Match Point

Synopsis: Chris Wilton (Jonathan Rhys-Meyers) is a retired pro tennis player who has signed on to be a tennis instructor at a posh British club. One of his first clients is Tom Hewitt (Matthew Goode) who invites Chris out for a night at the opera. There, Chris meets Tom's family: his father, Alec (Brian Cox); his mother, Eleanor (Penelope Wilton); and his sister, Chloe (Emily Mortimer). Chris and Chloe begin seeing each other but when he meets Tom’s fiancée, Nola (Scarlett Johansson), Tom's alluring American fiancée, Chris’s applecart is overthrown.

Woody Allen returns to the themes of his much-lauded 1989 film, Crimes And Misdemeanors in this exploration of moral turpitude in polite society.  The locus for Match Point, is not upper-class Manhattan but upper-class London (Allen wrote the script with a New York setting, then shifted it to London when he found he could get financing from the BBC) and the film is given to picturesque displays of Knightsbridge restaurants, white-walled art galleries, Home County estates and Burburry hunting attire, not to mention a roster of insufferably pompous Poms awash with money and self-satisfaction in a rarefied, but also stultified, universe of top drawer comfort. It is to Allen;s credit that this feels surprisingly realistic.

The main character, Chris, is a young man from the wrong side of the tracks (poor Irish, as Allen was poor Brooklyn) with no other purpose than to blend into this world, whilst Nola, the American girlfriend, even though critical plotwise, remains sequestered from it as an outsider. Whilst physical lust maybe the immediate catalyst of their relationship it is this otherness that provides the real basis of their relationship.

 Jonathan Rhys Meyers, who bears an uncanny resemblance to Malcolm MacDowell of  A Clockwork Orange days, is effective in the lead and unlike other actors who have had to in one way or another stand in for Woody (Kenneth Branagh for example in Celebrity, 1998), does not bring a trace of the writer-director's characteristic neurosis to his performance. Like Kubrick’s Alex, his Chris is a smarmy, calculating self-seeker hiding behind a façade of conventional politeness, having carefully schooled himself to ape his social superiors. There is no doubt that as a dramatist Allen has here captured a certain bitter poignancy in his protagonist’s tragic fate. The trouble is that whilst we knew about Alex’s ruthless aggression prior to his “re-socialization”, we know nothing of Chris’s private world prior to the commencement of the story and therefore have no insight into the source of his apparently inexorable fate.

Although there are some typical Allen touches such as Chris seen reading Crime and Punishment early in the film, in tandem with The Cambridge Companion to Dostoevskii, this is a serious film that eschews the director’s propensity for wise-cracks and comic irony. Indeed one would be hard pressed to identify this as an Allen film if one did not already know.  Yet if more substantial than a good many of Allen’s films in the past two decades it does not sustain as a truly convincing drama of human passions. His Chris remains a cypher whose behaviour at the end of the film is completely out of proportion to everything that has gone before.  He is, in other words, a puppet in Woody’s moral fable, not a flesh and blood human being. For once, a device with which the essentially verbal director is well-familiar, the voice-over could have been made much more use to reveal the inner workings of the character.

The other main character, Nola, also is under-developed, being little more than a plot convenience to force Chris into a dilemmic situation. If Scarlett Johansson stands out  here (other than in the bust department which seems to be the main explanation for her stellar career rise, Allen here obliging with a wet-T-shirt scene) it is only because the other characters are so mono-dimensional. Kudos, however, to Brian Cox who is winning, in an understated way, as the solicitous paterfamilias, whilst Penelope Wilton is equally good as his G&T-soaked wife. Emily Mortimer is border-line annoying as the clinging girlfriend/wife and we could have done with a lot less of her witterings about getting pregnant.

Relative to Allen’s hit-and-miss post-Hannah And Her Sisters (1986) output, Match Point is worthy of praise although his once-brilliant ability to pinpoint life’s myriad contradictions has diminished over his long career and the spontaneous insight of wit has been replaced by a diligent illustration of certain precepts.

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