The themes and ironies of Woody Allen’s cynical 1989 Crimes and Misdemeanors have been probed in a new video essay by Digging Deeper. Following the lives of a documentary filmmaker (Allen) and ophthalmologist (Martin Landau) living in New York, the film is a darkly comic meditation on faith, hope, and beliefs. The essay discusses the irony in the reaffirmation of God’s power by Landau’s Judah, how a holder of belief can be proven to be mistaken, and how the film itself subverts the book it is loosely based upon by not punishing its characters for their crimes.
It also explores the understanding by some of cinema as objective truth, and how in reality it is a flawed gaze no more accurate than those of a higher power. Of a particularly interesting note is the essayists dissection of the use of glasses in the film — as a method of seeing, as a depiction of belief and, in the end, blindness — that is both very minute and extremely important. Try to stay positive and watch the essay below as we await the director’s next three projects.