CRIMES AND MISDEMEANORS

LOOK, I’M WOODY. HOWDY, HOWDY, HOWDY.

Starring Martin Landau and Woody Allen

Trailer

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Why does it keep going back to Melinda and Melinda? That film was a pit full of spikes tipped with liquid rubbish, daring you to find anything decent within its bags of crap acting and desperate attempts at any kind of insight whatsoever. But there’s DNA there, a template buried under the crud that many of Allen’s other films reference or return to; strong women, detailed relationships, the fleeting farce of fate. Alliteration. Melinda and Melinda’s main shtick was the idea of a life divided into comedy and tragedy, but it dressed it like a child in a bin bag and left it to rot and fester under a script marched on by a moron carnival. Crimes and Misdmeanours, filmed over ten years earlier, is better. It’s the McFly to Melinda’s Busted, the Ali G to the later work’s Lee Nelson. The captain man from Space 1999 plays a complete bastard murder-orderer, but he does it with a conflicted brow and series of monologues and facial twitches that make you actually THINK ABOUT THINGS, about consequences, and passion and avoiding the distractions of 1980s fashion. Meanwhile, in a parallel storyline handled with 86% more subtletly than Melinda Woody himself grapples with his own shortcomings, questioning whether the end can ever justify the means and if he can get his little intellectual stick into Mia Farrow again. An attempt to drag the big questions of his beloved Russian novels into his own circle-jerk of navel-gazing, it generally works, if falling into preposterouness from frame to frame. For once Allen’s crutch of humour doesn’t detract from the serious central point, instead providing freedom from the claustrophobic nature of Landau’s storyline, whilst the conclusions it reaches reveal the sadness that clog the decisions that everyone makes. When he’s attempted to make grand statements before he’s tripped into aloofness, but here Allen keeps a steady keel and a compelling examination down to the final beats of another excellent soundtrack. When he’s on, he’s on.