Word: eye
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Such profligacy must bring retribution, one would think. Yet Italy goes serenely on, racking up an enviable economic record and attracting little international criticism or even attention. Perhaps insolvency resides in the eye of the beholder, for there can be no doubt about the numbers. Italian governments have been abusing their credit cards for 20 years, piling debt onto debt. Only once in the past dozen years has the annual budget deficit been less than 10% of GDP. By contrast, the worst U.S. ratio was 3.8% in 1983; last year it was only 1.8%. Moreover, most of Italy's debt...
Judah Rosenthal (Martin Landau) is possessed by a primal memory: a rabbi instructing the boy Judah that the eye of God is all seeing; no crime ever escapes it. Now successful and middle aged, Judah self-deprecatingly suggests to the audience at a testimonial dinner on his behalf that perhaps he became an ophthalmologist because he is haunted by that recollection...
Seeing is also a subject that Cliff Stern (Woody Allen) takes seriously. A documentary filmmaker, he is driven not by God but by the demands of an unyielding conscience to make his camera -- his eye -- bear witness to the inequities of his careless time...
...Cliff's only connection to Judah -- until the concluding sequence of this thematically unified but somewhat bifurcated movie -- is through Ben, another rabbi (Sam Waterston), who is one of Cliff's brothers-in-law. The rabbi is Judah's patient, and his eye trouble is quite literal; by the end of the movie he has gone blind. But this blindness is also symbolic. By visiting this affliction on the only character in his movie who has remained close to God, Allen is suggesting that if the Deity himself is not dead, then he must be suffering from severely impaired vision...
...ironies of Judah's discomfiting story. It also rings with irony. If neither Judah's guilty musings on his own crimes -- and he does exhibit a strong desire to be caught and punished -- nor decent Cliff's frantic quest for some kind of fulfillment can awaken heaven's sleeping eye, then what in this world can? If Manhattan, coming at the end of the '70s, was Woody Allen's comment on that decade's besetting sin, self-absorption, then this is his concluding unscientific postscript on the besetting sin of the '80s, greed. At times the joints in the movie...