Match Point

 

Posted to www.marxmail.org on January 2, 2006

 

Warning: This film review will reveal the surprise ending of Woody Allen’s latest film.

 

----

 

If you’ve seen “Annie Hall,” I am sure you will remember the scene when Woody (Alvy) and Diane Keaton (Annie) are walking down a city street discussing how dysfunctional their relationship is. They then spot a couple who look like Calvin Klein models walking towards them and Woody stops them in their tracks to ask the secret of their success:

 

Alvy Singer: Here, you look like a very happy couple, um, are you?

 

Female street stranger: Yeah.

 

Alvy Singer: Yeah? So, so, how do you account for it?

 

Female street stranger: Uh, I'm very shallow and empty and I have no ideas and nothing interesting to say.

 

Male street stranger: And I'm exactly the same way.

 

Alvy Singer: I see. Wow. That's very interesting. So you've managed to work out something?

 

Ironically, the 69 year old director’s latest film is focused on exactly two such shallow and empty characters. That it has received any sort of critical acclaim (and it has) should indicate how deep a creative trough he had descended into in the past 15 years or so. To damn it with faint praise, I confess at having been able to watch it to the conclusion--something that has proven beyond my capabilities for a Woody Allen film for as long as I can remember.

 

“Match Point” tells the story of Chris Wilton (Jonathan Rhys-Meyers), an Irish tennis pro from a modest family background, who marries Chloe Hewett (Emily Mortimer), the daughter of a bourgeois British family out of naked ambition. Eventually, he takes up with Nola Rice (Scarlett Johansson), an aspiring actress from the USA who is as shallow and materialistic as him and who is the girl-friend of Chloe’s brother Tom (Matthew Goode). All four of these characters are lovely to look at but nearly impossible to take seriously.

 

Most of their dialogue consists of setting up luncheon or theater dates or reveling in their fabulous life-style. On a certain level, it would offer the same kind of titillation to a middle-class audience as a Sidney Sheldon or Jacqueline Susann novel. Or for that matter, it shares the real estate porn of Steve Martin’s “Shopgirl,” a film that I reviewed here recently. (Both films were available to me as free screeners fortunately.)

 

The characters in “Match Point” shop at expensive boutiques, drive around in Jaguars and live in palatial estates and townhouses. In other words, it is Woody Allen’s Manhattan transposed to London.

 

The explanation for this is about as mercenary as the characters in the film. Allen’s recent money-losing track record made it impossible to bankroll the film for an American production. The BBC, deciding to take a chance with “Match Point,” required that it be shot in Great Britain and include an all-British cast.

 

Three-quarter’s of the way through the film, it shifts gears entirely and becomes a kind of clumsy imitation of a Dostoyevsky novel. After Chris gets Nola pregnant, she threatens to reveal their affair to his wife unless he agrees to leave her. A desperate Chris accosts her in her apartment building, shoots her and her elderly neighbor dead with a shotgun and disguises the murders as a drug robbery.

 

When he eventually throws the spoils of the robbery into the Thames to cover his tracks, a wedding ring bounces off the railing and fails to fall into the water. It is retrieved by a junky thief who is then shot dead in a robbery attempt. When the ring is found on his dead body, the police are forced to conclude that he is Nola’s murderer rather than Chris, who looms large in their investigation.

 

The end of the movie reveals a relieved Chris at a lavish party celebrating his wife’s pregnancy. If the message of the film is not that crime pays, it is certainly that luck matters more than anything. The opening of the film shows a tennis ball bouncing back--unluckily--into the court of the server, just as the ring bounces--luckily--onto a sidewalk where the junky thief can retrieve it.

 

As Allen told the Guardian’s Emma Brockes (author of the hatchet job on Chomsky):

 

“I had an idea about wanting to do something about the role that luck plays in life and that we're all terrified to face up to that. Everyone wants to think that they, you know, control their lives, or at least have some control. You like to think, you know, well, if I exercise and eat right and don't smoke, I'm going to ... But that doesn't do it. And no amount of planning can account for the big part that luck plays. I wanted to write a story that would illustrate that.”

 

Some critics have likened Allen’s film to Theodore Dreiser’s “An American Tragedy” and to the film “A Place in the Sun,” which is based on Dreiser’s naturalistic morality tale about the downfall of a working class man who marries into a bourgeois family. But Allen’s vision and that of Dreiser’s could not be further apart. Dreiser was a stern critic of the wealthy and even joined the Communist Party at the very end of his life.

 

Despite Allen’s frequent characterization of himself as a schlemiel (Yiddish for loser), in real life he has had much more in common with the wealthy family that the tennis pro marries into. After Allen began writing jokes professionally in his teens, he embarked on a fabulously successful career in show business. I was constantly reminded of this as I passed his three-story townhouse on East 92nd Street on my way to my own apartment building. That place was used by Soon-Yi’s and her adopted child, while Woody had his own penthouse on Fifth Avenue. When critics complain about the absence of Blacks or workers in his film, it can at least be said that he is making art about what he knows best, namely the life-styles of the rich and famous.

 

So why did I stick with this film until the conclusion? It has to be said that it has a formal elegance that is found in only the work of the most gifted directors. One could conceivably be entertained by this film if there was not a single work of dialogue. Indeed, the work that it reminded me of was not by the moralistic Dreiser at all. I kept thinking of the films of Stanley Kubrick, which also combined formal elegance with a studious refusal to moralize.

 

In particular, I thought of “Barry Lyndon,” the film based on Thackeray’s novel that depicts the marriage of a lowly Irishman into a British aristocratic family. Barry Lyndon was as much of a cipher and nearly as repellent as Chris Wilton, but one was drawn into his saga despite this.