from the new york times

Crimes and Misdemeanors, New From Woody Allen
By VINCENT CANBY
Published: October 13, 1989

LEAD: Judah Rosenthal (Martin Landau), a successful Manhattan ophthalmologist, and his best friend, Ben (Sam Waterston), a rabbi, are discussing what one of them describes as ”a small infidelity” when they suddenly are confronting the meaning of existence.

Judah Rosenthal (Martin Landau), a successful Manhattan ophthalmologist, and his best friend, Ben (Sam Waterston), a rabbi, are discussing what one of them describes as ”a small infidelity” when they suddenly are confronting the meaning of existence.

Lester (Alan Alda), a crass, hugely successful television producer, cannot resist defining comedy in the broad terms beloved by interviewers but which often mean nothing at all. Sometimes he says that ”comedy is tragedy, plus time” or he may say that ”if it bends, it’s comedy. If it breaks it isn’t.”

When Halley (Mia Farrow), an admiring would-be television producer, describes Lester as ”a phenomenon of our time,” Cliff Stern (Woody Allen) says simply, ”So is acid rain.” Cliff is a gloomy producer of documentaries no one wants to see. A short film he made about leukemia once won a bottle of French Champagne.

The principal characters in ‘Crimes and Misdemeanors,’ Mr. Allen’s most securely serious and funny film to date, have a way of jumping headlong from the specific to the general, trying to place themselves in some larger system of things.

So, too, does Mr. Allen, and never before has he made the leap with more self-assurance than in this adventurous dramatic comedy, which is a kind of companion piece to ”Hannah and Her Sisters.” He hits the bull’s-eye again.

‘Crimes and Misdemeanors,’ opening today at Loews Tower East and other theaters, recalls ”Hannah” in that it has the richness and breadth of a novel, told with the concision of a densely packed short story. Like ”Hannah,” it’s about families, though about brothers rather than sisters.

‘Crimes and Misdemeanors‘ is also about love and death, lust and murder, and attempts to reconcile religious faith in a world where it’s now taken for granted that E-mc#2.

The film manages to embrace the lives of a dozen disparate characters, for whom Mr. Landau’s Judah Rosenthal becomes the pivotal figure. When first seen, Judah is the special guest at a gala dinner honoring his work in behalf of science and humanity. Judah is an ideal honoree. He is successful and handsome and his manner smooth. On a dais he looks the role.

He tells stories easily. He recalls that when he was a little boy his father used to frighten him by saying that God’s eyes could see everything. No wonder, he says to appreciative laughter, that he became an ophthalmologist.

Judah is a little too good to be true. He is, in fact, a fraud. What makes him interesting is that he knows it.

He has been carrying on an affair for several years with the once adoring, now increasingly hysterical Dolores (Anjelica Huston), a former flight attendant who screams at him about the career opportunities she gave up for him. Dolores also knows that Judah hasn’t been entirely ethical in the way he has used contributions to the hospital wing he has sponsored.

Judah’s world is otherwise composed of his children; his beautiful wife (Claire Bloom), who is so forbidding in her perfection that she may be in part responsible for the terrible deed that comes to haunt the film; his black-sheep brother, Jack (Jerry Orbach), who has mob connections; his best friend, the genuinely good Ben, and the members of Ben’s family.

These include Ben’s brother Lester and sister Wendy (Joanna Gleason), who is the loveless and very bored wife of Mr. Allen’s Cliff Stern. Through them the world of the film also touches on the lives of Miss Farrow’s Halley, Cliff’s lonely sister Barbara (Caroline Aaron), and a Holocaust survivor, an old Jewish philosopher named Louis Levy (Martin Bergmann), who is seen only in film clips.

This is a large number of characters for one film to keep straight and, at the beginning, it is not easy sorting out the relationships. The wonder of ‘Crimes and Misdemeanors‘ is the facility with which Mr. Allen deals with so many interlocking stories of so many differing tones and voices. The film cuts back and forth between parallel incidents and between present and past with the effortlessness of a hip, contemporary Aesop.

The movie’s secret strength – its structure, really – comes from the truth of the dozens and dozens of particular details through which it arrives at its own very hesitant, not especially comforting, very moving generality.

‘Crimes and Misdemeanors‘ is almost entirely concerned with the members of an upper-middle-class Jewish society that is indigenous to our time and place. Its characters are aware of traditions they cannot always honor, some without compunction, others with only the gravest consequences.

In what is possibly the movie’s most expressive moment, Judah finds himself recalling a seder when he was a boy, when his father and a chain-smoking, militantly leftist aunt have a grand family row about the place of faith in a world that demands social activism.

Though Mr. Landau is splendid in the key role of Judah, it’s Mr. Allen’s presence that fuses the various elements, and that, in the film’s fine penultimate scene, sets up the coda that is the bittersweet final image.

The writer and director continues to be his own most vital on-screen force. The role of Cliff Stern is not large, but it functions as the film’s pomposity detector, keeping the film on course when it might veer into bathos.

No one performance, however, eclipses any other. All of the actors have been given rich material, but among these equals, some are are a little more equal than others, if only because their roles are so splashy.

Mr. Alda is priceless as the archetypal Hollywood producer. No scene is funnier than the one in which he and Mr. Allen sit in a screening room watching the mocking, ”authorized” documentary that Mr. Allen’s Cliff has been making about Mr. Alda’s Lester for a television series called ”The Creative Mind.”

Miss Farrow, too, is a standout, but then Miss Huston, Miss Gleason, Mr. Orbach, Miss Aaron, Mr. Waterston and Mr. Bergmann also stand out. ”Crimes and Misdemeanors” is truly an ensemble piece.

The most breathtaking line, reported in its entirety, but which cannot be explained here: ”I’ve gone out the window.” At this juncture in the film, Mr. Allen reverses himself, leaping from the general back to the utterly basic. It’s a memorable moment in a memorable film.