CRIMES AND MISDEMEANORS —-“My ex-husband and I fell in love at first sight. Maybe I should’ve taken a second look”, says ‘Halley Reed’ (Mia Farrow) in writer-director Woody Allen’s offering to 1989. Plenty of chuckle-inducing lines pepper the dialogue, as expected in an Allen comedy, but this one, threading several storylines thru its urban existential anxiety thread, has one that isn’t played for laughs, serious material about a serious man in a seriously f-‘d situation. It was so keenly done that it got Martin Landau an Oscar nomination for Supporting Actor, while Woody also was up for Direction and Screenplay.

Allen:”Of all the actors I’ve ever worked with, he gives expression to my dialogue exactly as I hear it. His colloquialisms, his idiom, his inflection is exactly correct….He never misunderstands what a line should sound like. I’ve worked with some pretty terrific actors, but he just makes it sound the way I wrote it.”

New York—where else? Esteemed ophthalmologist and family man ‘Judah Rosenthal’ (Landau, 60) makes the mistake of getting involved with flight attendant ‘Dolores Paley’ (Anjelica Huston, 37) whose initially arresting aura turns needy and desperate to the point of destructive. Judah turns for help to his brother ‘Jack’ (Jerry Orbach, 53), who has underworld ‘associates’ who can fix Judah’s problem quicker and easier than counseling. While this finality option plays havoc with Judah’s conscience, in another part of town—equally upscale and cutthroat but veneered with self-adulatory showbizzy gloss and ‘artistic purity’—jaded documentary filmmaker ‘Cliff Stern’ (Allen, 52) subjects himself to working on a kiss-up autobio of his pompous brother-in-law ‘Lester’ (Alan Alda, 52) a much-praised TV producer. His marriage to Lester’s sister going nowhere, Cliff gets a yen for ‘Halley Reed’ (Farrow, 43) Lester’s associate producer, but she’s shy to commit.

BARBARA: “You told me it’s been platonic for a year. And I say, once the sex goes, it all goes.”  CLIFF: “It’s true. It’s true. The last time I was inside a woman was when I visited the Statue of Liberty.”

The Judah storyline, played as straight drama, is gripping, with outstanding work from Landau (un-nerved and pathetic), Huston (un-hinged and scary) and Orbach (unfazed and practical—three years away from Law & Order). The Cliff conundrum is shades lighter, marked by acerbic zingers, but like most of Allen’s longing-laced humor, irony is on the plate with the wry self-effacement. Alda notches Lester as smug jerk, Farrow’s relaxed, Woody dialing back the anxiousness. The characters are written and played as mature, bright and sophisticated, but that doesn’t keep them from exhibiting foolishness, self-deception and self-sabotage. Anyone you know?

“Honey, you’re the one who stopped sleeping with me, ok. It’ll be a year come April 20th. I remember the date exactly, because it was Hitler’s birthday.”

“You will notice that what we are aiming at when we fall in love is a very strange paradox. The paradox consists of the fact that, when we fall in love, we are seeking to re-find all or some of the people to whom we were attached as children. On the other hand, we ask our beloved to correct all of the wrongs that these early parents or siblings inflicted upon us. So that love contains in it the contradiction: The attempt to return to the past and the attempt to undo the past.”

Box office for this incisive probe was $18,255,000, 58th for ’89. 104 minutes, with Sam Waterston, Joanna Gleason, Caroline Aaron, Martin S. Bergmann, Claire Bloom (given little to do), Frances Conroy, Nora Ephron and Daryl Hannah.

* Allen: “…there are certain movies of mine that I call ‘novels on film’, and Crimes and Misdemeanors is one of them, wherein a number of characters are being dissected and a number of stories are going on at the same time. Some of these stories can be more humorous, some other stories can be more philosophical. The trick is then to keep all the stories up in the air at the same time, so that you can follow them all and get involved in them all without getting bored.”  “Crimes and Misdemeanors is about people who don’t see. They don’t see themselves as others see them. They don’t see the right and wrong of situations.”

From his script: “We are 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 have been 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 to find joy from simple things like their family, their work, and from the hope that future generations might understand more.”