Essay
God, Faith and Organised Religion in Woody Allen’s Films.
Woody Allen has spent much of his career worrying about God. His films return again and again to faith, mortality, moral judgement and one particularly uncomfortable question: if nobody is keeping score, why should we behave ourselves?
The recurring question
Woody Allen has been worrying about God for most of his career.
Sometimes the subject is played for a quick joke. Elsewhere it becomes the entire moral engine of a film. His characters argue about whether God exists, whether religion offers anything useful, what happens after death and, perhaps most importantly, whether people have any reason to behave morally if nobody is keeping score.
Allen himself has always drawn a distinction between personal faith and organised religion. He has spoken respectfully about people who genuinely believe while remaining deeply suspicious of religious institutions, rituals and rules.
That tension turns up repeatedly in his films. Religion may be mocked, but the questions behind it rarely are.
1989 · Crimes and Misdemeanors
What if nobody is watching?
No Woody Allen film tackles the subject more directly than Crimes and Misdemeanors.
Judah Rosenthal, played by Martin Landau, is a wealthy ophthalmologist whose comfortable life is threatened when Dolores, the woman with whom he has been having an affair, threatens to tell his wife.
Judah talks to Ben, a rabbi and patient of his who is gradually losing his sight. Ben believes in a moral order, forgiveness and personal responsibility. Judah then turns to his brother Jack, whose solution is considerably less spiritual: Dolores can simply be killed.
Judah chooses Jack.
What follows makes Crimes and Misdemeanors far more disturbing than a conventional story about guilt. Judah initially expects punishment. His Jewish upbringing returns to him in fragments and memories, along with the belief that God sees everything. Murder ought to have consequences because the universe ought to possess some kind of moral structure.
But nothing happens.
Judah isn’t exposed. God doesn’t strike him down. His family remains intact and, as time passes, even his guilt begins to disappear.
Morality
No divine justice.
That’s far more unsettling than simply presenting Judah as an evil man.
The film places several possible ways of understanding life alongside one another. Ben has religious faith. Cliff Stern, played by Allen, believes in morality but has no convincing religious foundation for it. Professor Louis Levy looks for philosophical meaning. Judah ultimately discovers that life will quite happily continue whether he deserves happiness or not.
Allen doesn’t give us the satisfaction of divine justice.
That absence is the point.
1986 · Hannah and Her Sisters
Shopping for a religion.
Religion gets a much funnier treatment in Hannah and Her Sisters, although the anxiety beneath the jokes is almost identical.
Allen plays Mickey Sachs, a television producer and committed hypochondriac who becomes convinced that he has a brain tumour. Tests eventually show that he’s healthy, which should solve the problem.
Instead, Mickey realises something worse.
He’s going to die anyway.
That sends him into an existential panic. If death is unavoidable and there’s nothing afterwards, he can’t see much point in anything. Unlike Judah, who worries that God might exist, Mickey desperately wants God to exist.
So he starts looking.
Born Jewish, Mickey considers converting to Catholicism. He buys religious paraphernalia, talks to a priest and tries to convince himself that faith might provide the answer. When that doesn’t work, he investigates Hare Krishna and reincarnation.
None of it sticks.
Mickey’s answer
Then he walks into a cinema.
It’s funny because Mickey approaches religion almost like a consumer comparing products. He isn’t experiencing a revelation. He’s frightened and looking for whichever belief system can offer the most reassuring answer.
Then Allen does something rather lovely with the story.
Mickey eventually wanders into a cinema and watches the Marx Brothers in Duck Soup. Surrounded by people laughing, he begins to wonder whether demanding a grand explanation for existence is the wrong approach. Perhaps life doesn’t need to come with an answer. Perhaps being alive, experiencing pleasure, loving people and laughing at the Marx Brothers is enough.
Religion doesn’t cure Mickey’s fear of death. A film does.
For someone as obsessed with cinema as Allen, that feels entirely appropriate.
1975 · Love and Death
Philosophy with punchlines.
More than a decade before Crimes and Misdemeanors, Allen was already asking many of the same questions in Love and Death.
The difference is that in 1975 he was still treating philosophy as material for almost continuous jokes.
Allen plays Boris Grushenko, a cowardly Russian dragged into the Napoleonic Wars. Boris and Sonja, played by Diane Keaton, discuss love, death, morality and God while Allen cheerfully parodies Russian literature, Bergman and philosophical argument itself.
Boris is constantly asking enormous questions and receiving very little reassurance.
Does God exist? Is there an afterlife? Is morality something handed down from above, or something human beings have invented? Why does suffering exist if someone is supposedly in charge?
The film doesn’t seriously attempt to answer them. That’s part of the joke.
Yet beneath all the Dostoevsky references and slapstick, you can already see the preoccupation that would become much darker in Allen’s later work.
Love and Death laughs at our desire for certainty.
Crimes and Misdemeanors asks what happens when that certainty disappears.
2005 · Match Point
And then there’s luck.
Match Point inevitably invites comparison with Crimes and Misdemeanors.
Both feature a man whose comfortable life is threatened by a lover. Both men choose murder. Both escape punishment.
But there’s an important difference.
Allen has described Crimes and Misdemeanors as fundamentally concerned with religion and a godless universe, while Match Point is about luck.
Chris Wilton doesn’t spend much time worrying that God might punish him. Chance decides his fate. A tiny accident can determine whether he is caught or walks free.
In Crimes and Misdemeanors, the frightening possibility is that nobody is watching.
In Match Point, nobody needs to be watching. Life may simply be random.
The question that remains
How
should
we live?
Woody Allen’s films are frequently described as atheistic, which is true up to a point. What makes them interesting is how reluctant they are to leave the matter there.
A filmmaker genuinely uninterested in religion wouldn’t keep returning to God, death, judgement, faith and the possibility of an afterlife.
His suspicion of organised religion is obvious, but so is a certain envy of people who can genuinely believe. Faith gives Ben in Crimes and Misdemeanors something Judah lacks: confidence that life possesses a moral structure beyond whatever happens to be convenient at the time.
Mickey wants that certainty in Hannah and Her Sisters and discovers that he can’t manufacture it simply because it would make him feel better. Boris jokes about it. Judah tests it in the most horrifying way possible.
If there is no God, no afterlife and no final judgement, how should we live?
Allen never comes up with a definitive answer. He does, at least, suggest that laughing at the Marx Brothers is a pretty good way to spend some of the time we have.