Crime and No Punishment: Allen on Dostoevsky, Part II

Rating: 6/10 (26 September 2019)

Generally considered one of Woody Allen's more atypical films, which being made outside of New York (in this case, London) makes that consideration true, I suppose, "Match Point" is in other ways similar to his "Crimes and Misdemeanors" (1989) and later "Irrational Man" (2015), all of which contest the underlying philosophy of Fyodor Dostoevsky's novel "Crime and Punishment." The 1989 film only alluded to this with its play on the book's title, but "Match Point" more noticeably acknowledges Dostoevsky's influence by including a scene where the film's protagonist, Chris, is reading the novel, as well as "The Cambridge Companion to Dostoevsky." The patriarch of the Hewett family later remarks that Chris made insightful comments regarding the Russian author. Indeed, Chris goes on to test Raskolnikov's, the book's protagonist, theory regarding getting away with murder. The motive for the crime, however, is more akin to that of "Crimes and Misdemeanors" rather than that of Raskolnikov, and "Match Point" also seems indebted to the oeuvre of Alfred Hitchcock, especially "Strangers on a Train" (1951) and "Vertigo" (1958).
As with one of the leads in Hitchcock's former film, Chris is a tennis player who plans to marry up, and both get involved in a murder plot. There's also the attention to symbolic objects: the lighter in "Strangers on a Train," for instance, and the tennis ball and ring in "Match Point." There's no homosexual coding along the lines of Hitchcock's picture in Allen's, however, regardless of two men enjoying the opera and sleeping with the same woman. Meanwhile, the picture's movie romance and art gallery sequence shadow "Vertigo." As for "Crimes and Misdemeanors," "Match Point" lifts the dilemma of a mistress who threatens to expose their affair to the wife. Both also exploit their crime as an atheistic antithesis to Dostoevsky's Orthodox conservatism. None of the comedy and cinematic reflexivity of the prior film is carried over, though. There is the spectatorship of opera, the musical "The Woman in White," and an American actress, Scarlett Johansson, plays an American actress, but not much is done with any of that. Much more is made of social class here, however, which is more in line with Dostoevsky's prose and the movie's British setting. The Irish tennis-pro-turned-businessman and the struggling American actress are both the active and suspect characters in the drawing-room play of a life of leisure preoccupying the English and wealthy Hewett family.
Shared among Allen, Dostoevsky and Hitchcock are their inclusions of doubles motifs. In "Match Point," there's the two players in tennis, the two lower-class foreigners, the two upper-class siblings and their two parents, the two men, as in "Crimes and Misdemeanors," who both have affairs and marriages, each in this case causing two pregnancies, Chris's, like Raskolinikov's, and as planned in "Strangers on a Train," two murders (well, three counting the pregnancy), and even two detectives. One man breaks off his engagement after impregnating his mistress, while the other decides to preserve his union by murdering his expecting lover, which recalls the duality of Allen and Martin Landau's characters in "Crimes and Misdemeanors," the two protagonists in "Strangers on a Train," Kim Novak's doppelgängers in "Vertigo," and Raskolnikov and Svidrigaïlov in "Crime and Punishment."
Although this is all interesting material, "Match Point" is rather meandering, despite some critics' claim of it being a "taut thriller." Without the Dostoevsky foreshadowing, the crime would've seemed entirely out of place. The classism doesn't add anything, and the luck business seems overly simplistic compared to Allen's prior philosophizing. The dreary picture reflects its subject matter. And some of the borrowings here seem trite; there's even a make-out session in the rain, which I know it rains a lot in England, but had Allen just seen "The Notebook" (2004) or something? Nevertheless, after seeking a bunch of film adaptations after reading "Crime and Punishment," I continue to be impressed that Allen more intelligently engages with the text, as well as other films, than do other filmmakers, whether of straightforward adaptations or inspired reworkings such as "Match Point."