Z for Zachariah

Z for Zachariah is a parable of postlapsarian loss. In a verdant valley miraculously saved from a nuclear apocalypse a young woman and her dog are joined first by a black engineer and then by a young white miner. Together they convert the girl’s father’s church into a water wheel that will use a radioactive waterfall to generate electricity. The wood from the church will help them rebuild human society. But the new world perpetuates the tensions of the old, including romantic emotions and racial tension.

The radioactive water points to mankind’s corruption of the source of life, the poisoning of purity. Indeed director Craig Zobel converts a survival novel into a religious drama by adding a character to the original two-person novel and developing the religious imagery. 

The title recalls a book that engineer John Loomis takes off a shelf: A is for Adam. The film dramatizes the end of that Biblical story, replaying the myth of Eden after the apocalypse. Zachariah is the prophet murdered between the temple and the altar, the last of the killed prophets, so the name embodies the new narrative as a whole.

The heroine Ann Burden carries the burden of innocence and faith when she struggles alone with her dog to survive. When she finds engineer John bathing in a radioactive pool she nurses him back to life. They develop a relationship of respect and interdependence. Drunk on beer, Loomis briefly confronts Ann with his vulgar carnality from which he retreats apologetic. 

Through the sacrament of wine Ann approaches John on her own terms and invites an intimate relationship. But John retreats, desiring her closeness but fearing the change that a sexual relationship would make. He’s inhibited by both their age and their colour difference. The scene in which Ann comes to him and he embraces her with a tender self-denial expresses the desire for a deep connection through the body but not carnal.

The serpent in Eden — added to the source novel — is young white Caleb, whose “Mr Loomis” is a condescending formality by which he insinuates himself between his two hosts. The scene in which Ann chooses Caleb over John begins with their excessive use of wine, non-sacramental, and another baptism parody when the three cavort in the water. John is finally moved to confess his love to Ann, but when she comes to him he’s drunk and unconscious. She surrenders her purity to Caleb instead, waiting when he comes out of the shower. This scene parallels her finding John under a waterfall and parodies their truer love scene, a literal purification parodying the authentic. 

Margot Robbie marvelously suggests her character’s transition from Innocence to Experience. After Caleb, her eyes are darker, more knowing, her carriage heavier under the burden of experience, and we know she cannot revert to her earlier self, nor to her earlier relationship. In the last scene she plays a dirge on the church organ while John sits earnestly listening, his hands clasped in prayer as if in futile hope to recover what he had with her pre-Caleb.  But you can’t recover a lost Eden. After sampling the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil innocence is gone. 

     One by one the male figures drop out of Ann’s life. We see less of her dog after John appears and nothing at all with the arrival of Caleb. Caleb — named after one of Moses’s advance spies who encouraged the invasion of Canaan — becomes the animal figure in Ann’s life despite his pretence at being her fellow-believer, in contrast to the agnostic John. After losing Ann John arranges for Caleb’s disappearance. But he can’t erase the change Caleb wrought upon Ann.

Mission: Impossible -- Rogue Nation

So why is the new Mission: Impossible subtitled Rogue Nation? The evil Syndicate is not a nation but a covert operation of disenchanted international recruits. The white hat IMF is not a nation but a secret American undercover unit independent of the CIA and every other acronym this side of the SPCA. 

Then who’s the “rogue nation”?

Here’s a hint: the film’s coproducers include an Arabic and a Chinese company. It assumes a global perspective.

The rogue nation is America. It continues its longstanding mythology of valuing the outlaw.

American westerns and gangster films typically pretend to honour community values, the restraints that civilization places on its member citizens. But that’s only lip service. America’s heart is in the outlands, where individuals place themselves above the law in order to get things done that the law won’t allow. So even if the IMF is a rogue unit its fictional existence attests to America’s willingness to break the law for the communal good. 

That also defines America’s less violent popular genres. In comedies and musicals the explicit value is the team, the community, but the ultimate respect is for the individual that transcends it. The comedians are valued for breaking conventions — hello brothers Marx — and the musical ultimately vaporizes not the chorus line but the star who rises out of it.

America pretends to rule by law but its secret passion is for the rogue, the rugged individualist who breaks the law — to do good. Civilization can’t survive without the outlaw’s service, as we see in The Man Shot Liberty Valance. That’s who America has its cake of civilization but iced with the outlaw thrill.

That’s Shane, the gunslinger who rides into town, saves the town from the evil corporate ranchers, then conveniently rides into the mountains to die — in the very last frame, almost subliminally — so that the town, the good rancher’s vulnerable wife and role-model needing Joey, don’t have to live with him. Clint Eastwood remade Shane with a grittier realism in Pale Rider — same mystique. The two films stand together like Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience.

In that spirit James Bond is famously licensed to kill. Tom Cruise’s Ethan is licensed to kill, disappear, command limitless technology and resources, and do whatever he wants. He’s strictly a filmic creation, so he lives through a concert hall scene out of Hitchcock and in Casablanca, etc., engages with a mysterious heroine named Ilsa (out of Casablanca). He’s a film hero about film, about his nation’s mythology, not about any literal reality. 

Ethan’s engagement with the villain Lane begins and ends with smoke-filled glass boxes. Ethan is trapped in the first, Lane in the second. The neat symmetry gives a sense of structure to the overall chaos. So do the three most dramatic set pieces, where Ethan clings to a flying plane, survives several breakneck land chases and comes back from an underwater death. To round out the elements, a motorcycle chase ends up with several motorcycles afire. This is epic stuff.

In that sense the film is a celebration of American popular culture. That’s why the narrative absorbs classical European culture, setting an extended scene around a Vienna opera production of Turandot. The theme recurs in the later soundtrack. Pop culture, you see, is itself a rogue, daring to stand up against and include — to transcend — the best of its European forbears.

Ricki and the Flash

Sure, Meryl Streep sings and plays the gee-tar real good and once again acts up a subtle touching storm. Sure, this is another funny story about a dysfunctional family. And sure, the film has all the tension and delivers all the satisfactions of a standard American romantic comedy. But its real kick is its political undertaking.

The dysfunctional family quickly comes to represent the cultural wars on America’s present landscape. Director Jonathan Demme sets up a situation where we’re tempted to define the characters as either Red or Blue state, Right or Left, Republican or Democrat, but then denies us that schemata. The harmony that Ricki’s bar band brings her son’s snobby whole foods wedding is a rejection of the division in US politics. It’s a provocative riff on America’s political rift.

Ricki (Streep) and Greg (Rick Springfield) are old hippies still living their musical lives on the cheap and raunchy. She took the hippie’s “I need to be me”  excuse to abandon her family and here staves off her lover’s devotion. But now she’s Republican. One of her first quips is a slam at Obama’s presidency. She’s one of those who “wants our country back.” She’s “for the troops.” She wears an Old Glory tattoo on her back. She’s working LA but her bar and band evoke the Okie from Muskokie. 

But there’s a reason she starts the wedding set with a Bruce Springsteen song — the same reason Springsteen climaxed the Jon Stewart farewell. Springsteen is the working class hero, Born in the USA, but who crosses all political lines. He can criticize the government without imperilling his patriotic cred. And that’s what Ricki grows into. The hippie turned redneck turns back to proper liberal values when she returns to her troubled daughter, confronts the bereft girl’s ex, and openly embraces her gay son and his lover. Ricki represents an America that has grown out of its cultural split. The film’s ethic lies in the lyrics of Ricki’s songs, in regard to both the personal and the national dilemmas.

Her ex Peter (Kevin Kline) apparently flirted with Ricki’s hippiehood but couldn’t make the leap.  He stayed behind to become a corporate success — the Republican type — but trails clouds of his liberal glory nonetheless. He married a black woman — one with class, culture and wealth — who gives his children the mothering Ricki abandoned. Now, after an awkward exchange with Ricki, she is instrumental in bringing Ricki back to her family for the son’s wedding. 

Despite the very formulaic sentimental plot Demme continually surprises us with his characters’ behaviour. The son that didn’t want Ricki at his wedding welcomes her most warmly and takes the initiative to start the dance to her Springsteen. She gets his blessing. That prompts the younger members of the stiff crowd to rip up the floor themselves. When Peter dissolves from his medicinal weed we expect him to renew his old nuptial rites (as does Ricki). But he’s done with that. He’s not the old free hippie. He prefers his new life. So, too, his wife Maureen’s generosity, after her acrid exchange with Ricki. When Ricki claims Peter still loves her, Maureen says “I’ll let you have that.” She is secure enough to allow Ricki that face-saving delusion. 

Demme has often worked in musicals, from Stop Making Sense through three docs with Neil Young. (There’s an even older Young lookalike in the Flash.) Here Demme exercises his love of lyric and rock to dramatize an America where the current split into Right and Left just doesn’t — needn’t — hold up. The country doesn’t have to be split as enraged as it is. To recover unity and harmony they have to remember they are one family, America, and reach out to each other. And dance.

The Gift

The Gift is a very effective genre thriller. Ah, but which genre?
      In dramatizing the amoral bullying in corporate culture it’s a white-collar crime melodrama. Its explicit theme of the terrible costs of bullying makes it a social commentary. In interweaving the guilt and innocence of an apparently virtuous and an apparent evil, it ventures into Hitchcock territory — as emphasized by one eruption of shrill strings (a la Psycho). 

But the film draws most effectively upon the Woman’s Film tradition — Rebecca, Gaslight, etc. — as a strong, fragile woman has her sanity thrown into doubt by two strong, scheming men.  “I’m not crazy,” she assures herself as she watches her faith in her husband, her marriage and his career crumble together.

Robyn (Rebecca Hall) was torn away from her Chicago home, career and independence to serve husband Simon’s (Jason Bateman) ambitions in a California suburb. Left vulnerable by a miscarriage, she is further unsettled by the mysterious Gordo (Joel Edgerton, who also wrote and directed). He besieges the young couple with gifts, then undermines her confidence with suggestions of her husband’s past misdeeds. 

Bateman plays against his persona when his amiable character is exposed to be a liar and a bully, who has no qualms about ruining someone else’s life to get ahead. We learn he ruined Gordo’s as a kid, but now as an adult destroys a rival with unfounded slander. 

Simon personifies male authority. As Gordo recalls, Simon used his name to bend others to his will, especially when he ran for students union president (always an omen of adult corruption). What Simon says, everyone did. We watch Simon tyrannize Robyn despite his obvious love for her.

His glide through life ends here when Gordo wreaks a magnificent, ironic revenge. When  Gordo was a child Simon led his schoolyard  bullying and beating. He and a pal falsely accused young Gordo of being homosexually molested, which led to his near murder by his father and his derailment from any normal life. As if in atonement Simon’s partner in crime became a chiropractor, as if to bring compensatory relief to the afflicted. Simon pursues a career in “security systems,” ironically apt for a man who builds his own security on causing the insecurity of others.

In his revenge Gordo reverses that first crime. He poisons Simon’s mind with the idea that Gordo raped and inseminated an unconscious Robyn. Gordon sends Simon a tape of the scene and of the couple’s domestic conversations. This invasion humiliates the security systems specialist. Gordon undermines Simon entirely. Simon will always see Gordo’s eyes in his new son. Having seen how badly Simon beat Gordo Robyn will not return to him or their house. In the last shot Gordo walks away blurred by hospital glass, tossing aside the arm brace he had worn to dramatize Simon’s assault. The broken man has broken his nemesis. 

Robyn is trapped between the two men. As Gordo visits her when Simon is at work Simon suspects Gordo wants to take her from him. That’s the insecurity of the bully. Perhaps from that anxiety Gordo gets the idea how to get back at his boyhood tormentor. He makes the bully’s dread a reality. At the end nothing Simon says means anything. He loses not just his promotion but his job, his marriage — and any confidence his son is his and not Gordo’s.  

Ant-Man

     The exhilarating Ant-Man is a huge advance upon The Incredible Shrinking Man and Them.  But it has one credibility problem. The ultra-brilliant scientist Dr Pym (Michael Douglas) commits a serious grammatical error. He uses “presently” as if it means “at present” instead of “soon.” No ultra-brilliant scientist would do that. But that’s what our universities are coming to. Once the Humanities die will humanity be far behind? 

But that’s another film. Or is it? 

This delightful, witty entertainment grows out of two traditions. The first is the mock-heroic, which John Dryden characterized as a very small man wearing a very very large suit of armour. In literature, that translates into a trivial issue treated as of major importance. Examples of the mock epic include Pope’s The Rape of the Lock and the recent Canadian leaders’ debate which focused on trivial issues instead of the most compelling and serious one — the current prime minister’s absolute disdain for democracy and his persistent attempts to undermine it.   

The very concept of the film is mock heroic. As the giant screen swarms with huge figures of superhuman strength, hulking hunks and tower-sized robots, it was only a matter of time before the estimable Marvel comix would proffer a mini-hero. As Superman begat Mighty Mouse the 3-D behemoths bred Ant-Man. The empowered hero Scott Lang is played by the usually nebbish Paul Rudd, who would usually out-nebbish Clark Kent, except for his extraordinary cleverness as a cat burglar — with a pussy’s idealism. 

Instead of empowering the weak the essential fantasy in this film is restoring father-daughter relationships. Scott is an ex-con frustrated in his attempt to see his daughter, post-divorce. Dr Pym lost his daughter, the aptly-named Hope (Evangeline Lilly), who now works for his arch-enemy and ex-mentee Darren Cross (Corey Stoll). As the scientist, daughter and ex-con join forces to save the world from an army of evil miniatures, the fathers win back their daughters and a second-generation romance promises to avoid past freezes and neglect. Cross lives out the son's rebellion against his surrogate father figure.

The second tradition reflects the current global military dread. The drama centers on the use of destructive power. As Pym observes, you can’t destroy power, just learn to control it. Most films present the war between good and evil as clashes between armies, nations, even cultures. Individual heroes may face off to settle the issue, but wars are between armies. 

By miniaturizing the war this film makes the army subordinate to the individual. True, Ant-Man commands an entomologist’s dream of obedient battalions, but that just puts him in harmony with nature, contra all the other bombers. (In further harmony, there is even music by Adam and the Ants.) This war is between the goodie Ant-Man and the baddie Yellowjacket. Ant-Man’s mobility seems trumped by Yellowjacket's laser shots, at least till he’s zapped himself by a patio light. Here the villain is a solitary shooter not a commander of men. That is, Ant-Man here fights off our current dread, the outlaw loner, the suicide bomber, the terrorist cell. Ant-Man may be a familiar kind of hero but his opponent — and the nightmare he personifies — is the dread evil of our times.  

The Tribe

The opening scene encapsulates the film. There is no music and we hear no language. The camera holds a stationary view across a city road at a bus stop. In front we see and hear a succession of cars, trucks and buses. This is the film’s characteristic shot: we are remote, detached, coolly observant of whatever is going on beyond our hearing and understanding. In the distant right is the black ruin of an old car. It’s a charred omen of the vehicles that pass, an augur of disaster. 

A young man, who will turn out to be our “hero,” suitcase in hand, asks a woman at the bus stop for direction. He produces a note to express himself. So he’s mute; her gesticulations tell us he’s deaf. 

The lad is joining a boarding school for the deaf and dumb. That first scene is the last we will see him in that presents the normalcy of our everyday life. His criminal activities will take him to a truckers’ stop and onto a train but those scenes show him working for the “tribe” he draws into at the school. Once he gets to the school he is in another world. As he is forced to immerse himself in it we’re kept far out. Watching but outside. 

The staff and students are very articulate with their gestures, panting and grunts. But we’re outside that language. We’re of another tribe so we don’t understand them. But we can figure out what’s going on. That’s because we’re of the same tribe after all. So we recognize rites of initiation, socialization, pecking orders, cruelty, exploitation and the corruption of our highest values.  

The parable of the school, its teachers — some well-meaning, some compromised — and its clearly structured gang of rough boys and sexualized girls, opens into two themes. 

The first grows out of all this prolonged, detached shots of cold observation. The tribe at this school is a microcosm of our social structure. The absence of words and music make the experience seem like a clinical study, society viewed as through a microscope. We’re detached so we can analyze the group’s dynamics — but not so detached that we don’t see it is mirroring us. 

Two scenes pack the most emotional wallop. In one our lad has sex with the blonde he has been pimping. What begins with awkwardness and fumbles ends in such a closeness she lets him kiss her. For him it’s love; for her it may or may not be. Now he can’t let himself pimp her anymore. They have another lyrical love scene, which turns ominous when he gives her a full wallet he stole on the train. At the end he bludgeons a teacher to steal money to buy her again. In that tribe he fears there is no “love” without payment.  

The second powerful scene is related: the girl’s grisly abortion. This too is shot in one continuous long-shot take, in painfully real time. For this she uses the first money he gave her. We don’t know if he knows that or not. Their relationship ends in either case. 

If the film dramatizes the essential ways of our society, if it shows one sub-culture as typifying  ours, the climax gives us another resonance. Our lad, who was such a nice, helpless victim when he arrived at he school, stumbling from one abuse to another, suffering the painful initiations, then doing the work assigned him, now rises up against his oppressors. First he assaults and robs the shop teacher who moonlights driving the girls for he pimps. Then he tries to keep his beloved whore from escaping to Italy — by eating her passport. Finally he kills the four boys who have most persecuted him. The appealing young lad turns robotic killer. We hear his continuing thumps right through the end credits — as if his march of revenge proceeds ad infinitum. Now the fable reads as the oppressed classes arising  — finally, after so much abuse — rising up in violent revolution. 

     At the end we learn the film is from the Ukraine. As the news reminds us, they know about oppression, about tribal wars, about the loss of innocence and about the savagery that persists beneath our veneer of civilization, even — or especially — among those whose disadvantages might dictate they rather aim for civility and care. But our tribe is not like that.

To blog or not to blog …. that was the question

For 2 1/2 years I’ve been doing a blog of “Instant film analysis” — primarily.  As I approach the 25,000-viewer (as distinct from ‘reader,’ i know, i know) mark I thought I’d have a look at what it shows. To date my 295 posts have drawn 24,830 readers. OK, viewers. Before I started the blog I was skeptical about its usefulness. What’s the point of sending a film analysis into the ether? By the way, that's also my main intention: to write analysis, not the casual "review." A review says what I liked or didn't. Analysis tries to pin down what a film is saying, doing or signifies. Anyway, I’ve been surprised by how it’s gone.

You can find it at www.yacowar.blogspot.com. Right: here. It works this way: If I see a film that has prompted me to some thought I zip home and whip it off. I don’t do any research or redrafts or anything respectable or academic like that. It’s a lark — well, maybe a release. What would the ancient mariner do if he couldn’t find a Wedding Guest to unload upon? 

Explode, probably. So my instant blog is a therapeutic release — for the primary benefit of my nearest and dearest who are thus spared the cleanup. 

Correction: there is usually an in-house sober second thought. If we’ve seen the film together wife Anne Petrie usually shares in the analysis, contributes very good ideas and a smart edit. The piece is always better for her involvement. But from the outset I promised never to embarrass her with any credit.

That outset was the 2013 Palm Springs International Film Festival, which is always a rewarding delight. In the lineups for the next film I found I was always finding ways subtly to unload my insights on innocent strangers. Soon they were backing away when I approached. Clearly i needed another outlet. So I started this blog with the off-the-top-quickly standard I’ve maintained. You don’t wan to waste film festival time researching any of the films. Watch, think  — then get it out.

The blog site consists of films I saw at the last three Palm Springs festivals, films that ran commercially in Calgary or wherever I was, the odd old DVD, and a few outriders. I downloaded some papers published elsewhere. Occasionally a theatre production inspired some reflection, e.g. the brilliant Stratford Merchant of Venice  and the Met’s irresponsible Death of Klinghoffer (spoiler alert: Klinghoffer didn’t exactly die; he was murdered by Muslim terrorists. The evasive euphemism coheres with the libretto’s prejudice). The Klinghoffer piece drew another, analyzing the more responsible British film version.  A film can win a second piece: Woody Allen’s Blue Jasmine cried out for an analysis of its use of — as opposed to “its ripping off” — A Streetcar Named Desire.

The blog stats throw up interesting info. United States has the most viewings (11,138), followed by Canada (4085), Ukraine (953), UK (678), France (628), Russia (518), Germany (466), China (366), Australia (180) and Turkey (159). After the top two, the next eight are surprising both in order and volume. I have no explanation why the last three countries register so high when I’ve done so few of their films. 

Of even more interest are the most trafficked films. The No. One subject is the Palestinian film Omar, with 1209 viewings. It appeared January 2014 but still leads in new viewers every week. I think its interest lies in my political reading of the film. The Counsellor is a surprising second (464) because it’s not a major film, not an art film. On that I didn’t publish an essay but an introduction for discussion, for the Calgary Association for Life-Long Learners. The plot intro, specific questions, quotations, seem to provide a popular format, making for a do-it-yourself analysis rather than mine. That also raised Grand Budapest Hotel, Robot and Frank and Love is All You Need to the top 10. Third place is the very limited-run Blue Ruin, a placement I can’t explain. My Klinghoffer critique drew 118 viewings, which is satisfying, and the first Blue Jasmine 79, my Queens Quarterly survey of Michael Haneke 89 and the Israeli Eagles 81. 

None of these numbers are impressive by Pauline Kael or Roger Ebert standards. But for me they’re enough. These quick responses are getting more readers than all my books and scholarly papers combined.

There’s another benefit. From time to time someone responds, usually with a (very welcome) correction, sometimes with a remark. I’d like more of those. But for now, having the opportunity to work out a critical position and get it out there within an hour of seeing the flick is a  true luxury.

Irrational Man

Though Woody Allen’s film centers upon a professor of philosophy — the epitome of rationality — it’s titled Irrational Man. Abe Lucas (Joaquin Phoenix) shows how carrying the rational to its extreme becomes madness. Reason should not abandon humanity and morality.

Allen introduces that theme when Abe cites — and counters — Kant’s argument that in the perfect world nobody should lie. If the gestapo ask if you’re hiding Anne Frank you have to tell the truth. Otherwise you’re opening a universe of lies. Abe overrides Kant here. Philosophy has to be subordinated to the harsh realities of life. Theory is insufficient to making the world a better, more responsible place.  You have to trust your gut response — the visceral level of your humanity — over any philosophic theory. 

This truth his student/lover Jill (Emma Stone) intuits when she slowly comes to realize her Abe killed Judge Spangler. Despite her love for Abe and her equal disgust for what she has heard about the custody lawyer, she realizes Abe’s guilt and his need to accept the blame to save the innocent suspect’s life. Her emotional commitment to Abe is subordinated to her moral reflex, which Kant and the make-your-own-life Existentialists spurn. Spangler’s name shimmeringly evokes Spengler, whose Decline of the West Spangler and Abe come to personify: an indulgent self-serving abuse of social responsibility.

The two women in Lucas’s present bed-life are in telling disciplines. Rita (Parker Posey) is a chemist, who has an immediate animal attraction to Abe — even before meeting him — and briefly enjoys his phallic/spiritual revival. When she guesses his possible guilt she laughs it off with him. Even if he is guilty, she will leave her husband to run off to Europe with Abe. Rita is the learned animal acting on animal instinct and body chemistry.  

Jill plays classical piano and is the daughter of two Music profs. She represents social and cultural tradition, harmony and the discipline of classical music. It’s outside her piano lesson that Abe tries to kill her and falls down his own shaft. Rita is a prof, world-, marriage- and profession-weary, but Jill is still a student, earnest, courageous before the frightening world opening before her. Her gut response is a moral one, where Abe’s was a coldly analytic (i.e., theoretical philosophy) one that gave him a new zest for life — at the cost of another’s death. That book won’t balance. It proves the emptiness of Existentialism. 

Jill’s moral backbone reflects in the ending. At the amusement park she hopes Abe won’t think she’s “practical” for choosing a little flashlight for her prize. That little machine of light saves her life when Abe slips on it in his attack. Her gut reflex of morality — the assumption of man’s essential goodness — makes her the embodiment of liberal humanism, more positive than the modern Europeans, however suspect in Republican America.

Allen’s recurring use of The Ramsay Lewis Trio’s “The ‘In’ Crowd” contrasts to Jill’s disciplined harmonies.  The theme recalls Abe’s characterization as an outsider, not just as an orphan, drunk and womanizer, but a misfit even among the university’s collective faculty of misfits. This jazz is loose, improvisational, yet a steady repetition of its own phrasing. Most significantly, throughout the turmoil in Abe’s and Jill’s minds and hearts, throughout the danger of science and reason overriding morality and humanity, the jazz plays on with the sociables partying, laughing and clapping (on the recording). As Nero fiddled when Rome burned our intellectuals exercise their abstruse theories, indulging themselves, while the world order crumbles. Analytic philosophy may be, as Abe teaches, verbal masturbation but the potential inhumanity of the European philosophers is far more damaging to others. 

In dramatizing the improper extension of philosophic theory into murder Allen follows Hitchcock’s classic Rope. But where Hitchcock kept a taut connection between theory and deed, between a word and a murder, to the extent of limiting his shots to the 10-minute length of a film reel, Allen plays with a much looser narrative and style. Sill, his touch is everywhere rigorous. When Abe tells Jill he has a new vitality (thanks to his resolve to kill the judge), Allen keeps them both in medium shot, on the right third of a screen full of well-dressed civilized folks attending Jill’s recital. The imminent murder — and the hero’s restoration of spirit and zest for life — contrast to the formal image of this setting. 

This film plays against Allen’s earlier exploration of the morality of a murder, Crimes and Misdemeanors. There the murderer gets away with it and the good rabbi goes blind. There the nebbish loses the girl; here he recovers her. There is no justice in the younger Allen’s take on our amoral universe. But here the little flashlight gives us a happy ending. But wait. The final justice is not due to any overriding principle of justice. no moral order in God’s creation. No, it’s a silly accident over a silly like plastic flashlight. The happy ending is a transparent consolation.

The earlier victim (Anjelica Huston) is far more sympathetic than Spangler, the corrupt custody judge. But her murder was arranged by her endangered lover, to serve his interest. Abe acts in an ostensibly more selfless manner — until his plan revives his spirit and love of life. The present narrative structure is not as complex, nor the themes and characters as roundly developed, as in the earlier film. But this is still a brilliant exercise in logic, in moral philosophy and in storytelling that most 40 year olds would be proud to have pulled off.

There’s a minor comic theme running through this film, a kind of fan dance that Allen seems to be doing with the critics. He mines the plot with enough jocular echoes of his own recent life to tempt them not to look — or, heaven forfend, even to think — beyond them. The prof has an affair with a much younger student — though here the prof deflects the girl’s intentions for a considerable time, until his ill-regained energies betray him. He also plays the mentor figure in the relationship, considered ambivalent since Plato’s vision and still a shadow across Allen’s 20-year (!) marriage. Then, too, the villain his hero kills is a corrupt judge who has proved heartless in his judgment on a child custody case. Remind you of anything? 

On the one hand Allen shows how theories have to be inflected to accommodate the complexities of real life, especially humanity and the need for a moral compass. On the other he tosses in these playful nods at his own life to see if his critics can transcend their own biases and predispositions to grapple with his larger themes.

   Many have failed. Several columnists have complained that Woody is aging gracelessly, self-indulgently,  as he replays his creepy December-June romance, and that his films are dull and repetitious. To them I have two responses. (i) This is as thoughtful, stylish, intellectually rigorous and moving a film as we’ve had this year.  And funny to boot. (ii) Isn’t it wonderful that even at 80, once a year our old friend Woody drops by to engage with us and to talk about what’s on his mind now. For such relief, much thanks.