Awake in the Dark: The Best of Roger Ebert (18 page)

There was a table at Elaine's restaurant that was always understood to be Woody's. Often it stood empty in the event that he might arrive. Late one night, Elaine gave the table to Chaz and me, observing that Woody was apparently not coming in. Twenty minutes later, he arrived, and was seated at the table across from us. We nodded and smiled and Chaz said, "Oh, my God." Two days later, the incident made page six of the New York Post. It was as if I'd tried out the queen's throne. Woody never mentioned the incident. Six months later, the publicist and Elaine's regular Bobby Zarem told me, "I was surprised that the earth did not open up and swallow you whole."

OCTOBER 4, 1989

NIEW YORK-In the course of Woody Allen's new movie, a man gets away with murder and is much happier afterward. A bright young woman rejects the dedicated documentary filmmaker who loves her, and marries a half-wit who produces successful sitcoms. A kind rabbi goes blind, a wise philosopher jumps out the window, and we laugh, that we may not cry. This is the most despairing of Allen's films, and, the more you think about it, the funniest.

What Allen is doing is questioning the veneer of faith and hope that lets us believe we live in a civilized world. Take the question of murder, for example. Most of us believe we could not live with the guilt if we committed such a crime. In Allen's movie, a respected eye doctor asks his hoodlum brother to knock off the mistress who is making his life miserable. After the murder takes place, the doctor is appalled and consciencestricken-for a time. But you know what? In the long run, he feels better, his marriage becomes stronger, and he grows closer to his children.

That is the pattern throughout Allen's Crimes and Misdemeanors, in which virtue is consistently punished and wrongdoing is rewarded. It is a radical film right down to the marrow in its bones; it is bleak and cynical and angry (and funny), and yet when he discusses it, Allen prefers to use the word "realistic."

"I'd hate to think of it as cynical," he was saying the other morning, looking almost wounded that anyone could hold such an idea. We were talking in his apartment on Fifth Avenue, high above Central Park. "If you ask me," he said, "I'd say realistic because I think in real life, when you get away from all the idealistic rhetoric, that's the way things happen. You can quote Anne Frank's line about how people are so good, or Will Rogers, who said he never met a man he didn't like, but these things don't really ring true in real life. When you strip away these Pollyannish kinds of superficial things, the truth is, life is hard going, it's tough, it's Darwinian, it's dog eat dog. You have nothing to guide you except your own sense of morality, and if you lose that compass, it's a terrible existence."

Allen has thought these things before, and even expressed them in his films (his last movie, Another Woman, was about a woman who finds that almost everything she believed about her life and relationships was false). But never before has he found such a confident tone, such a sure way of dealing with his doubts and fears within a movie that still, somehow, works as a comedy-a tragicomedy. To see Crimes and Misdemeanors is to understand where the other recent Allen films have been heading-all of them, from Hannah and Her Sisters and Radio Days to September and Another Woman. This is it, at last: a world in which God is silent and a few people hold ethical values, and the bastards usually win over the good guys because they aren't afraid to fight dirty and they don't make the mistake of thinking idealistically.

"When I originally conceived the movie," Allen said, "there were two themes that interested me. One was that in our culture, nobody pays off on high aspirations. Nobody cares about that. It's the guy who can deliver who wins, and not some jerk who is spending his life trying to do nice things. That was one theme, and the other was a man who commits murder and is plagued by guilt from it, and then as time passes, realizes that nothing happens. In fact, he prospers and everything goes fine."

The result is Allen's version of Crime and Punishment, in which a character sees himself as above the common morality, and feels that he has the right to kill someone because he is somehow more deserving of happiness than his victim. The hero of Crimes and Misdemeanors is a wealthy ophthalmologist, played by Martin Landau as a citizen who is universally respected even while he cheats on his wife and manipulates the funds in the charities he administers. In a sense, it is his unblemished reputation that leads him to arrange the murder of his mistress (Anjelica Huston). He would rather be a secret murderer than be known as an adulterer and embezzler. This is the sin of pride, but in the Allen universe it goeth not before a fall.

Talking about the film with Allen, while the sun came slanting in through the windows of his book-cluttered penthouse, I began to understand more fully how the movie expresses his deepest fears. Here is a man who should be happy. Who has made the funniest comedies in recent movie history and some of the best dramas. Who has been blessed in his early fifties with children and a woman he loves. Who is one of only two or three American film directors who makes all of his films on his own terms, in his own way. And yet coexisting with this happiness is a deep dread that the rug can be pulled out from under everything, at any moment, by a universe that doesn't give a damn.

Allen has said that hardly a day passes when he doesn't seriously consider suicide-not out of despair, but simply as a choice. He works all the time, he told me, because if he stopped he might never start again. He would like to treat himself to such pleasures as reading mystery novels, but would feel guilty of taking time away from something more serious. The serenity of nature has been a consolation for even the most despairing of philosophers, but not for Woody Allen:

"I was watching Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty the other day on television with my little daughter," he said, "and you know the way Disney draws these chipmunks running around, and you could lay down in the grass, and it's all very lovely, but what you don't see are the creeping, crawling things in life. Just this morning I read in the paper that a woman died of a spider bite. A spider crawled into her bed and bit her in the head and she died. A spider the size of your thumbnail."

He looked at his thumbnail, and he looked worried.

Yes, I said, but that was a city spider. You could die even in the city of a spider bite.

"In my mind, it was the country. And there's more than spiders in the country. When I go to visit Mia Farrow in Connecticut, I'm always mindful of the fact that lurking in the woods is Lyme disease. When she sees the little fawns come up to the front of the house, which they do, the kids gather suddenly and say it's so beautiful. And yes, it's pretty, but boring, and it does carry Lyme ticks on it. So there are no rural consolations for me."

And the grandeur of the seashore?

"I do love the beach, but after two hours of that, after the waves are crashing and it's beautiful, and you've had your clams or whatever, then you want to go home. I want to go home and get back to the typewriter and get back to the higher achievements of the human race."

And yet the higher achievements are the ones Allen calls most into question in Crimes and Misdemeanors-asking if they are really or simply an expression of man's hope that the world is a good and not hostile place.

"The truth of the matter is," he said, "that this movie doesn't give you an out. When I was first screening it for some friends, there would always be one or two people who would come to me afterward and say, `The doctor is plagued by guilt at the end, isn't he?' Or, `I noticed at that wedding he had two champagnes in his hand, does that mean he was turning into a drunkard?' But the truth is ... no! He isn't plagued by guilt, and he doesn't turn to drink. You can commit murder and get away with it, if that's the kind of person you want to be. People do as bad every day. The only thing that stands in your way is your own sense of right and wrong. That's why we can't make any progress with social problems, racial problems, or crack problems, because it has to come from the people involved. It can't be externally imposed. You'll never get rid of all the terrible social evils that plague people until it emanates from inside each individual himself.

"What happens is the doctor talks to his brother and he has this thing done, and he's not bothered by it. There's a slight suggestion of repudiation that's pooh-poohed in the picture, when my character says to him that he has to give himself up-because in the absence of a god, the individual has to assume responsibility. And he says that's not life, it's just the movies."

You know, I said, it's true that you never read in the papers about someone confessing that they put out a murder contract on a wife or a mistress or some relative they hate. You read about them getting caught, but you never read about how their conscience bothered them and they had to turn themselves in.

"No. It's very rare. Someone will occasionally be brought in by his own guilt on a much lesser charge, and will take his lumps. And people say, what a wonderful man, he cheated on his tax and then turned himself in. But when you murder someone, there's not such a tendency to turn yourself in."

In the movie, Allen plays the serious documentary filmmaker who is hired to make a film about his hateful brother-in-law (Alan Alda), who is a shallow, ignorant, and spectacularly successful producer of TV sitcoms. Allen's marriage is coming apart, and he falls in love with one of his production assistants (Mia Farrow). But she has ambitions to make it in the TV industry, and can clearly see that an earnest documentarian is not her ticket to the top. So she marries the Alda character. This illustrates Allen's thesis that not only do people sometimes get away with murder, but even on an everyday level they cheerfully sell out to attain success.

"What I'm saying with the Alan Alda situation," he said, "is that nobody really cares about the aspirations of people, or that they mean well, or that they aim high. They want to go with the winners. They rationalize afterward. They get on the success bandwagon and rationalize. They teach courses in college about I Love Lucy and things like that, just because it was so successful. The same thing happened originally with the Beatles. They came on the scene, they were criticized very much, but when their success became overwhelming, they were taken seriously. It's the same with megahit movies. People will start trying to convince themselves that they're saying something. You get all these articles about the significance of some blockbuster, and not a word about a truly significant movie that didn't make money."

The choice in this movie is clear-cut. The Allen character has filmed four hundred thousand feet on a wise old philosopher, but cannot get anyone to finance his work. There's lots of money, however, for a film about the stupid and vain zillionaire played by Alda.

"There's a little moment in the film," Allen said, "where he cares slightly what I think about him. It does bother him, down deep. He says I've gotta learn that they don't pay off on high aspirations, because he cares a little bit down deep that I don't like him.

"Years ago, there was a very successful television show and my friend Marshall Brickman was saying to me, `Yes, they're successful and all of that, and 99 percent of their conscious mind may be accepting that, but somewhere down deep they know there's a difference between what they're doing and what Tennessee Williams did. And in the final analysis, they would probably trade all that success to be Tennessee Williams.' He was probably right. Even the sitcom producer, if you said to him, if you give this up, we're going to give you Saul Bellow's talent, he'd probably do it, because something in him recognizes that no matter how lionized he is, Bellow is better."

But what if you're Saul Bellow, I said, and you still feel inadequate, down deep, because you're not Shakespeare?

"People have asked me at times, do I envy anyone? I would have traded everything I was to be Marlon Brando, because I so envied his talent. It was so thrilling to me."

But maybe right now Brando would trade to be you.

"Not for any rational reasons. Maybe if he wanted to lose weight, or lose some years from his age. He's older than I am, and he's heavier than I am, but he'd be crazy to trade. He'd j ust be crazy."

But he could be directing a movie every year, and it would be his movie, not someone else's.

"I think his thing is deeper. He was just a great genius, and I would have traded with him. There are probably other people in my lifetime I would have traded with. I would have been happy to have traded with Louie Armstrong. I don't know how Saul Bellow might have felt about Shakespeare, he may feel Shakespeare's a pretty dull writer, but there may be somebody that he may have been willing to trade with. Mozart or Rembrandt or somebody."

It was getting to be time, Allen said, for him to go to the nursery school and pick up his daughter and take her across the park to Mia's apartment, where they would all have lunch together. He seemed to brighten noticeably at the prospect, and I wondered if he would really trade with Brando unless his family was thrown in as part of the trade. As we were walking out, I could look down a corridor and see the big table with the old portable typewriter on it, the typewriter he has used to write everything he has ever written. I asked him when he was going to break down and get a computer to write his movies on.

"Yeah, that's what everyone says. But I'm happy with the typewriter. It's heavy and solid, not like these plastic typewriters they have today. I remember when my mother took me to buy it, the salesman told me, `This typewriter will last longer than you will.' It looks like he might have been right."