Screen
O'Brien, Tom
SCREEN TOOTH & CLAW 'CRIMES' & 'THE BEAR' In Crimes and Misdemeanors, Woody Allen tries to be profound; often he succeeds. This is due largely to his writing and directing and to Martin Landau's...
...The film doesn't engage in the cliched defamation of man practiced by some environmental zealots nor does it elevate one species at the expense of others (the whole source of the problem of ecocide...
...There are many people around who think Woody Allen (after several disasters rooted in his hyperintellectuality) is a great director...
...Like the young of many mammal species, bear cubs are cute: they frolic, nuzzle, frisk about, then conk out cold and sleep like logs...
...dogs and the puma are cruel to bears...
...In the second plot of the story, Allen relives the woesome love life of yet another of his schlemiel incarnations...
...Things have changed...
...Nature has not been treated kindly in films of the eighties...
...if he had less confidence about that, he might be better...
...Hannah is one of the best films of the decade...
...The filmmakers choose not to ignore many of the harsh facts of nature: bears are cruel to horses and dogs...
...it's a zoological version of the new "baby" movies...
...Only someone who looks on film hyperintellectually could try to float Crimes's abstract design, then try to get by with fusing the plots by the thinnest of narrative links...
...The bear hunters pursuing Bart and Douce are simple, quiet men driven by economic imperatives, not greed or cruelty...
...it's Hawkeye as a wisecracking monster...
...Robots and computers, not animals, were the pets on screen...
...His source is a Canadian novel by James Oliver Curwood, The Grizzly King...
...The issue is serious since it goes to the heart of haute couture false taste, the kind of showiness that is currently killing the teaching of literature: intellectual overesteem for pretension, brainy allusion, and nonstop wit...
...new movies on environmental heroes are already in the works...
...one even has special affection for his airedale...
...in Hannah, he even dared to say homes can be happy...
...But a great deal of what he touches doesn't turn into gold...
...Bill Cosby's Leonard Part VI vilified animal activists...
...He's good...
...Huston won't accept rejection and threatens to ruin him...
...The film's sentimentality lies in its fable: in the British Columbia wilderness, a bear cub (Douce) loses his mother, then adopts a wounded male grizzly (Bart) as a substitute parent...
...Nor does the double-plotting work as well as it did in Hannah and Her Sisters, which fused irony and lyricism...
...A good herald of the new age is Jean Jacques Annaud's The Bear, which, despite some cloyingly sentimental moments, is a simple and beautiful burst of northwest wind to open the pores of the spirit...
...Tragedy is comedy plus time," Alda cracks at one point...
...Ghostbusters pilloried an EPA bureaucrat who wanted to tie up Bill Murray's entrepreneurialism in red tape...
...Even in a zoo, their spirit captivates their captors with its special comic grace...
...He does in Landau's half of the story...
...Never Cry Wolf, Koyaanisqatsi, and Gorillas in the Mist stand as brave exceptions in a period when Hollywood treated the envi-ronment with benign neglect and a Hollywood president said, "trees cause pollution too...
...on this level, The Bear is worse than a Disney film...
...While this has bite, the breakup of Allen's marriage, his philandering with Mia Farrow (a producer), and competition with Alda for her hand have as much bounce as a medicine ball...
...Check out the allusion to Joyce in Crimes: it's a symbol of the problem...
...Fortunately, Allen doesn't make Alda's smarminess likable...
...This is due largely to his writing and directing and to Martin Landau's performance as a New York doctor who considers murdering someone...
...The result is a startling freshness of perspective...
...It's hard to figure out exactly why...
...Bart and Douce may not be members of the Actors' Guild but they are fine performers, whose mimicry of their trainers and each other makes for one of the most credible animal movies in years...
...The heart of film is storytelling, where Allen can often excel...
...only a few men (bear hunters on Bart's track) are involved...
...the rest of the dramatis personae are dogs, deer, and one sleek puma...
...Landau feels that he has gone on too long with a mistress (Angelica Huston...
...he captures a serious tone without the forced moodiness that dominated his past imitations of Bergman {Interiors...
...nature is bloody red in tooth and claw (though Annaud does censor direct views of torn bodies...
...Landau makes you feel his own nausea at what he considers doing...
...To parallel tragedy and comedy is quite a different matter...
...Allen's direction of this sudden eruption of mortal sin in an ordinary, at worst, mediocre life has compelling power...
...he wants the comfort of a simpler relation with his wife (the ever so radiant Claire Bloom...
...an animal sex scene goes beyond Disney only to end up plain hokey...
...he's not...
...Allen plays a New York documentary filmmaker shooting a movie on his more famous brother-in-law, a comedian played by Alan Alda (who partly plays himself...
...Many of Allen's recent movies undercut liberal fundamentalism...
...Reversing his usual strength and weakness, Allen is better here at melodrama than comedy...
...The best that art can do with such a subject is catch its simplicity with dignity TOM O'BRIEN...
...Crimes's power is rooted in Landau's memories of growing up Jewish and his regrets that he did not listen to his father's moral strictures...
...Annaud anthropomorphically imagines dreams for Douce...
...No: tragedy has a different texture, into which comic relief can erupt...
...In Crimes, there is a clear, uncluttered sense of what sin is, enough to touch the soul...
...There are some excessively sentimental touches...
...Still, I can't imagine how anyone could make a film about a bear cub and avoid cuteness...
...I was moved...
...The Bear's strength lies in technique: Annaud, who tried to catch the experiences of primitive man in Quest for Fire, here convincingly shoots the film to catch life from a bear's point of view...
...The Bear recalls one of the best seventies' nature documentaries, the wordless La Territoire des Autres...
...Even with some fine lines ("God is a luxury I can't afford," Landau says), Allen endows the tale with a moral austerity that gives it a genuine "existential" flavor...
...Much of the screenplay is silent, but for grunts and whimpers...
...Not an evil man, he nevertheless considers bumping her off...
Vol. 116 • December 1989 • No. 22
