Small Time Crooks
a review by Jeffrey Overstreet
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A question that frequently arises in my conversations with film buffs is “What’s your favorite Woody Allen movie?”
The question comes up again and again, partly because the guy writes and directs a new movie every year. It seems like everybody has a favorite. While his resume boasts an incredible range — zany sci-fi epics (Sleeper), mock documentaries (Zelig), fairy tales (The Purple Rose of Cairo), weighty morality plays (Crimes and Misdemeanors) — they all bear that unmistakable wit and bizarre knack for characterization that was true of his early standup comedy routines. Pull out any conversation, any introspective monologue from his work — it’s not hard to recognize Woody Allen’s voice.
That voice in the 1990s was souring, at times becoming a caustic, painfully embittered tantrum about failed loves and an unforgiving society, tainted with self-loathing. (Deconstructing Harry may be have been the peak of Allen’s most self-interested and self-indulgent work, while remaining a fascinating exploration of the artist and ego. It may have been his most autobiographical film, inadvertently or otherwise.)
Perhaps with the dawn of new decade, or millennium, Allen wants to go back to the basics. His new film is a strong indication. Small Time Crooks sounds more like early Woody — simpler, zanier. But, not unlike George Lucas’s mixed success at returning to Star Wars storytelling, the seams are showing. The transitions are clunky; there may as well be chapter headings for the film’s abrupt changes in tone. The characters are closer to being caricatures than believable individuals. Still, a mediocre Woody Allen film is better than most Hollywood comedies any day of the week.
Small Time Crooks tells the rags-to-riches story or Ray and Francis Winkler. Ray’s a bone-headed dishwasher who spent time in prison for burglary, and he hasn’t quite outgrown his criminal impulses. Francis, once an exotic dancer, now keeps house and puts up with her wisecracking husband, from whom she has genuine affection…once in a while. They dream about a better life, but they’re not miserable.
Then Ray gets an idea, like a bored kid who has too much time on his hands. He and his cronies decide to buy an open retail store space and then tunnel from there into the bank on the same block. Easy, right? Not for Ray and his dumb-and-dumber cohorts.
Ray talks Francis into opening a cookie shop in the space to cover for their criminal endeavors. In the basement of their new small business, the tunneling begins. Needless to say, with much hysteria they brilliantly botch the robbery. But “Sunset Cookies”, on the other hand, in Francis’s capable hands, becomes a startling success. “Sunset Cookies” expands like Starbucks, and the film’s most successful sequence (a storytelling trick Woody has used before) is a 60 Minutes’ style news story on the Winklers’ success. Journalists interview the employees of the first store who went on to become “The Board”, who have “Board Meetings” to discuss “important” issues, such as what to do when the company toilet overflows. And thus, we’ve arrived at Act Two: Riches.
Soon Francis has taken a beautiful mansion and turned it into expensive and appalling squalor, with a leopard skin motif and a beautiful harp in the living room because she likes the “visual sweep” of it. But when they host their first dinner party with New York’s elite and discover they’re still considered vulgar, Francis is heartbroken. After all, her materialistic dreams have come true, and she’s still a social outcast. At this point, Ray decides he wants to return to the simple things, simple pleasures, simple crimes, the things he understood and loved. Francis wants to learn how to be sophisticated, how to be rich, how to like the right things.
Is class merely a matter of money? Who are more humane, the lower class or the upper class? And what is the relationship between money, education, and taste? The Winklers serve to show that money doesn’t bring happiness, but is it that simple? The movie almost proposes that money and power in the hands of those uneducated in the finer things leads to a shoddy culture.
But Woody resists the allure of such questions and goes for easy laughs and caper contrivances. Maybe he wanted to give something to the fans of his early work, or maybe he just wanted to do a tribute to “The Honeymooners”. Very little room for social commentary here. Like Ralph Kramden, Ray boasts to his buddies about being head of the household, but his arrogance falls flat in the presence of his smarter, stronger wife, so he’s reduced to empty threats like ”I’m gonna slam your head off!”
This may be the first Woody film where I came away most impressed with the cinematographer (Zhao Fei) than the actors. He captures one of the most beautiful sunsets I’ve ever seen in onscreen; I almost had to shield my eyes from the blazing sun. The Winklers’ mansion is a wonderland, a vast and beautiful place that might have been a Stanley Kubrick set before Francis got to it with her decorating sense.
No Oscar-worthy performances this time around. (Usually Woody gives somebody a major star turn.) A few fine comic actors are sorely under-used. Jon Lovitz and Michael Rappaport must have been frustrated, being in a Woody Allen movie and having so few good lines. Woody himself is in fine form, much closer to his early slapstick persona than anything in recent memory. Casting Tracey Ullman as Francis is his smartest move of all. She’s his best on-screen match since Diane Keaton in Annie Hall; smart, funny, a fully-developed character. I hope he brings her back in a better movie. She deserves it. It’s not hard to imagine him writing an Oscar-worthy part for someone who has long deserved a place in the comediennes Hall of Fame. Hugh Grant’s scenes with Ullman also gave me visions of the two of them in a romantic comedy someday; their chemistry was undeniable, her bluntness playing perfectly off his characteristic, well-mannered sophistication.
Elaine May is the most pleasant surprise of all, earning the biggest laughs as a perpetually bewildered minimum-wage employee at “Sunset Cookies.” She seems unfazed by the change in circumstances when the money starts coming in, as blundering and simple-minded as she was when she had nothing. She shares a touching moment with Ray, sitting on a plush couch in the mansion, sipping Pepsi from a wine glass and watching an old movie. It’s a scene of rare sentiment, and one that gave me great hope for Woody’s new direction.
Perhaps Woody Allen is a little like Ray Winkler, having come so far as an intellectual’s filmmaker, as an artist, as a success, that he’s longing to go back to the simpler things, the carefree zany things. In the story, it’s a whole lot easier for Ray than it may be for Woody himself. We’ll see.
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Writer/director – Woody Allen
Director of photography – Zhao Fei
Editor – Alisa Lepselter
Production designer – Santo Loquasto
Produced by Jean Doumanian
DreamWorks Pictures. 95 minutes. Rated PG.
STARRING: Woody Allen (Ray), Tracey Ullman (Frenchy), Tony Darrow (Tommy), Hugh Grant (David), George Grizzard (George Blint), Jon Lovitz (Benny), Elaine May (May), Michael Rapaport (Denny) and Elaine Stritch (Chi Chi Potter).
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