Movie Pick

Match Point Is A Winner

Match Point (R)

originally published February 8, 2006

Best known for his picture postcards of the Big Apple, Woody Allen’s working holiday across the pond has produced his most electrifying film in years. Former professional tennis player Chris Wilton (Jonathan Rhys-Meyers) believes that, no matter how hard one works, winning at life depends on luck the same way that winning a match does. Wilton’s lucky bounce comes when he meets Tom Hewett (Matthew Goode), an upper crust, English playboy whose father (Brian Cox, as good at playing the stately, overprotective patriarch who provides his children’s every need- be it a fiver or a job for their potential spouse - as he is chewing scenery) owns a number of profitable companies. Sharing what appears to be a calculated interest in opera, Chris gets himself invited to the family’s private box, where he meets Chloe (Emily Mortimer), Tom’s sweet sister. Chris’ subsequent wooing of Chloe allows him to wheedle his way into the Hewett family, where unsurprisingly, he fits quite well. Complications (there are always complications) arise when Chris meets Nola (Scarlett Johansson), a wannabe actress, an unbeaten American temptress and Tom’s fiancée. Chris’ and Nola’s commonality - both scrabbled their way up from life’s hard courts to the upper class’ plush grass ones - sparks an instant frisson, upon which they ill-advisedly act. A few narrative feints later and the married Chris begins a disastrous but passionate affair (when will humanity learn there is no other kind?) with Nola, while the seemingly infertile Chloe sits at home, waiting to be impregnated. When Chris discovers he is more in love with his lavish lifestyle than he is with love, he makes a final, uncharacteristic decision that may forever change his luck, and therefore, his life.

Much ado has been made of Match Point’s being a departure - of sorts - for Allen, America’s most prolific and talented filmmaker. Sure, the film and its London setting commemorate his first cinematic jaunt across the Atlantic; however, this geographic distance marks the only true dissociation the film takes from those of Allen’s past. From many critics’ reactions, you’d think Match Point opens with some ludicrous, Saul Bass credit sequence. It doesn’t. The same comforting white font on a black background informs us of who will be playing the unfortunate souls in Allen’s amorality play. In Match Point, Allen the writer tells the same misanthropic love story he’s told countless times over, and with less brutality than in Deconstructing Harry. Be it age, marriage or boredom, something always stands in the way of true love and happiness for a Woody Allen character. Less humorous than other Allen films (still, that, in and of itself, is nothing new; see Interiors), Match Point manages to generate a few laughs, some dryly comic, others slightly silly (James Nesbitt and Ewen Bremner’s outsmarted and dimwitted policemen, respectively).

Even directorially, Match Point doesn’t stray too far from Allen’s oeuvre. He still utilizes every bit of the frame, letting no space go to waste, and forces the viewer to choose that bit of action upon which he or she wishes to concentrate. Tone is where this picture diverges from Allen’s cinematic stream. Ever the cynical romantic, the filmmaker has suddenly chosen to cloak his bitter love in the noirish attire of Alfred Hitchcock. His two main characters seem to have marched straight from the pages of pulp fiction, yet they are two of the most sympathetically human characters, despite their obvious designs on the hearts of the Hewett clan, ever created by Allen. Nola is ever the James M. Cain femme fatale, and Chris, all things to all people, is the filmmaker’s Tom Ripley, that master of conscious deceit about whom Patricia Highsmith wrote. Chris’ entire conversation upon first meeting Tom Hewett sounds scripted, as if he researched the fellow with the intent of infiltrating his family. It appears the former tennis player turned club pro, with a plan as chiseled as his chin, sees the ball finally bouncing his way. Displaying extreme acting maturity for her age (she’s still just 21), while retaining the eerily youthful sexuality Allen so values in his female leads, the sensuous, nubile Johansson, her every curve on display throughout the picture, is a perfect match for Nola and the longtime filmmaker. Her drunken one-on-one with Chris is frightening, not only because he is powerless before her come-hither nature, but because we (the collective audience) are as well, thanks to the intimacy with which Allen stages the seduction.

Match Point absolutely deserves its sole Academy Award nomination in the Best Original Screenplay category, as the film’s strongest feature is Allen’s script. Its ensemble cast is too communally good to single out just one performer (though I wouldn’t be crying if Johansson’s name had been called), and the crafty direction is nothing out of the ordinary for the Woodster. But in the subtext heard ‘round the world and the deliberate plotting, Match Point reflects a reinvigorated writer, which is first and foremost what Allen is, at least before the camera begins to roll. Whether or not it is the septuagenarian filmmaker’s new global perspective - he’s already finished a second London-based film, starring Johansson no less, and has either a third BBC Films production or a Barcelona-set picture in the works - that rejuvenated his recently flagging creativity matters little. Match Point is a winning stroke by an American ace.

Drew Wheeler

Drew Wheeler