Screen

...John Malkovich is rather fascinating to watch because he is so bad that he comes across as mentally impaired...

...That witty fantasy dealt with a human chameleon, a man without a distinct personality who took on the characteristics of whatever milieu he encountered...

...Commonweal 8 May 1992: 19 For this story of how certain citizens of a nameless Central European town in a period that may be the 1920s respond to the onslaught of a murderous psycho, Di Palma has rendered the ingredients of the title voluptuously, in delicious layers and various shades of grey, white, and black...

...As a moviemaker, Allen has that tendency himself...

...You merely shudder to think whose throat he will be slitting next...

...But Allen makes the killer such a specific psycho that, far from accepting him as a symbol or an elemental force, you merely want to see the nut locked up...

...Loyalty seems to be the only thing he has commanded from them...

...But, paradoxically, Di Palma's skill emphasizes rather than mitigates the ineptitude of every other element in the movie...

...Similarly, in a subplot, a clown (John Malkovich) from a visiting circus troupe lives in a marital hell with his sword-swallowing wife (Mia Farrow)—a situation that recalls Bergman's The Naked Night...

...The overall situation of the insane killer threatening a community seems meant to portray the condition of mankind living under the shadow of death...

...His comic timing, both as actor and as director, is absent, and he has let himself be dominated by his own cinematographer...

...he just trades in his hero's situation for a more frenetic one when Kleinman is preposterously accused of being the killer...

...Once he abandons his own voice, he stutters...

...A group of prostitutes discussing the clientele is seated roughly in a circle...

...Kafkaesque themes are introduced only to be dropped midway through in favor of other themes which are also dropped before the movie is over...

...Shadows and Fog must be the worst acted American film of the last few years...

...So, like Kafka's Joseph K., he awaits his charge and, as in a Kafka novel, it never comes...

...Like a weakling son who slouches and mumbles in the presence of a domineering parent, Allen is unnerved by the spiritual presence of the presiding genius that he himself has invoked...

...the camera takes a 360 degree tour of the countenances of the women with the camera coming to rest in turn on the face of each whore just as she contributes her bit to the discussion...

...But, as I have noted, in a figurative presence of a master like Bergman, Allen turns into a boy...

...There's something distasteful about Allen's propensity for cramming as many hot properties as possible into one movie...

...But again, that killer is too specific to haul such symbolic freight...

...How colorful black-and-white can be...

...When he is first magically disarmed by a magician (another steal from Bergman, this time The Magician) and then evaporates into thin air, you get the symbolic point: art can divert us from death but cannot defeat it...

...And, though the lighting is magisterial, the placement of the camera (ultimately, the director's responsibility) is not...

...It's as if the actors were being used not for their talents but just to show that the director can command their loyalty even when he casts them in small parts...

...I detest the mousiness that Allen has imposed on Mia Farrow in their last few collaborations, and it is particularly out of place here since she is playing a circus performer used to working crowds...

...It's a photographic stunt that not only fails to illuminate the meaning of the scene but actually contradicts it...

...Shadows and Fog has an all-star cast: Mia Farrow, John Malkovich, John Cusack, Madonna, Jodie Foster, Kathy Bates, Lily Tomlin, Julie Kavner, Kate Nelligan, et...

...But Woody is simply not a very good mimic...

...The women are supposed to be relating to each other with their complaints and mockery of the male sex but the panning camera instead isolates each female in space and turns her face into a monstrous portrait a la Diane Arbus...

...Stardust Memories, Radio Days, Alice (Fellini mode...

...Actually, more than one master is evoked, for elements of the story are drawn from Kafka as well as Bergman...

...The differences between the couple seem irreconcilable until the woman discovers an orphaned baby and her husband immediately becomes a doting father...

...With Shadows and Fog, Allen is back in his Bergman mode and he has never been so pathetically imitative...

...Thus, a Strindbergian couple is suddenly transformed into the holy family model out of The Seventh Seal...

...Every so often he tries to turn into Federico Fellini or Ingmar Bergman, and the results constitute about half—pretty much the weaker half—of the corpus of Allen's work: Interiors, A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy, September, Another Woman (all in the Bergman mode...

...Allen as a wormy little clerk named Kleinman (a K hero, get it...

...But Allen doesn't have the courage of his own thievery...

...He has momentarily lost his sense of the way people talk and move and react...

...Allen himself dithers tiresomely...

...One might expect this from a student filmmaker drunk on the newly discovered resources of his medium but not from a seasoned director like Allen...

...One scene, in particular, may haunt me forever with its stupid, pointless virtuosity...

...I'm not here repeating the old canard about Allen being authentic only when he's funny, for he was capable of making the fine somber film, Crimes and Misdemeanors...

...To be sure, that cameraman is the superb Carlo Di Palma, and thanks to him and to designer Santo Loquasto, this movie has a certain visual flair even if it is a nonstarter in every other respect...

...How wise Camus was to make the ubiquity of death a matter of microbes in The Plague...

...RICHARD ALLEVA Commonweal 8 May 1992: 21...

...But, unlike Kafka, Allen doesn't explore the tensions of such a psychological purgatory...

...In each gorgeous frame everyone and everything is so swathed and nuanced by the most delicate use of light and shadow that you are constantly struck by the incongruity of the undergraduate script and acting...

...is drafted into a vigilante organization trying to apprehend the killer and is told that he will receive his orders from an unknown superior quite soon...

...Jodie Foster working up a cackle that is supposed to be sensuously all-knowing and Julie Kavner, sawing the air and disobeying each of Hamlet's dicta to the players, are particularly revolting...

...Pure cop-out...

...Only John 20: 8 May 1992 Commonweal Cusack, as a serenely self-absorbed rich kid, gives the audience something and someone interesting to watch...