Small Time Crooks (2000)
Directed by Woody Allen

Film Review

After a mostly fallow decade in the 1990s, Woody Allen made a spectacular return to form with Small Time Crooks, a wholehearted attempt to embrace the mainstream rather than go chasing after increasingly fickle art-house audiences, as the director had been apt to do (with limited success) for many years.  It was a return to the sparkling, wisecracking comedies of the 70s and 80s, albeit with a somewhat cleaner, less intellectual edge.  Critics were quick to lambaste Allen for his concessions to mainstream sensibilities but the film was a box office hit, both in America and abroad, the director's biggest success since Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989).

Small Time Crooks is by no means in the same league as Allen's most sophisticated comedies, but it is, without a shadow of a doubt, one of his funniest films.  The first third of the film has probably the highest laugh-out-loud gag quota of any Woody Allen film and is unremittingly hilarious, even if the basic premise (a heist that goes badly wrong) is a familiar one.  After this superb opening, the film settles down into a more sedate kind of a comedy, a blunt social satire that feels like a cheeky send-up of an American sitcom.  Rent-a-cad Hugh Grant is the archetypal plummy English scoundrel who ends up playing Henry Higgins to social climber Tracey Ullman's Eliza Doolittle.  The class-themed humour is entirely predictable (gags involving finger bowls, tacky furniture and portraits in closets fall thick and fast) but, thanks to the sharpness of Allen's wit and the impeccable comic timing of the performers, it never becomes stale.

Woody Allen's flair and vitality as a comedy performer still bring joy to the spectator, even if the comic genius was in his mid-60s when he made the film.  The jokes may be cleaner but Allen is still as funny as ever, although here he comes dangerously close to being eclipsed by two other formidable talents, Tracey Ullman and Elaine May.  Both actresses are clearly in their element in Allen's wacky universe and have never given so much entertainment value.  Ullman's impersonation of a cultural ignoramus struggling to better herself (which she does by memorising every word in the dictionary in turn, beginning with the letter A) is comic book lunacy at its most basic but it is tirelessly amusing. 

What makes Ullman's performance so laudable is that whilst outwardly her character is an outright caricature, underneath this we can see a real person, someone desperately trying to make something of her life.  The tragedy is that in doing so, she loses sight of who she really is and ends up setting herself up for a tremendous fall.  Elaine May's character is even more exaggerated (when asked to talk about the weather at a party she subjects her unfortunate interlocutors to a full-blown weather forecast) but again the actress doesn't just go for the laughs; she also gives her character a memorable solidity.  By contrast, all of the other supporting characters are comicbook stereotypes intended only for our amusement.  Hugh Grant's English bounder and Elaine Stritch's party hostess are pure archetypes, easy targets in Allen's jaundiced assault on bourgeois pretentiousness.  Small Time Crooks may lack the finesse of Woody Allen's previous comedies but it is as enjoyable a class-themed morality romp as you could hope for.

Film Synopsis

Ray is an ex-convict who has put his criminal past behind him and now earns a meagre crust as a dishwasher.  When he sees a pizza restaurant up for sale next to a bank he sees an easy way to get rich quick, but can he persuade his wife Frenchy to stump up their life savings to buy the restaurant?  Frenchy finally gives into to Ray's mad-cap scheme, which is to dig a tunnel from the restaurant cellar into the bank vault next door whilst his wife runs a legitimate cookie shop at street level.  The plan soon goes awry when Frenchy ropes her dim-witted cousin May into helping her in her unexpectedly successful business.  May's loose tongue leads a cop to uncover Ray's scheme, but fortunately the cop is as crooked as he is.  A year on, Frenchy and Ray are fabulously wealthy, their small cookie enterprise having mushroomed into a nationwide franchise.  But wealth is not enough for Frenchy.  She yearns to improve herself and be accepted by her new rich friends, instead of being laughed at behind her back as an uncultured ignoramus.  Handsome young English art dealer David takes her in hand and begins educating her on the finer things in life.  Frenchy is so taken in by David's charm that she doesn't realise that he is only after her money so that he can finance his next art project.  Meanwhile, Ray feels completely alienated from the social sphere that he and his wife have somehow ended up in.  How he longs for the old life of poverty and simple pleasures...