Woody Allen’s quest for the meaning of life in his movies after his early period makes an existentialist peak with Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989). Just like Bergman comes up with a conclusion that “God is a spider” in his quest for God with Through a Glass Darkly, Woody Allen finalizes his efforts to overcome his understanding of the universe as an ‘empty void’ in Crimes and Misdemeanors. Eliminating all the remedies that he thought would be an exit to a meaningless life, in this movie he surrenders to ‘reality’. It is such a reality that no real feelings for love or arts can survive in it. All kinds of moral systems that are supposed to create a greater sense of belonging fail to achieve the aim of leading a meaningful life. In other words, Allen proves in Crimes and Misdemeanors that every individual has his/her own set of values that lulls them into a life-long dream which has no general values that are applicable to everyone in it. The themes of religion, love and art are investigated again in this movie and that investigation led to the outcome of a cruel reality in which ‘appearances’ win the battle against the ‘souls’.
Crimes and Misdemeanors follows two separate stories that do not intersect until the last ten minutes of the film. The first one is the story of an ophthalmologist, Judah (Martin Landau), who gets his mistress murdered in order not to be exposed to her threats anymore to announce their relationship to his wife. The second one is the story of Cliff (Woody Allen), a documentary filmmaker, who is unhappy in his marriage and falls in love with Halley (Mia Farrow). Although the stories do not intersect till the end, the characters in the two stories struggle with similar questions and converge to the same conclusion of the importance of how one appears to be in this world rather than caring about how one really is. The characters with a greater concern for the true feelings in both stories either die, or doomed to solitude.
In order to analyze Woody Allen’s set up for the reality that prospers the appearances in contrast to the ones who seek for a deeper true value in life, it will be appropriate to go into details with the main characters of both stories. The first story evolves on the axis of Judah in relation to his mistress Dolores (Anjelica Houston), his rabbi friend Ben (Sam Waterston), and his brother Jack (Jerry Orbach). In the opening scene we see Judah with his family at a dinner that he is going to be honored for his success in his career. Woody Allen gives the outline of the story right in the first scenes in which Judah finds the letter that Dolores had written to his wife and in the following scene with Judas’s speech at the dinner. Judah says in that speech “I am a man of science. I have always been a skeptic, but I was raised quite religiously. I challenged it even as a child, but some of that feeling must have had stuck with me.” From that speech and with the knowledge of him having an affair, the viewer is already introduced to Judah’s twisted moral values in the first five minutes of the movie. Judah follows his speech with the lines “I remember my father telling me, ‘The eyes of God are always on us.’ The eyes of God! What a phrase to a young boy.” With the reference to the eyes that can see everything, Allen starts to construct the theme of eyesight in relation to the ability to see the reality emphasized by Judah’s skepticism.
On the opposite side to Judah, there is Dolores, who has no ability to see her reflection on the other eyes. Judah, raised with the fear of being seen from God, has developed a sense of looking upon himself as an image, which later relates to his profession. In contrast, Dolores was raised without the notion of her image because she was told, by her mother that her eyes were actually the windows of her soul that enable her to be visible to everyone. This is also the reason why Dolores is blinded by her love and desire because she lacks the ability -- a prosperous ability for Allen’s ‘reality’ in Crimes and Misdemeanors-- to see herself from an outer point, that is to say she has no notion of a collision between the image of herself and her real self. In that sense, Dolores can be categorized on the losers’ side of the battle between the ‘appearances’ and the ‘souls’.
Ben the rabbi is on a different side of the set-up. He represents the character that Judah would have become if he did not approach skeptically to his father’s teachings. Given that Woody Allen’s moral system does not in any ways based on religious beliefs, Ben is reflected as a person that goes blind. His blindness is a metaphor to the illusion that he is living in. Like Dolores, Ben also does not have a collision between his image and his self because, unlike Dolores, he does not have a notion of his real self anymore. By looking upon himself from God’s eyes, he lost his self and totally became the image that he wants to show to God. Again in Allen’s reality, although Ben goes blind, he is an extreme example of ‘appearances’ in the sense that he is able to lead a life without the existential difficulties that the ‘souls’ are facing.
The second story evolves on the axis of Cliff in relation to Professor Levi (Martin S. Bergmann), his brother-in-law Lester (Alan Alda), and Halley. References to their eyesight is, again strong in this story, although they are not as extreme as in the first story. Cliff and Professor Levi wear glasses as a metaphor to show that they look at the world behind a set of philosophically investigated values. In the beginning of the story we also see Halley with glasses but later she takes them off to refer to a change in her set of values. In this story there is a stronger emphasis on the eyes related to a camera view, that is to say seeing the world through some lenses. Cliff, Halley and Lester are all in media scene whether in front of the camera or behind it. Additionally, Professor Levy in the film is only seen through Cliff’s camera. This difference in the two stories shows that with the first story Allen again investigates the theme of religion, which he had already come up with an answer in his previous movies that religion cannot be the meaning of life. With the second story he investigates the themes of love and arts that he somehow favored before as possible solutions to his existential deadlock. It is obvious in Crimes and Misdemeanors that Allen loses his optimism on those solutions as well.
Although Woody Allen claims that he made the movie based on two different stories in order to spice up the murder story with some funny elements presented in Cliff’s story, the second story is not a cheerful one too. The viewer follows the failure of Cliff’s pure love when it is rejected by Halley. Additionally, his art is left unfinished because the whole story that Cliff build upon Professor Levi about the possibilities of a happy and peaceful life collapsed with the professor’s sudden decision to kill himself. It is at least encouraging to know that Woody Allen, the auteur, kept making movies after such a pessimistic peak.
The two stories proceed in parallel in the movie, since there is no interaction between them until the last scene. Allen uses movie footages to create a passage from one story to the other. The passages occur in the form of Cliff’s education on his niece through the cinema history. Allen uses related scenes from the movies like Mr. and Mrs. Smith, This Gun for Fire, Happy Go Lucky and The Last Gangster based on the scenes’ resemblance to the previous scene in Judah’s story and moves on with Cliff’s story. He also uses the film footage of Mussolini’s in Cliff’s portrait of Lester. Else than the footages he has the recourse to a flashback that was mentioned above as bergmanesque, his cinematographer being Sven Nykvist, and Professor Levi’s voiceover on a series of scenes from the previous parts of the movie in the end.
“We're all faced throughout our lives with agonizing decisions, moral choices. Some are on a grand scale, most of these choices are on lesser points. But we define ourselves by the choices we have made. We are, in fact, the sum total of our choices. Events unfold so unpredictably, so unfairly, Human happiness does not seem to be included in the design of creation. It is only we, with our capacity to love that give meaning to the indifferent universe. And yet, most human beings seem to have the ability to keep trying and even try to find joy from simple things, like their family, their work, and from the hope that future generations might understand more.”
