Comic relief

These crooks know the drill

by Gary Susman

Why can't Woody Allen make funny movies again?" That's the question his cultists often ask, as if Allen's early movies, his hit slapstick comedies from the early '70s, marked his Golden Age. By cultists, I mean American film critics, themselves pining for American filmmaking's early-'70s Golden Age, who seem to be the only people this side of the Atlantic who care or even notice when the prolific auteur releases another movie. In Europe, it's another story, where each new Allen release is treated with the only people this side of the Atlantic the only people this side of the Atlantic who care or even notice when the prolific auteur releases another movie. In Europe, it's another story, where each new Allen release is treated with all the reverence due an old master like Eric Rohmer, Jean-Luc Godard, or Jerry Lewis. The cultists complain that Allen's Ingmar Bergman fixation ruined him, making even his recent comedies irredeemably pretentious, and that the sordidness of his personal life has tainted most of the movies he did in the '90s, which seem to excuse his bad behavior as an artist's prerogative. It's a facile argument, but it allows the cultists (like the American moviegoing public) to dismiss everything Allen's done for the last 25 years.

So now, here comes Small Time Crooks, a slapstick comedy very much in the vein of Allen's earliest films, especially his directorial debut, 1969's Take The Money and Run, which, like this one, starred Allen as a ludicrously inept robber. It's easily his funniest, lightest movie in ages, and, no coincidence, the one with the greatest commercial prospects. Hey, cultists: are you happy now?

I doubt it. Having grown accustomed to and expecting Allen the serious moralizer, or at least Allen the ponderer of philosophical queries, one is surprised by and suspicious of Allen the frivolous escapist. Moreover, those early comedies were rigorously structured, whereas this one is lopsided and sloppy. Still, such likely dissatisfaction is apt, since the theme of Small Time Crooks is, "Be careful what you wish for."

Allen's Ray is a lowlife loser and ex-convict married to the tart-tongued former stripper Frenchy (Tracey Ullman -- at last, a romantic partner for Allen who's, well, not a nymphet). Re-creating the scenario from the Sherlock Holmes story "The Red-Headed League," he comes up with a plan to rent the vacant storefront two doors down from a bank and tunnel from the basement into the bank vault. Ray persuades the dubious Frenchy and several of his shady pals (Michael Rapaport, Tony Darrow, and Jon Lovitz, all priceless) to aid in this caper. Frenchy and her clueless cousin May (Elaine May) run a cookie business as a front upstairs while the boys downstairs excavate the most ill-conceived tunnel since the Big Dig. Despite the crooks' sidesplitting ineptitude and the way their plan goes cosmically awry, they do stumble into an improbable fortune.

After this first act, the movie abruptly shifts from a farce about The Gang That Couldn't Drill Straight into a satire about taste. It's as if the latter two-thirds of the movie were one long joke about production design. The laughable taste in clothes, furnishings, and culture that Ray and Frenchy had as paupers is amplified into garish, kitschy vulgarity by their wealth. Ray is proud of his blue-collar, beer-and-basketball ways, but the snickering from the couple's snobbish new Park Avenue social set embarrasses Frenchy, who aspires to become a refined patron of the arts. To that end, she enlists David (Hugh Grant), a handsome art dealer, to give her a crash course in culture, while Ray finds himself spending more time with May, who's as miserable at being rich as he is and shares his yearning for simpler pleasures. Ray learns that though he can throw away the zebra-print bedspreads, he can't change his stripes; Frenchy learns that though the rich may be different from her and Ray, they can be just as avaricious and treacherous.

Not since 1984's Broadway Danny Rose has Allen played a guy this far down the ladder, and the move brings out his most inventive performance in years (unless you count his animated bug in Antz). Ullman makes the most of Frenchy's self-improvement kick, and May's Gracie Allen-like sweet 'n' dim act is worth the price of admission, but the film suffers from the near-complete disappearance of Rapaport and Lovitz after the first third. There are laughs throughout the less slapsticky, more satirical section, but you may find yourself wondering, "Why can't Woody Allen make a funny movie again, like he did 25 minutes ago?"

Woody gets Small NEW YORK -- Moviegoers assume that Woody Allen's movies about cultured New Yorkers are autobiographical. But he'd have you believe that he's more like Ray, the feckless thief he plays in Small Time Crooks -- a streetwise knucklehead with unsophisticated tastes. "I've gotten a lot of mileage out of people thinking I'm intellectual when in fact I'm closer to the other part," he says during our conversation at Manhattan's swank Regency Hotel, not far from his Upper East Side townhouse. "If you could see my life, you would see me with the spaghetti and turkey meatballs [that Ray eats], watching the Knicks game at home with a Beck's beer. I'm not at the opera." Allen has played guys like Ray before, most notably Virgil Starkwell, the similarly clueless crook in his directorial debut, Take the Money and Run. "There are very few characters I can play. I'm not really an actor. One kind of thing that I can play is a lowlife, a streety person. So I was able to play Virgil, this character, and Broadway Danny Rose. I can also play a college teacher. But nothing in between." Crooks does indeed suggest that a person can either be crude or urbane but not both, even though Allen seems to do so, in art as well as in life. He insists, "I'm basically a low-culture person. I don't say that pejoratively. The truth is, when I was in high school, there were a lot of very wonderful women that had no patience with you if you hadn't read a certain amount, if you weren't culturally interested. And so, in order to keep pace with those girls, I educated myself. But my natural tendencies -- the family I grew up in, the environment -- are not even to low culture, but to no culture. My parents never took me to the theater, to a museum. Sometimes to the movies, but not often. They introduced me to no music at all. "I look intellectual and studious because I have these black glasses and I'm slight. But that was never me. I was a street kid who played ball all the time, a very good athlete, not the last one but the first one chosen all the time, a winner of track medals, not a student or a Casper Milquetoast. I was a very poor high-school student. I was thrown out of college my first year. So I'm much closer to Ray." So the brainy, non-athletic nebbish persona is just an act? "That's just a chancy, creative function. I didn't set out to do it that way. As I wrote jokes, the jokes that seemed funny to me had a literate patina to them without really being overly literate. I had a facility to utilize the intellectual patois and make it seem that I knew more than I knew. But the truth is, it's just a skill. It's not really deep." It's certainly clear from Crooks that Allen knows bad taste. "I was pretty horrified when I saw the opening shot with me in green leggings," says Tracey Ullman, who plays Ray's wife, Frenchy. "It's not a choice an actress makes very often." Notes Hugh Grant, who plays an art dealer, "A lot of the sequences are laughing at these people's vulgarity." Of the extravagantly tacky furnishings Ray and Frenchy buy when they strike it rich, he marvels, "That is a woman's house in New Jersey with her things, and she was there all day [during the shoot]. Swear to God. It was so amazing, people came from miles around to see it." Allen is known for doing much of his directing during the casting stage. "He wrote me a fax," Grant goes on, "saying, `I've written a part for a man who seems incredibly charming and debonair and attractive but turns out to be an utter shit, and I thought you'd be perfect.' " And once everybody's on the set, Grant found, Allen gives his actors minimal instruction and maximum freedom. "At first, it was really alarming. We'd do two or three takes and it would be just before lunchtime, five to one, and he'd say, `Well, great!' And that was the end of the day, and we'd go home." In fact, the shoot went so quickly that Crooks was ready for release just six months after Allen's last film, Sweet and Lowdown. "This kind of film is easy for me," he explains. "What's very hard for me is a really serious film. The more serious the comedy, the longer it takes, because the relationships become complicated, and I find, when I look back at my first draft of the film, that this doesn't work and I have to go back and reshoot. But a film like this, I could do two of these a year because this is really what falls off of my fingers easiest. I can make up broadly comic things very easily. This is really what I am after all is said and done and all the pretension falls away." -- GS