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Match Point February 5, 2006 |
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To suggest, like some have, that “Match Point” is Woody Allen’s best film in recent years is a slight understatement – it’s his best film in nearly two decades. Allen is one of my icons, and one of the greatest writer/directors of all time, but there’s no mistaking the fact that the ‘90’s were bad on him creatively, and it seemed like the 2000’s were going to be the same, with one less than inspired comedy after another. Anybody who saw “Hollywood Ending” or “The Curse of the Jade Scorpion” was left questioning if what they just saw was by the same man who once made “Annie Hall”, “Interiors” and “Manhattan” in one glorious three year span, and “Zelig”, “Broadway Danny Rose”, “The Purple Rose of Cairo”, and “Hannah and Her Sisters” in a just as glorious four year run. The problem, it seems, was that the great comedic genius has lost his grasp on what is still funny, so instead of forcing out another tired comedy, this time around Allen went for strict drama, not the Bergmanesque drama of “Interiors”, the Felliniesque drama of “Stardust Memories”, or the Cassavetesesque drama of “Husbands and Wives”, but the James M. Cainesque drama of “The Postman Always Rings Twice”, or the guilt ridden Dreiseresque drama of “An American Tragedy”, drama fraught with tension, deception, love, sex, and morality so thick you’d strain to cut it with a ginsu knife. The transition back to drama has paid off, as has the transition away from his usually solid N.Y. City backdrop, where the city itself was always a key character, to a post London setting where country estates, modern high rise offices and flats, high scale boutiques and restaurants, and stylish art galleries make up the chilly ambiance of the well to do, because “Match Point” is a superb human drama, Allen’s most respectable film since “Sweet and Lowdown”, and his first masterwork since “Crimes and Misdemeanors”, 17 years ago. At 71, the director could quit now and go out on top, with one of the best films he’s ever made, a capper to a stunning career that has had more ups than downs, but we know Allen is a consummate workhorse, and the odds of him giving it up are miniscule, so, I say, if the results of his next five films are anywhere close to being as good as this Londonian morality play, than bring ‘em on, we could always do with more great Woody Allen films, certainly we could do worse. The much praised film, which recently received an Oscar nomination for Allen’s bracing screenplay (his 21st in total), takes place in modern day London, England, where bored, nearly poor ex-tennis pro Chris Wilton (Jonathan Rhys-Meyers) takes a job at a country club as a moderately paid tennis teacher, a job that keeps him in a decent downtown flat, and allows him plenty of time to mingle with the rich, young set that he should belong to. One family, the obscenely wealthy Hewetts, take a shine to the handsome young man immediately when the eldest son, Tom (Matthew Goode) brings him to an opera, where pretty but lonely daughter Chloe (Emily Mortimer) falls in love with him on the spot. Chris is a gentleman, dashing and charming, so it’s not a stretch to imagine that the beautiful Hewett girl would fall for him, or that her kindly, businessman father (Brian Cox), would instantly take a liking to him, offering the boy a cushy job with a big office, secretary, and multiple figures, but it is a stretch to imagine that Chris would be happy tied down to the family routine, and no sooner after falling in love with Chloe does he find himself powerfully overcome by Tom’s American fiancé, the stunning beauty Nola Rice (Scarlett Johansson). Very methodically, Allen sets up the crux of the second half of the picture, as Chris and Nola have a brief one-time fling in a vast field in the pouring rain that leads, one year later, when Chris is married and Nola is no longer attached to the Hewett family, to a torrid affair that threatens Chris’s ever rising stock in the upper class set. The ultimate conflict: stay in a relatively uneventful, yet happy marriage, and benefit from the obvious monetary perks, or throw it all away for certain poorness, but total sexual fulfillment with the gorgeous Nola. Things happen rather quickly after the leisurely paced first half, and it would be wrong to give it away, but it’s safe enough to note that, no matter which way Chris turns, family stability or a lovers paradise, the outcome is heavily burdened by guilt, making the finale something of a philosophical nightmare. At the beginning of the film, Chris narrates the philosophy of a good tennis volley, and how, when the ball hits the top of the net, for a split second, the outcome of the entire point, maybe even the match, results on whether the ball falls forward, for the score, or backward, for the loss. This is obviously important, and serves as a metaphor for the larger scheme of the story, for if Chris’s decision on which woman to choose is made out to be that floating ball, than its outcome is based less on skill in choosing than in pure luck. For that split second, the tennis player is left to his devices, hoping for a lucky forward spin, and dreading a turn for the worse. The connection between the back-and-forth of tennis and the guilt of ruining a life (Chloe’s or Nola’s) is comparable to Hitchcock’s “Strangers on a Train”, with Chris being a composite of both Bruno and Guy, but I’d liken it more to “An American Tragedy”, and the film adaptation “A Place in the Sun”, where frustrated factory worker Montgomery Clift has to choose what to do with frumpy girlfriend Shelly Winters when he falls powerfully in love with the company owner’s glamorous daughter, Elizabeth Taylor. Like in the old film, Chris is wracked with frustration, and later debilitating guilt, over his decision, and how exactly he chooses to execute his decision, gently, or harshly (both of which have their pros and cons), but where “Match Point” differs is that Chris, unlike the Clift character, is basically choosing one beautiful woman or the other, basing the choice less on beauty (in “A Place in the Sun”, Liz over Shelly is a seemingly obvious choice), but on sexual vs. financial needs. “I can’t fool myself,” he tells a confidant rationalizing a decision towards his wife, “that I haven’t grown attached to a certain kind of living.” There’s that, and there’s sexy Nola, who draws men in “like a guided missile”; Allen sets up the volley with keen precision, and how it plays out is chilling, heartbreaking, and in the end, really the only logical escape, which, in retrospect, may be the biggest statement Allen has ever made about human nature and its often conflicted ways of working through its muddy problems. Visually, taking a cue from film noir, this is one of Allen’s finest looking films, with impeccable camerawork fluidly covering the well-designed London settings. When Chris meets up with Nola for the first time since their rainy field fling, it is at an art gallery, where Allen beautifully flanks Nola beneath a gigantic abstract painting, a shot that is calling out for more beyond its painstakingly pretty setup. The mise-en-scene of the piece is as carefully crafted as the delicately scratchy Verdi recording that constantly pops up, like a whispering ghost, at crucial moments of introspective thought and plot changing action. Like Hitchcock, Allen isn’t tricking us with a deceptive directing style, it’s straightforward, but he’s putting more thought, and emphasis, on certain designs, making it impossible to watch without trying to understand how the camera, as much as the screenplay, is leading us towards the slow-burning conclusion. What a joy it is to see Woody Allen mastering a form he had all but lost touch of, with precision in his directing choices, and sophistication in his sharp screenplay, a piece of writing that deftly balances the psychology of guilt, with the thrills of leading a double life. Bringing the script to life is a talented cast of young actors, the best of which is Jonathan Rhys-Meyers, whose sleepy eyes bemoans a confidence and cocksure attitude at bagging women, as well as a paranoia in blowing his newfound riches, a countenance befitting an actor who not too long ago forsake his natural accent to play Elvis Pressley on American television. As Nola, Scarlett Johansson is appropriately sexy, especially in the first half of the film, when Chris’s lust filled eyes double for the male contingency in the audience, with her throaty voice and full lips exuding bombshell status, but there’s more to the character than a dynamite figure and seductive nature, she’s vulnerable, lost in a foreign metropolis, and cynical from a bad childhood, lack of work, and years of being used by men who fantasize about her, but don’t know what to do with her after the fantasy has been realized. From “Lost in Translation” to “The Girl in the Pearl Earring”, Johansson is building quite a strong career out of playing the young ingénue who romantically complicates the lives of older, married men, with her voluptuous looks, and desirable likeability. Woody is smart to give Chris most of the ethical problems in the film, but he doesn’t shortchange his supporting characters, and of the handful of people spinning around Chris’s orbit, Nola is the most well rounded, and for that matter, the most troubled. It’s hard, I’m sure, for a girl to continually fall in love with men who see her as nothing but a sexual conquest. The chemistry between the two good looking actors is genuine, like Garfield and Turner in “The Postman Always Rings Twice”, and one of the keys to the success of the film is believing that Chris really thinks more of Nola than just another notch on his belt, that he would properly leave his wife, and agonize over the difficult decision. “Match Point” may not break any new ground, since it’s easily comparable with past stories of infidelity and guilt ridden sexual matters, but it’s unique in the canon of Woody Allen, and that it’s a genuinely thrilling drama should categorize it as more than just a comeback picture for an old master. I liken it to 1950’s “The Night and the City”, a film noir masterpiece by the great blacklisted American director Jules Dassin, who, when faced with the prospect of never working in his home country again, took his crew to the foggy nighttime streets of London and made his best picture to date. The transition from New York to London has had a similar effect on Woody Allen, and “Match Point” is the stunning product of the switch, a film both sensual and thrilling, as well as calculated and deceptively chilling. As long as he sticks to this kind of morality drenched material, and fights the urge to go back to watered down comedy (“Deconstructing Prince Harry”, anybody?), than it should be an eventful eighth decade for our favorite nebbishy auteur, and his adopted British stomping ground. by Adam Suraf “Match Point” is playing at the McKinley Mall cinema.
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