Small Time Crooks

It's not like "Small Time Crooks," Woody Allen's much-ballyhooed return to making funny films instead of thinly disguised autobiographies, is a bad movie. It's fairly funny, for one. It's recognizably a Woody Allen movie, as well, full of neurotic meanderings and jazz-band music and New York accents. Passing 95 minutes with "Small Time Crooks" is never less than a pleasant experience. But there's nothing much to irresistibly draw viewers to "Small Time Crooks" , either. Allen and most of his ensemble cast do an unexceptional comic-acting job, long dead stretches and sudden plot switches drain off the laughter, and even when jokes are being made they're mostly not that amusing. Except for a dynamite performance by Elaine May, "Small Time Crooks," for all its good qualities, is a small-time flick.

Without giving too much of the plot away, "Small Time Crooks" is primarily structured around Allen's ability to script a comic situation into the ground. Allen sets up a bumbled heist meticulously, then abandons it for a culture-clash plot, then decides to chuck that too and return to bumbling heisting. This constant switching, as you might guess, saps the comic momentum, even though it is painfully obvious by the end of the first two plots that there is nothing more to be done with them. This is painfully obvious because towards the end of each of the plots, Allen begins restating jokes, inserting random meandering by one or another of the characters, or simply inserting long shots of nothing interesting (a line outside a cookie shop, a New York vista). A great comedic opus heats up as it goes, as each scene builds on the hilarity of those which preceded it; "Small Time Crooks," by contrast, limps along for much of its length.

The only characters common to all three threads are Allen, the ex-con dishwasher; Tracey Ullman as his sometime-manicurist wife; and the aforementioned May as Ullman's idiot cousin. Ullman, surprisingly, is given a little more screen time than Allen, as she attempts to become cultured with the help of transparently oily and scheming Hugh Grant. Ullman has some comedic gifts, but all Allen asks her to do is hit one note and hit it hard. Her performance starts out refreshingly acidic, but the acid loses its effect on the audience from repeated exposure. However, Ullman herself never loses her enthusiasm for the role or the character, and her involvement makes her consistently watchable, if diminishingly hilarious.

After Allen gives some ludicrous lines to himself about beating down Ullman, who looks like she could take Allen out in about twenty seconds, he settles into a comic rhythm. Unusually, Allen assigns the intellectual predilections here to Ullman, while himself singing the simple, neurotic song of a man who just wants to eat cheeseburgers rather than foie gras and to go to the horse track rather than "La Traviata." Allen consistently seems about to collapse into a whiny snit, but always manages to pull back at the last minute; his portrait of his lowbrow character, while not especially convincing, is fun to watch.

Still, these two actors do not shine in any particular way. The only person in the whole movie who does that is Elaine May. Every time she comes onscreen, she demonstrates breathtaking comedic timing, a feel for physical gesture which is so subtle and delicate that it makes you laugh while you barely notice it, and a sublime sense of the ridiculousness of her character. A scene during the second heist plot, where she is attempting to make up medical symptoms to distract attention from the heisting Allen, is hysterical, showing off a rhythm and tonal control most actors only dream about having. May is magnificent.

But she's not on screen a whole lot, either, and what you get most of the time is genial but unmemorable. It's certainly a lot more fun to watch funny Allen movies than thinly disguised Allen autobiographies, but Allen doesn't have it back yet. Unless you think everything Woody Allen has ever done is genius, or you're willing to pony up eight bucks to watch May tear it up during the screen time she has, it's not worth your time to see "Small Time Crooks."

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