Shoot The Pianist

Rating: 1/10 (22 February 2008)

Having run out of backers in the USA, Woody Allen came to England to shoot this film for the BBC. Maybe his paymasters influenced the treatment because this film turns out to be exactly like the sort of pap that the BBC serves up every every night of the week and particularly on Sundays. After a hard week's work you let your brain have an early night and settle down to watch a BBC drama with implausible plotting and cardboard characters inhabiting an English middle-class never-never land. One is tempted to think that Woody is having a joke at his paymasters' expense but that is probably being too charitable.
Some critics have complained about the wooden acting but, again, it is no worse than you see on British television. Anyway, the dialogue is so implausible that it is best delivered by mediocre actors. Saddest for me was seeing the embarrassment of a great actor, Brian Cox, having to deliver lines such as "He's right Helen  I think you've had one too many G and Ts".
The theme is loosely based on the plot of Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment. In fact we see the protagonist Chris reading this novel early on in the film. It reminds me that one of Woody's greatest films, Crimes and Misdemeanours also took the Dostoevsky novel as its starting point. What really upsets me, seeing this phony film, is the thought that, maybe, all Woody's wonderful Manhatten-set films are equally phony and I only think they sound authentic from my ignorant English viewpoint. That gets me thinking that, maybe, many of the masterpieces of world cinema that I so admire are phony too. It's a sobering thought. Woody has a lot to answer for.
Plenty of other reviewers have given examples of Woody's ignorance of all things English in making this film so I will end with just one. On several occasions we see our middle class family in their box at Covent Garden and twice we get a glimpse of the performance on stage, of La Traviata and Rigoletto. On both these occasions, the opera is accompanied solely by a badly played piano. I know British opera houses are a bit strapped for cash but I have never heard of one having to put on an opera without an orchestra.