Woody Allen doing Chabrol? Is it possible? For that small but vocal cadre of critics who complain every time a middle-class Allen protagonist comes complete with a plush, expansive New York City apartment several fortunes removed from the gross income he or she would have made over their entire life time, here, finally, is a socially conscious Woody Allen movie. Unfortunately, it is not much of one. Characters are barely defined by anything beyond their attractiveness, and, most importantly, by their class. Or, at least, what amounts to class in the film. Chris Wilton (Jonathan Rhys-Meyers) is a young, handsome lad who "pulled himself up" from Irish poverty by training hard at tennis. This being a Woody Allen film though, Chris is also a bit of a pretentious intellectual. The first thing we see him doing is reading Dostoyevski's Crime and Punishment (which Match Point lovingly borrows from), and Chris' enthusiastic love for opera is what immediately ties him to the wealthy Hewitt family. After being assigned to teach the Hewitt son (Matthew Goode) how to play tennis at the club Chris works at, a friendship is immediately struck over the two's mutual enjoyment of opera. Friendship with the Hewitt son leads to engagement to the Hewitt daughter, Chloe (Emily Mortimer), and Chris leaves his tennis instructor job to be groomed and loved by Hewett's immensely rich and prestigious British family. Trouble comes in the form of a failing American actress, Nola (Scarlett Johansson), who is engaged to Chloe's brother but being actively drooled over by Chris. Their dialog is the stuff of dime store romance novels, but the two work up a considerable heat, what with Johansson's recent, unfortunately superficial, understanding of her own voluptuousness (her body as a visual treat does more for the character than her acting, sadly), and Rhys-Meyer's particular brand of brooding intensity, the English equivalent of the Joaquin Phoenix phenomenon. Despite Nola's haughty, knowing sexuality, she gives into Chris after a day of being berated for her failing career by disapproving Mother Hewitt. What keeps the illicit couple together is obvious lust and freedom from the aristocratically stifling Hewitts on his part, and for her something completely undefined, as Allen flips her switch from sultry and experienced to paranoid, borderline alcoholic, and clingy. Bored with the job Chloe got for him and unable to make her pregnent, Chris keeps seeing Nola even as she tries to break apart his marriage. When the wrong girl gets pregnant, it is clear that Chris needs to make a very serious decision.

Though it certainly is a relief to see a Woody Allen movie with such a firmly told story, the nouveau riche man torn between his life of staid comfort and plebian lusts is not invested with any new spark (unless we consider the idea of Woody making this kind of movie interesting in and of itself). And it does not help that while each character is most important to the story because of their class background, that is indeed the only depth the script allows them. (Just look at the Hewitt parents, blank wealthy old people; the father (played with no interest by Brian Cox) like opera, the mother drinks and says inappropriate things. And this in the chamber piece with so few prominent characters!) The critics who think that the bare bones simplicity of character in Johansson's sultry femme fatale cum Allen-neurotic and in Mortimer's sweet, helpful, whiny and clueless heiress are final indicators of the director's misogyny should take a harder look at Rhys-Meyer's Chris, who only distinguishes himself beyond his impoverished upbringing because he is given a moral dimensionality. Even then, he is still a bit too ridiculous, from his clear revulsion to being integrated and groomed into a career he hates and partnered with a woman who seems to elicit no romantic reaction--yet uncomplainingly takes the job, and succeeding, as well as marrying the girl--to his oddly awkward affinity for opera.

In fact, the pretention that coats the character--which I think is suppose to connotate class ambitions, but I did not see any, nor, crucially, are any really evident in Rhys-Meyer's characterization--almost exudes into the film itself. Instead of the patented crackling jazz records common to the Woody ouevre, we get ancient, dignificed sounding opera recordings during Chris' suffering, and along with cinematographer Remi Adefarasin's satin-like photography the sound and images gloss the film with a Chabrol-like feel of satirizing the bourgeoisie-as-character as much as the bourgeoisie-as-audience. I would swear that the fact that Chloe wants to see Andrew Lloyd Weber's "The Woman in White," and all Allen allows the audience to glean of it is a single musical cue cut in half by an edit, is a parodic jab at Chris' view of Chloe's contempable upper-class tastelessness. But while Chris' just barely felt dismissal of the Weber musical is his joke, Allen's scoring of his trials and tribulations to classical opera seems just as satiric, Allen making it clear that his lead thinks a bit too much of himself. This trend at borderline self-satire for the director's own style connects Match Point in my mind to Hollywood Ending which more overtly joked around with Woody as a filmmaker.

Looking good and moving steadily foward, the film nevertheless aches with a simplicity and uninventiveness that makes it hard to excuse the fact this is one of Allen's most enjoyable films to watch. (The London setting helps a bit too.) Looked through a class schema, the film works in a classical sense reminiscent of 19th century literature, with Chris's animal lust for Nola being an embrasure of the illicit, untidy passion of both their lower-class backgrounds, and Chris' eventual need to rid himself of the Nola problem functioning as a literal suppression of his class roots. The only problem is that we never feel like Chris really wants the aristocratic lifestyle of the Hewitts, nor indeed that he was ever really impoverished or coarse in the first place. While Chris may be comfortable in his new milieu, the sacrifices he has to make for it seem ridiculous in light of his intelligent lathargy. Maybe it's just that Allen had a good scenario, albiet one done far too many times, and failed to create characters rich enough (no pun intended) to tie his newly tackled themes of class with the moral questions asked in his better serious films. Match Point stakes everything, from its passion to its immorality, on the psychological conflicts of class within its characters. The script, however, is unable to portray these characters as anything more than one-note pawns, rich and poor, shackling Chris' dilemma by an over-simplification that undercuts the emotional and moral meat of the story as it does the possible social and self criticism of the film's themes.