Comic relief

These crooks know the drill

by Gary Susman

SMALL TIME CROOKS, Written and directed by Woody Allen. With Woody Allen, Tracey Ullman, Hugh Grant, Elaine May, Michael Rapaport, Tony Darrow, and Jon Lovitz. A DreamWorks release. At the Nickelodeon, the Kendall Square, and the Chestnut Hill and in the suburbs.

"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 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."

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Read Gary Susman's interview with Woody Allen.

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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?"