Crimes and Misdemeanors was released a quarter of a century ago. The link tells the story right through so if you haven’t seen the film don’t read the review until you have watched it yourself. But the quote from Allen at the start of the article is worth thinking about and gets to the essence of the film’s storyline:

I firmly believe . . . that life is meaningless. I’m not alone in thinking this – there have been many great minds far, far superior to mine, that have come to that conclusion. And unless somebody can come up with some proof or some example where it’s not, I think it is. I think it’s just a lot of sound and fury, signifying nothing. I’m not saying that one should opt to kill oneself. But the truth of the matter is, when you think of it, every 100 years, there’s a big flush, and everybody in the world is gone. And there’s a new group of people. And this goes on interminably towards no particular end, no rhyme or reason. And the universe, as you know from the best of physicists, is coming apart, and eventually there will be nothing, absolutely nothing. All the great works of Shakespeare, and Beethoven, and Da Vinci, all that will be gone. Now, not for a long time, but shorter than you think because the sun is going to burn out much earlier than the universe vanishes . . . So all these plays and these symphonies, the height of human achievement, will be gone completely. There’ll be no time, no space, nothing at all, just zero.

All plausible, but the universe we live in seems too perfectly structured to have just been randomly constructed by a series of molecules that happened to cohere in particular ways that led to life. The moment that does shine through to me is the Seder scene (which the non-Jewish reviewer saw as a dinner party!) where Woody Allen’s movie grandfather sees morality in the universe because he chooses to. It is difficult to believe with any kind of certainty that there is, with ISIS running around who also believe they represent justice at its highest level. I believe I share Allen’s own perspective which makes everything possible with a blank empty universe of pain and suffering as likely as anything else. He would like evidence that it isn’t so, but you can see that even if he doesn’t believe there is more because he is unable to prove it to himself, there is that spark of hope that makes him keep looking. And being my favourite Woody Allen film, it is also my favourite film of all time.