Small
Time Crooks
Rated
PG
Opens Friday, May 19
Woody Allen was
born Allan Stewart Konigsberg on Dec. 1, 1935.
Allen's first
role was in 1965's What's New, Pussycat? His directorial
debut came the following year with What's Up, Tiger Lily?
"I think I will
review for you some of the outstanding features of my private
life and put them in perspective."
--a Woody Allen monologue
Small Time
Crooks also stars Jon Lovitz, Michael Rapaport and Elaine
May.
Although it's just a silly little comedy, Small Time
Crooks may prove an important turning point for Woody
Allen. For most of his 30-year film career, Allen--like
Chaplin and Buster Keaton before him--based his films around
an indelible comic persona. First in early comedies like
Bananas and Sleeper, and later in whimsical
romances like Manhattan and Hannah and Her Sisters,
Allen brilliantly fused vintage slapstick with knowing,
post-Freud pathos. By disarming our everyday neuroses with
a barrage of wisecracks and irony, Allen made being a cowardly
pipsqueak look good.
But in the wake of his well-publicized breakup with Mia
Farrow and ensuing marriage to her adopted daughter, Soon-Yi
Previn, Allen's protagonists have gone from lovable losers
to jaded old men spewing vitriol at women and themselves.
In films like Mighty Aphrodite, Celebrity
and even the masterful Decon-structing Harry, the
familiar character weaknesses are there--cowardice, hostility,
lust for women 30 years younger--but the accompanying charm
and self-awareness have given way to rage and delusion.
As a result, Allen has made it harder and harder to give
his alter egos the benefit of the doubt.
Lately, though, Allen has emerged from his funk by returning
to the light comedy that made him a star in the first place.
Just months after the amiable jazz valentine Sweet and
Lowdown comes Small Time Crooks, a delightfully
simple and hilarious comedy that feels more like diversion
than confession. Some might also call this artistic regression,
but considering the caustic nature of a lot of Allen's recent
work, it's just what the filmmaker and his audience need.
Allen plays Ray, a meager New Jersey dishwasher and common
thief with a weakness for get-rich-quick schemes. When he
concocts a ridiculous plan to rob a nearby bank by renting
an adjacent storefront and drilling underground to the vault,
his wife, Frenchie (Tracey Ullman, made up to be a refreshingly
and suitably old-looking match), is justifiably skeptical.
But a little dumb luck brings Ray and Frenchie all the riches
they desire.
From here, Small Time Crooks becomes a Pygmalion-esque
cautionary tale about the inability of money and class to
bring happiness, with Hugh Grant as a dapper Henry Higgins
figure after Frenchie's big bucks. The story and its moral
are predictable, but as Ray and Frenchie stumble up the
class ladder, Allen's endless store of wisecracks makes
the trip tremendous fun to watch. Allen is a perennial fish-out-of-water--born
outside upper-class privilege and arrogance, yet enlightened
beyond your average blue-collar Joe--and that's precisely
what allows him to poke fun at both sides of the tracks.
Given Allen's history of huge ensemble casts, multiple
plot lines and weighty explorations of morality and death,
there's no doubt Small Time Crooks is a modest effort.
That said, it's an unequivocal victory on a smaller scale--a
silly comedy from a man who perfected silly comedies. And
while you don't have to be likable (on screen or off) to
be a great artist, considering the blurred lines between
Allen's real life and his fiction, it's great to have back
our lovable loser.
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Willamette Week | originally
published May 10,
2000
|
