My complaint about
Woody Allen movies in general is that they are good ideas that he has no
interest in refining. No matter what my thoughts of him as a person are, he's a
very gifted screenwriter. He has a knack for coming up with twists on
understood formulas they few screenwriters have ever had. He was being meta
before it was cool. I think his follow-through is awful though. It's so
disappointing how often his endings are cop-outs that he didn't bother to
figure out any better.
Crimes and
Misdemeanors is close to the best case scenario for Allen's strengths and weaknesses.
It has a large ensemble. He also stars in the movie, but he doesn't dominate it
the way he often does. Personally, I like him as a performer, but I know many
people get irritated by too much Woody Allen. He mixes a couple genres
effectively, featuring both a doomed romance and a murder cover-up. He gets
away with an abrupt, underwhelming ending by making it a feature rather than a
bug. The audience spends the whole movie wondering what the two main stories
with Allen and Martin Landau have to do with one another. Finally, at the very
end, the two men meet at a wedding, Landau spills his guts to Allen, then
nothing comes of it. Allen suggests the ending that Hollywood audiences have
been groomed to expect. Landau shoots the idea down, saying that this isn't a
movie. And it ends. It's kind of a self-aware cop-out. The kind of thing you
can only get away with once.
I think Allen's
best films are his early ones when it feels like more time went into crafting
jokes and story, but Crimes and Misdemeanors is definitely in his
upper-tier of non-comedies.
Verdict: Strongly Recommend
No comments:
Post a Comment