Woody Allen has really, really, really lost it (mild spoilers)

Rating: 1/10 (5 December 2005)

Well. And what a waste of 8 euros "Match Point" turned out to be. As it happens, Woody Allen couldn't get financing in the US, or at least without strings attached, so he's decided to go and milk the BBC instead. Which means, in effect, that he recycled a story he'd written for a New York setting straight into a London setting, without any attempt at any significant rewrite. And "written" is a loose term. "An American Tragedy" meets "A Place In The Sun" meets "Room at the Top" meets "The Talented Mr. Ripley" meets (but let's not get carried away) "Le Rouge et le Noir." Ambitious poor boy courts aristocratic rich girl then gets torn between rich in-laws and poor girlfriend from the wrong side of the tracks. If you think this is too generic a summary, that's the whole point: "Match Point" is nothing but generic.
It's not just that Jonathan Rhys Meyers' young Irish tennis pro speaks like a 1950s BBC presenter without a hint of an explanation of how it came to him; it's that when he meets an old tennis acquaintance in the street, or when he bursts into a rage, his accent doesn't change. (Everybody in the movie speaks RP, except for the Scot-and-Cockney-coppers-as-comic-relief, and the property agent right at the beginning, probably because he was initially written as yammering in broad Brooklynese.) It's not just that sugar-daddy's country house is totally unconvincing if he's old money (wall-to-wall carpeting?), or his accent is if he's Alan Sugar. It's not just that somehow, I can't imagine a London copper calling someone a "schmuck", or a Sloane Ranger, however arty, mention that a couple is made in heaven because "their neuroses match". Or another Sloane boasting of getting good invitations because she was "born in Belgravia." Or that the country house set would welcome their daughter marrying a tennis instructor. Or that the cocktail-swilling son of the house, all public-school accent and Jeeves-and-Woosterish quips, could get away with calling even the hired help "Hey, Irish", meaning it to be affectionate. (Although the initial meeting between said son, played on automatic pilot by Matthew Goode, and JRM as his tennis coach at the Kensington Queen's Club, plays like nothing more than a gay pickup, all "Oh, you like opera? My father gives a tonne of money to Covent Garden, can I take you to Traviata tomorrow night?" for entirely too long for his sister to look like anything but a beard for the rest of the movie.) Or that even Richard Branson could just snap his fingers and said tennis pro becomes magically a business wizard. Or that a would-be American actress with only a commercial under her belt would audition for a part at the Royal Court.
It's that nobody has a real backstory, or even edges. (Scarlett Johansson does wonders with what little she's given. JRM is pretty - when he panics, you can't quite tell whether it's because he's afraid of handling a gun, or because he's just read the rest of the screenplay.) As for London, Allen tries for the postcard effect he perfected in "Manhattan" (complete with self-reference to the River Café shot), but he entirely misses the texture of the city: there isn't a single London scene set in a house, for instance, it's all flats (it's summer but Allen's London practically has no trees); people shop in Mayfair (at Aspreys and Ralph Lauren, natch), not Sloane Street; and when JRM, early in the movie, takes his posh totty for a romantic walk, it's to watch the changing of the guard at Buck House.
To be honest, there is a lovely plot twist right in the last five minutes. It's contrived, yes, but very clever. But it's not worth waiting two hours for.
And apparently, the Beeb has done it again: Allen's next movie, also starring Johansson, is also set in London. Chaps, this is your licence fee money that's being wasted.
It probably won't surprise anyone that the same French critics who found Existentialist genius in Jerry Lewis simply loved the movie, ranking it as high as Annie Hall in Allen's oeuvre. Le Monde called in "pungent social criticism with...a deeply-felt clinical study of class relations conditioning men's [*] behaviour and destiny in the...deterministic social system." And you were wondering why we had those riots.
[*] Nah, this isn't a feminist take - Le Monde's critics have no qualms about using "men" when they mean "human."