A crime without punishment and a Woody Allen without wood

Rating: 7/10 (26 July 2006)

I'm being fair with Allen's movie and voting a 7 just because he's been able after so many attempts to FINALLY "elaborate the mourning" for his wrecked marriage and difficult life over the last decade in the manner that real artists do: by hiding, rather than showing.
He really was off the target in his last... how many? 4? 5? 6 movies? when he showed unable to abandon his by now stereotyped querulous, paranoid and irritating character who talked and talked without getting never to the core of things.
Yet of the three keywords he's been only able to show the "obsession" part. Btw, what have you perceived to be the main character's obsession? Scarlett Johansson or Emily Mortimer? I believe it is Rhys Meyers' wife and her craving for pregnancy that becomes the real obsession. A life in the form of a gilded trap for a honest and candid Irish Paddy. Both Passion and Temptation are more or less left on the background.
A huge note of blame for the way Allen tries to stick by force some Dostoevskji in the story. It takes more than showing the cover of a book and kill two women to even scratch the surface of that endless research of Good and the struggle between ideas and deeds that obsessed the Russian titan throughout his work.
What is Rhys Meyers "higher design" that he mumbles when dreaming the women he killed? It is not clear... perhaps the fact that he will pretend to love his wife to make her happy. Only in this sense Allen becomes Dostoevskjian: "Crime without punishment" read wrongly one of the DVD extra... wrongly because his punishment and redemption is there; his wife.