jmjosmak

I have a confession to make: At a certain point late in the first season I started watching this show just to see how bad it would get. How over-wrought, meandering, how bloated with melodrama, how attenuated with weak tension, how dishwater dull. I don't know why it intrigued me to keep watching so morbidly, episode after episode. It's like negating in slow-motion. Maybe I was waiting for them all to drown at a clambake by some miracle. Maybe I have too much time on my hands. But if you want to feel time crawling across the floor, binge-watch this blob. You may feel elderly when it's over.

What first sparked it for me was Hagai Levi's writing. He was the best thing about the show and he left after a few episodes. The Rashomon device in the first episode was done elegantly, filled with ambivalent turns, inviting us into private corners of consciousness, hinting at as-yet unknowable outcomes of human desire. Ruth Wilson and Dominic West are in the hands of good writer here and they swim along well. They are ordinary people waking up to complex passions.

I started noticing that Ruth Wilson looks nauseated much of the time. Not surprising in light of the way she was treated by the people who ran this show after Levi left. Then I studied Dominic West's face and noticed that he ALSO looked like he was about to throw-up quite frequently. How about a beach scene where they both kneel and puke into the surf, holding hands...Another counterfeit catharsis in a show packed with them.

This show promises a lot but keeps on delivering these two dreary retreads. Didn't anyone stop to ask: Who cares if they're having an affair? Their love, or whatever it is, is tedious. Glad I wasn't in it.

This is a bloated, grandiose, pretentious cluster of half-anecdotes and impressions. Nolan whips it and whips it bad. I have read a little about these events but pity the 99.99% of humanity that has not, if they come to Nolan's movie hoping to learn. How would the unschooled have a prayer of understanding these events if their only source is this overpriced Jackson Pollock? Nolan is an obscurantist.

He goes non-linear because it's cool. Deep down, Nolan wants to ride Michael Mann into Tarantinismo, prettified with a veneer of ideas that makes him seem Something Better--than he really is. Nolan already brought in the anti-communist grilling in his unnecessary time skips, so after the big fat dud of the Trinity scene it's anti-climax time. He trudges onward, swinging his whip of exposition over the assembled worthies for another 50 minutes of verbiage.

Cillian Murphy doesn't deserve the praise he's getting, though I salute him for keeping a straight face while reciting Nolan's Cliff Notes. Watching Murphy's stupefied, bedazzled gape you can almost see him calculating: 'I might win an Oscar.' So he'll get rich. Hooray for show-biz.

The music! Horribly overbearing and overbearingly horrible. It sounds like Arvo Part trying to play Motown on a Moog. If it were actually good music of course it would be too distracting and we wouldn't get to hear whatever fragment of an idea the actor bandies about. It drowns out the dialogue and it's electronic tone is anachronistic. No doubt Nolan was trying to make it the sound of prophecy. In the late 40s Hollywood had a period when overbearing symphonic soundtracks were the thing (Portrait of Jennie). It's beyond excessive--an impediment to understanding, more obscurantism. Quite early on I caught myself asking: When is this tedious irrelevant music going to stop? It never did.

So the feature film staggers onward, deeper into artistic irrelevance, consoled by financial accumulating. There is so much hero-worship in movie culture and appreciation. You become a celebrity director like this guy and it gets to be like "The Aristocrats" joke. And you make millions. People will pay good money to worship what ever god happens to be at the top of the charts.

Nolan wants so much to be profound, like a god. But a cluster of artistic flourishes does not profundity make. We have all seen false modesty gushers in red-carpetland. Nolan should try the real thing.

My opinion: this is Woody Allen's best movie and his only great one. It's his best writing, including the pompous windbag he creates for Alan Alda, who says that comedy is tragedy plus time. This carries through as Allen brilliantly posits the humor as counterpoint to the moral seriousness of Dr. Rosenthal's torment.

Allen's comedic character is a masterpiece of frustrated desire, low self-esteem. And this comedy seems to "exonerate" Rosenthal at the finish, when Allen and Martin Landau have their meeting. Of course, the good Doctor has has already exonerated himself. What a relief that god turns out to be blind! In the moral seriousness of his agony, the solution to guilt is atheism. There is no god. All is permitted. As long as you can get away with it socially, with your country club and your rich friends.

After the tragedy of Dolores's murder time goes by and Rosenthal "awakens," fulfilled in the knowledge that he has solved his problem rationally. His problem was sin, guilt, fear--thinking he was morally wrong, damned, for having killed her. But he awakens to realize that he was right to have killed her. His self-exculpation works because he himself is the only real judge.

C & M was done just before Woody's nebbish act got so stale, before his writing began spitting out tediously familiar lines, making a cliche out of his persona and themes. From 1990 on, Allen puked out one terrible movie after another. I think he was working too hard. Definitely too much. Few artists have made prolificacy a vice to the extent Allen has. He even rehashed the themes of Crimes and Misdemeanors in his dreary, lifeless "Match Point," whose awfulness called to mind Coppola's self-inflicted travesty of "Apocalypse Now Redux."

Someone should have done an intervention with Woody as the 90s became the aughts. He should have retired from screenwriting totally--and probably acting. I'd say one exception in this time is "Bullets Over Broadway." This was a fun clever movie, sparkling with ideas. And it didn't hurt one bit that Woody had major help from another writer. He needed it, badly. Still, fun though it is, it can't approach the magnitude of Crimes and Misdemeanors.

Martin Landau got the role of a lifetime late in life. He redeemed what he may have felt was a disappointing career. Ever since Mission Impossible, I always thought that Landau, to quote Jerry Orbach in another movie about another character "should have been bigger." He had the depth to put across the moral seriousness of Dr. Rosenthal. Landau haunts us with his anguish of guilt, his ambivalence, then his "chilling" resolution. Hats of to Landau and a great cast for personifying Woody Allen's masterpiece.