a rather fresh and accurate way of putting the matter: a truly compassionate God requires is an entity beyond the imagination of a God who is, first of all, a Lord, akin to a lord of the manor who has power over his underlings or the leader of a nation who holds sway over their minds. How do we separate the idea of God from the idea of hierarchy?
Allen's movie turns that theological insight into an evolutionary statement. We have come to understand a God compassionate enough to forgive murderers, even if such an understanding is not shared by most of the movie audience, but only by religious people like the virtuous Ben and the only sometimes virtuous Judah. But we have not yet come to even conceive of a God who can acknowledge, who is not blind to, misdemeanors, much less to forgive the remorseless and unending damage of our misdemeanors to our souls.
Misdemeanors can be glossed as the cause, substance and consequences of all of those petty deceits and betrayals which are not reducible to a single definitive act, but are the accumulation of all the minor flaws in character that make a person small and pathetic. Woody Allen suggests that there is no forgiveness for that, at least not yet, no way to redeem such a personality into the world of wholeness, and so the lives of such people contain one failure of nerve or imagination or love after another, ever diminishing their ability to confront new challenges. People may have invented formulas whereby God has come to grips with tragedy and moral weakness, but they have not invented formulas whereby God has come to grips with comedy and faults of character. It is as if God has neglected Cliff, the Woody Allen persona. God had found no room for him in His universe.
Woody Allen is very hard on the Woody Allen persona in this movie. Earlier, the persona was a comic figure who might have and sometimes did get the girl because his failures came from a too great perceptiveness about the world which made him unfit him for it, a gawky early Charlie Chaplin tramp, rather than a later, mellowed and melodramatic and pathetic tramp. But the Woody Allen persona, by the time of “Crimes and Misdemeanors”, is not very loveable. His weaknesses are his own rather than those of the world. His emotions are superficial rather than of a brittle incisiveness. The final comparison is not with Lester or with Judah, but with Ben who, even though blind, dances joyfully with his daughter at her wedding, thankful for the richness of the gifts he can appreciate, which Judah had for a while forgotten and which Cliff can never know. The image of the father dancing with his daughter is certainly a popular symbol of deeper values, acknowledged as such at family ceremonial occasions, and so accessible to any audience, and so a very stark and yet emotionally rich image with which to sum up and close this very moral movie.