Woody Wooing a New Muse With ‘Crimes’

The tombstone-style ad Woody Allen has decreed for his new film “Crimes and Misdemeanors” is startling in its lack of startle. No pulsating quotes, no searing ad line, no pretty faces, no drawn gun, no bared bosom; just the title in large letters adrift in a sea of white space, with the cast and crew in much smaller type and Allen’s name nestled inconspicuously among the other players.

A drawn gun and several bared bosoms are implicit although not revealed in the film’s contents, and ad lines of incendiary power would be possible (“When Love Dies . . . The Hard Way,” and so on).

The ad may (or may not) be a distributor’s nightmare. Despite his critical reputation, Allen has never been a consistently big box-office attraction. The ad can also be variously interpreted as one man’s modesty and his earnest rebellion against customary hype, or it can be viewed as a kind of inverted arrogance that says Allen’s work does not require the hard sell.

The truth is that the ad will probably work as well as and conceivably better than another kind of ad would have. Word of mouth sells or kills most films, and Allen has a hard-core following which amplifies word of mouth when Allen is on form.

And the fact is that “Crimes and Misdemeanors” reaffirms Allen’s status as the most persistently personal, original and provocative of all U.S. film makers. It is one of his best films.

As has been said about Ken Russell and a few other obstreperously individualistic creators, Allen’s less successful films are more interesting than most directors’ smooth triumphs. “Interiors,” “September” and “Another Woman” may have fizzled at the box office, but in their examination of characters and relationships and in their capturing of moods and environments they can’t accurately be called failures.

In “Crimes and Misdemeanors,” as Michael Wilmington pointed out in an eloquent review last week, Allen has done what many of his fainter-hearted admirers have beseeched him to do, which is leaven the serious stuff with a few good jokes.

There is a sizable cargo of laughs in “Crimes and Misdemeanors,” some of them Allen’s sardonic one-liners as a failed documentary-maker, scorned husband and rejected lover. More of them derive from the character Allen created for Alan Alda to play (dazzlingly well) as a lecherous, overbearing, egocentric producer of television comedy. Alda will call to mind, at least in the industry, all or part of several real life models.

What is noteworthy about the humor, which leavens the whole piece, is that it exists within Allen’s darkest film yet.

His pessimism has seemed real enough in several of the films. The characters he has played have often as not lost the girl. Like Chaplin’s Tramp, the collective Woody has gone on alone, with a wry joke instead of a strut.

The disappointments Allen rendered on Mia Farrow in “Purple Rose of Cairo,” masked only slightly by his technically ingenious homage to the movies as our principal source of solace, were bitterly cruel.

Allen’s pessimism lifted measurably in “Hannah and Her Sisters,” which glowed with an uncommon family warmth. Yet much of the warmth began, or flowed from, an acceptance of the world as it is and a setting-aside of the infidelities, the estrangements, the disappointments and betrayals of the past. Ripeness, and forgiveness, were all.

In “Crimes and Misdemeanors”--the echoing parallel to the Ingmar Bergman title “Cries and Whispers” is intriguingly close--Allen seems to take the idea of ripeness, of a philosophical acceptance of reality, even further than before.

The film maker Allen plays is making a documentary on a German-Jewish philosopher. With his thick accent, the philosopher can be taken as a parody of an academic type. He is also a comment on the film maker’s unworldliness. On the evidence, PBS would be hesitant to show the documentary at midnight, even if they could get it for nothing.

But the philosopher is saying desperately coherent things, depicting the universe as cold, indifferent and mechanistic, warmed only by such efforts as human beings make to create warmth within it.

The documentary is left unfinished because the philosopher has evidently found the efforts to warm the universe unavailing. The documentary sequence is played off against Allen’s growing infatuation with the production assistant played by Mia Farrow. It is not unlike a magician’s use of indirection, making you realize only later what was really going on.

As reviews have noted, “Crimes and Misdemeanors” is the most melodramatic of Allen’s films: Martin Landau, in another superb performance, conspiring with his brother Jerry Ohrbach in the murder of a discarded mistress who is making trouble.

In this movie Allen is wrestling with a lot of major stuff, love and the death of love, guilt and punishment (if any), and, embracing all else, the question of the existence and nature of God.

It’s hard to think of another film maker who could give us a Seder table argument about an all-seeing God (insisted upon by Allen’s devout father) against a cynical worldly pragmatism voiced by an atheistic aunt.

Ingmar Bergman has often dealt with faith and the death of faith, the pains of spiritual aridity, but never a laugh in a carload, though affecting in other ways.

Allen’s film is first and last an entertainment with all the appurtenances thereof--humor, suspense, drama, conflict. It also offers reverberations that won’t die down, and speculations about living in a world with and without the consoling, chiding idea of God.

Allen has come a long way from humor for its own sake to humor as the carrier of some very somber thoughts.