Postscript to the '80s

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

CRIMES AND MISDEMEANORS Directed and Written by Woody Allen

Judah Rosenthal (Martin Landau) is possessed by a primal memory: a rabbi instructing the boy Judah that the eye of God is all seeing; no crime ever escapes it. Now successful and middle aged, Judah self-deprecatingly suggests to the audience at a testimonial dinner on his behalf that perhaps he became an ophthalmologist because he is haunted by that recollection.

Seeing is also a subject that Cliff Stern (Woody Allen) takes seriously. A documentary filmmaker, he is driven not by God but by the demands of an unyielding conscience to make his camera -- his eye -- bear witness to the inequities of his careless time.

/ Cliff's only connection to Judah -- until the concluding sequence of this thematically unified but somewhat bifurcated movie -- is through Ben, another rabbi (Sam Waterston), who is one of Cliff's brothers-in-law. The rabbi is Judah's patient, and his eye trouble is quite literal; by the end of the movie he has gone blind. But this blindness is also symbolic. By visiting this affliction on the only character in his movie who has remained close to God, Allen is suggesting that if the Deity himself is not dead, then he must be suffering from severely impaired vision.

All the crimes and misdemeanors Allen records in this film go not merely unpunished; they are generously rewarded. Upstairs, on the melodramatic story line, a hypocritical Judah gets away with murder, arranging for the assassination of his mistress (Anjelica Huston), who threatens to make their affair -- and his equally shabby financial affairs -- public, thereby destroying his family, wealth and reputation.

Downstairs, on the funny line, is Cliff's other brother-in-law Lester, a sleek TV producer (played by Alan Alda in a gloriously fashioned comic performance). He offers Cliff a sinecure: filming a documentary that will make Lester look like a philosopher-king among the pompous nitwits who produce prime-time TV. Cliff agrees, but because he tries to turn Lester's story into a truthful expose, the project collapses. Along the way he loses the woman he loves (Mia Farrow), as well as a serious film to which he had been profoundly committed.

This is the funny stuff? Yes, because Allen puts a deliberately farcical spin on Cliff's frenzies. It is good showmanship, a way of relieving the itchy ironies of Judah's discomfiting story. It also rings with irony. If neither Judah's guilty musings on his own crimes -- and he does exhibit a strong desire to be caught and punished -- nor decent Cliff's frantic quest for some kind of fulfillment can awaken heaven's sleeping eye, then what in this world can? If Manhattan, coming at the end of the '70s, was Woody Allen's comment on that decade's besetting sin, self-absorption, then this is his concluding unscientific postscript on the besetting sin of the '80s, greed. At times the joints in the movie's carpentry are strained, at times the mood swings jarring. But they stir us from our comfortable stupor and vivify a true, moral, always acute and often hilarious meditation on the psychological economy of the Reagan years.