A place in the sun across the channel.

Rating: 7/10 (3 February 2006)

Woody Allen is treading down a familiar path. Lower class boy meets rich girl, and uses her to get ahead, but is sidetracked along the way by his libido. The question is can Allen do the subject as well, or better than it's forebears. Two movies come to mind: "A place in the Sun," and "Room at the top." Both are classics, the first an American version of Dreiser's: "An American tragedy," starring Montgomery Clift. The second a gritty British version starring Laurence Harvey as the unforgettable Joe Lampton. The answer is: no, not by a long shot!
A tennis pro (Myers), at a posh British Country club, gets invited by one of his clients to the Opera with his rich family. Our hero meets the client's sister, and she takes a romantic interest in him. Our hero sees his opportunity and let's it take him where it can do him the most good, which is out of Tennis and into the boardroom.
Allen chooses to go softly and slowly into this story, and it takes awhile for the story to get under one's skin. That moment is the arrival of Scarlett Johansen, his girlfriend's, brother's, fiancée; and our hero's immediate beeline towards her. Now we know that he isn't simply trying to get ahead, he is trying to have it all, and in so doing the only question left unanswered is how self destructive are his demons? Allen wrote the screenplay as well as directed, often a difficult combination to pull off. But then, that is his métier! The problem I had with the script is that too often we can see the actor's struggling to make the words come out naturally. Johansen struggles the most, perhaps because she is not a great actress, or perhaps because Allen gives her lines that are more in place on stage.
Meyers struggles as well, in part because he is surrounded by more accomplished British professionals, and in part because he is not really up for the kind of nuanced performance required of him. But ultimately the main fault is Allen's, because he wants to give us a movie about the pit falls of ambition, and all we get is a rather mediocre morality play. In the end Meyer's character is not nearly as dangerous as Joe Lampton, nor as tragic as Clift's. So what he leaves us with is a nice little twist at the end, that somehow manages to come off too easily and too patly.