Classic Movie Review: 'Crimes and Misdemeanors'

Crimes and Misdemeanors perfectly captures the ability of a perfectly mediocre, rich, white guy to get away with just about anything. Spoilers ahead, the movie is 30 years old, you've had your chance to see it. The film stars Martin Landau as an ophthalmologist who has his criminal brother, played by Jerry Orbach, hire someone to kill his mistress, played by a slumming Anjelica Huston.

That Landau's eye doctor gets away with it is the thesis statement of Crimes and Misdemeanors. Life is a meaningless series of empty interactions, and even the worst parts of human existence can be washed away with the inexorable march of time. Humans are capable of rationalizing away just about any horror they commit, because what choice do they have?

Yes, that last line does function as a modern commentary on the modern Woody Allen, a man who appears to have rationalized away many things over the past 30 years or so. It was not long after the release of Crimes and Misdemeanors that we come to find out about Allen's biggest rationalization, leaving his wife, Mia Farrow, for their adopted, teenage daughter, Soon Yi.

Landau portrays Judah Rosenthal, a beloved figure in his social circle and one with a lot to hide about his seemingly idyllic existence. For the past several years, Judah has carried on an affair with Delores (Huston), but that relationship has become cumbersome. In Delores's telling of their relationship, she's sacrificed aspects of her life in order to be where Judah is, and she did so on the implicit promise that he would leave his wife.

Judah refuses to upend his life for Delores, so she has decided that she will try and do it for him by sending a letter that he narrowly is able to steal away before his wife sees it. She tries to come to his home, she's insistent on laying everything bare, so that he will have no choice, but to be with her. At the end of his rope, Judah reaches out to his brother, a criminal low life, who hires a hit man who finishes the job in quick fashion.

At first, Judah is consumed with guilt and the desire to confess. He goes to Delores's apartment, while her body is still on the floor and has an existential crisis, even as he retains the capacity to abscond with evidence of their affair, and make it harder for police to connect him to Delores's death. He's eager to get away with what he's done, while he attempts to rend his conscience in a practiced attempt at feeling genuine guilt.

But the rending and tearing of Judah's conscience is all an act. as the movie comes to a close, it's been four months since the murder, and Judah has reached a state of complete rationale. He still has pangs of guilt for being responsible for Delores's death, but he no longer fears any kind of retribution. He wrestled with his former faith, in the form of a Rabbi father we glimpse in flashback, and is set free by the equally prominent character of a long-forgotten Aunt who once opposed his father's deeply held religious convictions during a family dinner.

A vivid memory of his Aunt's intellect over religion argument along with the simple passage of time, and the convenient arrest of a suspect that was not him, have left Judah capable of putting the murder behind him. By the end of Crimes and Misdemeanors, Judah is happier than ever before. He's loving and dutiful toward his once forgotten wife, and he's found peace with his actions in a way that only a mediocre, rich white man appears capable of.

The other plot of Crimes and Misdemeanors is similarly obsessed with the rationales of mediocre white men, only this one is less rich. Woody Allen's Cliff is a deeply pretentious documentary filmmaker who is eager to cheat on his wife with a producer he met while making a documentary about his brother-in-law, Lester (Alan Alda).

Is Cliff genuinely interested in Mia Farrow's Halley, or is he interested in what she represents to him. First, she's someone who appears to resist the charms of Cliff's nemesis, Lester. Getting her over him would be a feather in Cliff's cap to be sure. She also represents a potential creative opportunity as she is a producer for a PBS like series that seeks documentary subjects such as the one Cliff has been working on about an elderly philosophy professor.

Halley also represents many of the things that Cliff's distant wife, Wendy (Joanna Gleason), is not, warmth, attentiveness, willing to listen when Cliff criticizes the otherwise beloved Lester. Halley is attractive and intelligent but those qualities come not from Allen's conception of the character but from Farrow who radiates those qualities in ways the movie desperately needs her too in order not to devolve fully into male navel gazing.

Crimes and Misdemeanors is a movie about the divide between what things are, and what they represent. For Judah, Delores presents another life where he is younger, sexy, and vibrant. She also represents his personal and professional ruin, and a problem that he must find a way to solve. That is perhaps why Huston doesn't so much portray a character in Crimes and Misdemeanors as much as she portrays a human obstacle course to be survived and conquered.

Was that Huston and Allen's intent in creating the character of Delores? To craft a character who doesn't have much of her own realistic existence, but rather exists solely to provide a jumping off point for Judah, and for Allen as the filmmaker, to examine morality, religion, chaos and privilege? I am assuming so because otherwise Delores isn't a really great character, she's a rather low point for both Allen in writing women and Huston as an actress.

Farrow's Halley is underwritten also, as I mentioned earlier, but she's not as burdened by the plot as Huston's Delores is. She still functions as Cliff's ideal of what is lacking in his marriage and in his life, but Farrow invests Halley with a radiant inner life and the final moments of the movie, after she's rejected Cliff in favor of Lester, give her the agency that Delores never had.

The film ends with Judah confessing to Delores's murder to Cliff in a sideways fashion. Having just met Cliff and knowing that he's a filmmaker, Judah pitches Cliff his idea for a thriller movie in which a man has his mistress killed and is never caught, no lessons are learned, and life simply goes on. Cliff complains that the story isn't cinematic enough causing Judah to bristle that his story isn't 'Hollywood,' it's closer to the way life really is.

The scene defines the two characters rather brilliantly, the mediocre, self-involved, narcissistic Judah, and the constantly dreaming, striving, self-pitying Cliff. Cliff wants the fantasy world that movies provide with happy endings for the seeming good guys and punishment for the evil of the world as he sees it. This tracks with Cliff's character who is glimpsed repeatedly taking his young niece to the movies.

Cliff is narcissistic in his own way, though much less murderous. Cliff imposes his worldview on people and expects them to fall in line. He's baffled when someone doesn't fit his conception of them. Lester, for instance, in Cliff's mind, is a pompous ass, and he kind of is, but he's also said by other's to be generous and, as embodied by Alan Alda, he's wildly charismatic. Cliff hates him for being handsome and tall and rich and casts him as a villain in his mind.

That's what makes his infatuation with Halley a personal tragedy for him, if not for us. Where we see Cliff's worldview getting its just comeuppance for being self-serving and narrow minded, Cliff views not getting Halley and her ending up with Lester as a grave, tragic, injustice and a better example of the emptiness of the universe than even Judah's murder plot.

I have indicted Allen's writing of women in this review but it is fair to say that Crimes and Misdemeanors is intended as lacerating the male characters for their smug worldviews and obsessions that come at the expense of the women in their lives. Perhaps, leaving the female characters of Crimes and Misdemeanors as rather functionary is Allen's way of letting women off the hook while he flagellates the inflated egos of his male protagonists.

In the end, what is Judah but a low life murderer who gets away with his crime simply out of the inertia with which people regard privileged old white men as non-threatening entities slowly marching to the grave. What is Cliff but a lonely, self-involved loser constantly allowing his pettiness about the perceived slights of the universe get in the way of happiness, contentment and a more genuine connection with someone who doesn't merely represent what he feels is lacking in his life.

Each man embodies part of the title, Judah is a criminal, legitimately a man who ordered a murder on his own behalf. And what are Cliff's crimes but the relative misdemeanors of a minor narcissist incapable of killing the obstacles in his way and instead lashing out with the petty criminality of his self-involved worldview, imposing himself on people who don't wish to be imposed upon by someone like him.

Crimes and Misdemeanors was released on October 12th, 1989 and 30 years later it remains a movie that even Allen's public persona cannot take weight from. It remains a movie that I cannot stop watching or thinking about even as I now re-frame it to reflect the filmmaker and his own, now rather obvious, narcissism and selfishness.