Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989)
Wednesday, March 15th, 2006God is a luxury I cannot afford.
It’s no accident that the moral center of this movie, a kindly rabbi named Ben (Sam Waterston), is in the process of going blind. Woody Allen’s bleak comedy takes a piercingly cynical look at the notion that punishment for the guilty is any kind of a certainty. In the world of this film, power, privilege and luck have more to do with justice than any kind of moral virtue. The main character, a wealthy and prominent ophthalmologist named Judah Rosenthal (Martin Landau), speaks of his childhood teaching that God was ever vigilantly watching everything we do, ready to mete out punishment for the slightest transgression. Rabbi Ben, the man of God, is slowly losing his power of sight and by the end of the film, it’s seems as if God’s perception of innocent and guilty is severely impaired. (more…)
