The Talkies/Manhattan Melodrama, Bayou Banter
Bawer, Bruce
THE TALKIES MANHATTAN MELODRAMA, BAYOU BANTER W oody Allen's Crimes and Misdemeanors begins with a black-tie banquet at which Judah Rosenthal (Martin Landau), a sixtyish, affluent,...
...it's dismaying, then, to discover that Bergmann—who is, in real life, a Manhattan psychiatrist—improvised most of his own stuff...
...and the celebration of artistry—as invariably personified by Woody Allen—over commercial claptrap...
...Clifford's a specialist in pious, low-budget documentaries on acid rain and toxic waste, and Wendy can't help comparing his pathetic career highlights (e.g., honorable mention in a Cincinnati documentary film festival) with the glorious achievements of her brother Lester (Alan Aida), a rich sitcom producer with "a closet full of Emmys...
...If Tennessee Williams had written The Women, it might've come out something like this...
...Robert Harling's play Steel Magnolias, which can currently be seen at the Lucille Lortel Theater in New York, is a two-act, four-scene, six-character hen session set in a Chinquapin, Louisiana, beauty parlor...
...Nor are the situations particularly fresh...
...Certainly some of Allen's pet ideas and motifs have worn dangerously thin: the notion of a grown-up protagonist peeking in on an agonizing dinner-table scene of his childhood...
...On the whole, indeed, notwithstanding all its imperfections, Steel Magnolias is well worth seeing...
...For instance, though Harling has fleshed out the dramatis personae with a few males (including Tom Skerritt as M'Lynn's husband), the only black person I remember seeing in the whole picture was an affluent-looking guest at Shelby's wedding...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1990 37 But then virtually all of Allen's post LP Love and Death movies have been blemished, to some degree, by his intellectual and artistic pretensions...
...38 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1990...
...Many of the film's subsidiary characters, moreover, tend to be contrived (Ben with his emblematic blindness...
...so, alas, is Crimes and Misdemeanors...
...Levy is, incidentally, the only character in any of Allen's films whose spoutings on love, death, God, and the meaning of life rise consistently above the sophomoric...
...Yet, as it develops, everything's not coming up roses for the Rosenthals...
...If the strongest of them were • nonetheless redeemed by their engaging stories, their sympathetic (or, at least, credible) characters, and (above all) their humor, such is not the case here...
...The men are all offstage, and a miserable lot they are: Truvy, the bighearted, self-styled "glamour technician," has a spouse who lies around all day and sponges off her...
...This sort of stilted, ponderous give-and-take has made for awkward moments in Allen's movies ever since Annie Hall, but he usually gets through them fast enough to avoid major damage...
...The sad part is that it's a good, solid role...
...Judah's in a quandary: as he explains -to his patient Ben (Sam Waterston), a rabbi who's gradually losing his eyesight, Miriam would never forgive him for having an affair...
...the celebration of innocence, in the form of children...
...Smith...
...The only problem, aside from the creaky exposition and uneven acting, is that the characters often remind one less of Southern belles than of the boys in Mort Crowley's The Boys in the Band: Harling's humor, in other words, can be extremely campy, and one comes across locutions, references, and touches of sensibility here that seem to have less to do with small-town Louisiana womanhood than with the milieu of the thoroughfare—namely, Christopher Street in Greenwich Village—on which the Lucille Lortel Theater is situated...
...Thus we have two protagonists, Doppelgangern of sorts, each of them a Jewish man lured by the attractions of a gentile woman into a solemn moral predicament...
...By adding a few scenes that take place in a hospital, and by transferring much of the beauty-parlor action to M'Lynn's house (and, in the climactic sequence, to a cemetery), Harling lends credibility to the catastrophe at the center of his story, making it—as well as the beauty parlor—seem less of a structural artifice than it does in the play...
...This is not the first time, moreover, that Allen has placed tenuously connected plots alongside each other: Hannah and Her Sisters is the most notable previous example...
...though his message is presumably that, in order to behave decently, we must believe God's eyes are on us, he doesn't convince us for a minute that it's a lack of religious conviction that makes possible Judah and Clifford's ethical waverings...
...Not since Mayberry, on the old "Andy Griffith Show," has anyone committed to celluloid a more thoroughly caucasian Southern burg...
...Clifford and Halley exchange similarly weighty remarks...
...And they're funny, too: the catty crosstalk is consistently entertaining...
...Judah—the public Judah, anyway—is plainly Allen's idea of what every man would like to be...
...But the stories in that film fit together in a way that the stories of Judah and Clifford don't...
...T he big disappointment is Sally .1 Field, who fails' to have a single natural moment as M'Lynn, her accent wandering all over the place (but then, so did those in Gone With the Wind: bad Southern accents are a proud tradition of Hollywood movies) and her Big Scene toward the end of the movie coming across as little more than a bid for a third Oscar...
...To his horror, he's tempted to call his lowlife brother Jack (Jerry Orbach)—who knows how to arrange a rub-out and has no qualms about doing so...
...I'm just saying this odd deficiency robs the movie of realism...
...He doesn't even convince us that this is what he believes...
...Throughout Crimes and Misdemeanors, one feels strangely distant from the characters, many of whom conform too tidily to Allen prototypes...
...The questions before us: Will Judah order a hit on Dolores...
...And would his fear of Miriam's wrath really cause him to contemplate murder...
...the celebration of movies as both reality's mirror and its escape hatch...
...And ideas is the operative word here...
...Will Clifford desert Wendy in short order and hit on Halley...
...Judah's father with his handy aphorisms), and many of the motivations dubious...
...As a friend of mine commented, "I wish I had a nickel for every scene in a Woody Allen movie where he proposes marriage to somebody in Central Park...
...Whereas Judah's debates over whether to have Dolores slaughtered are relatively brief, mannerly, and low-key (coming off as little more than pro for-ma), Clifford's hysterical carryings-on about Halley seem interminable...
...What to do...
...You keep expecting her to look into the camera and wail: "Do you still like me...
...Their connection feels entirely theoretical...
...Ben counters that it manifests a "moral structure and higher power...
...Crimes and Misdemeanors pays homage to the Almighty, in short, in the same superficial way that earlier Allen films have paid homage to Bergman and Fellini...
...Would Judah really have gotten entangled with a dreary harridan like Dolores...
...As for Shirley MacLaine, she's dreadfully miscast as Ouiser, andher presence makes one realize how similar this story is to her schlocky Terms of Endearment, the main difference being that the eccentric, misanthropic, fanatically possessive mother of that movie splits in two here, into the eccentric, misanthropic Ouiser and the fanatically possessive mother M'Lynn...
...It would've helped, too, if instead of opting for the usual big-budget glossy-realistic cinematography, the filmmakers had gone for photography that was just a bit more stylized (or, at least, nearer to the look of sex lies and videotape, which captured Louisiana nicely without hitting you over the head with atmosphere...
...Murder is in the air here, but the ultimate sin in Allen's world is plainly not homicide but fornication...
...When M'Lynn's family suffers a crisis, her mate folds up helplessly, and to her surprise she's the one who hangs tough...
...This Bruce Bawer is The American Spectator's movie reviewer...
...THE TALKIES MANHATTAN MELODRAMA, BAYOU BANTER W oody Allen's Crimes and Misdemeanors begins with a black-tie banquet at which Judah Rosenthal (Martin Landau), a sixtyish, affluent, distinguished-looking New York ophthalmologist, is being saluted for his fundraising efforts on behalf of a new hospital wing...
...Meanwhile, another marriage—between Ben's aloof, cranky sister Wendy (Joanna Gleason) and her filmmaker husband Clifford (Woody Allen)—is also on the ropes...
...Lester, for example, is a vapid retread of the Tony Roberts character in Annie Hall...
...And the best thing he has going for him, it would seem, is his long and happy marriage to the lovely Miriam (Claire Bloom...
...The cast is a mixed bag: Dolly Parton is splendidly right for Truvy, whose motto is "There's no such thing as natural beauty," and Olympia Dukakis does a perfect job as Clairee, the rich, gracious, quip-happy widow of the town's longtime mayor...
...Annelle, her bashful assistant, has just been deserted by a husband who's wanted on drug charges...
...But the neat little part of Annelle is wasted on Daryl Hannah (Flannery O'Connor would've understood this role, but Daryl doesn't), and Julia (Mystic Pizza) Roberts barely makes an impression as Shelby...
...Unbeknownst to Miriam, Judah's been having an affair for over two years with a dumpy middle-aged stewardess named Dolores Paley (Anjelica Huston...
...I'm not quota-mongering, you understand...
...They're all tough, these delicate flowers of Dixie (thus, of course, the title...
...Judah, we learn, finds the world "harsh and empty of values and pitiless...
...Indeed, the title Crimes and Misdemeanors might be seen as something of a variation on the title Love and Death, with the emphasis this time being not on emotional abstraction but on morally meaningful action: the misdemeanor being adultery, the crime murder...
...Levy (whose big surprise later in the picture is no surprise at all if you've seen La Dolce Vita) recalls the aging artist played by Max Von Sydow in Hannah and Her Sisters...
...unstable dame is threatening to tattle not only to Miriam but to the hospital authorities (into whose funds, it appears, Judah unwisely dipped a while back when he was having cash-flow problems...
...Plainly, love and death remain Allen's major themes...
...The point is clear: men are thoughtless, childish, irresponsible—and they're not even the one thing they're supposed to be, strong...
...and as the play opens, M'Lynn's daughter, Shelby, is about to wed a selfish young lawyer...
...yet Cif-ford's more interested in getting the series' associate producer, Halley Reed (Mia Farrow), with whom he finds himself becoming infatuated, to back his work-in-progress on the elderly philosopher...
...This gauche, unintentionally daffy equation of great art and la dolce vita is vintage Allen...
...the stiff, devout name-dropping of bygone artists, composers, and poets (and of that supreme temple of learning, Columbia University...
...Directed by Herbert Ross from a script by Harling, the movie version of Steel Magnolias stays close to the text of the play (though some of the more caustic lines about men and religion have been omitted) while opening up the action quite effectively...
...One wonders why the producers of Steel Magnolias bothered to drag this predominantly Yankee cast down bayou way: though it was shot in the author's hometown of Natchitoches, the film only intermittently captures the flavor of the Deep South...
...Judah and Clifford lust after shiksas in the same way they lust after (respectively) high and pop Western culture...
...one would've liked to see Tess Harper, Christine Lahti, or Jessica Lange take a stab at it...
...It seems no coincidence that Judah's favorite composer is Schubert—an Austrian!—and that Clifford is seen viewing a movie with the definitive Wasp title of Mr...
...A number of other big new sequences, furthermore—among them Shelby's wedding, a Christmas festival, and a riverside Easter get-together—are fitting and funny, even if the sight gags (e.g., a wedding cake with gray frosting in the shape of an armadillo) do fall a tad too often into the category of Southern tawdry-grotesque, Beth Henley division...
...Underneath all the gags, his is a harsh Old Testament world in which the Jewish husband is sinner and the infidel woman the occasion of sin...
...It's not long before you know you're in Woody Allen territory: when a colleague raises a toast, he hails Judah as a man who can tell you the name of "the best hotel in Moscow, the best restaurant in Paris, the best recording of a particular Mozart symphony...
...quite simply, it's a top-notch amusement—a genuinely diverting movie at a time when funny film comedy can seem as rare as magnolias in January...
...This pattern of symbolic references is grotesquely overdone and thoroughly mechanical, a textbook example of symbolism-by-the-textbook...
...Ouiser, a wealthy, cantankerous regular patron, has been so embittered by two lousy marriages that she shows affection onlyto her mangy dog...
...they may reflect Allen's enchantment with by Bruce Ba xer a single set of ideas, but they don't strike one as authentic components of a single vision...
...Truth to tell, Allen is far more captivated by the misdemeanor of sexual dalliance than by the high crime of murder...
...And rather than commission the syrupy standard Movie Music that has been provided by Georges Delerue (Jules et Jim, Julia, A Little Romance), they might've done better to slap together a score out of the sort of country-and-western tunes that Harling's play uses as a bridge...
...While waiting to find out what Judah and Clifford will do, we listen in on lots of Philosophy 101 chitchat...
...and Mrs...
...But the film is in many respects an improvement over the two-acter...
...What damages the film more than anything, however, is its posture toward Judah's and Clifford's respective transgressions...
...But Allen's apparent newfound esteem for Jehovah feels slick, insincere...
...M'Lynn, another regular, is married to a goofball who spends every spare moment shooting at birds and beasts...
...Louis Levy (Martin Bergmann...
...In what seems a last-ditch attempt to turn Clifford around, Wendy arranges for him to do a profile of Lester for a public TV series...
...Contributing to the devastation is Allen's most fully orchestrated attempt yet at symbolism, wherein everybody in the picture makes constant references to eyes, blindness, vision, and the like, all of which are meant to allude to a frequently quoted remark by Judah's late father, a rabbi (seen in flashback), to the effect that "the eyes of God are on us always...
...Woody Allen is, as ever, Woody Allen, but here, more than usually, he counts on our previous acquaintance with and presumed affection for him to give his character dimension and empathy...
...Interiors and September were exceptions...
Vol. 23 • February 1990 • No. 2
