If you didn’t know better, you’d swear that Match Point was the work of some promising newcomer, not the pathetic has-been that Woody Allen has become. Allen’s maddening, OCD insistence on making a new film every single year results in way too many half-baked movies that feel more like rough drafts and sketches than actual films (for an example, see any film he’s made in the past ten years–or better yet, don’t!).
Match Point is smart and sleek and sexy, a little jewel of a film that runs like clockwork. The story involves Chris (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) a former tennis pro who falls for the wrong woman, Nola (Scarlett Johansson). I can’t for the life of me understand why Rhys Meyers isn’t already a huge star or how Johansson ever became one, but both deliver star-making performances here.
Doom seems to hover over events from the moment our two main characters meet. We know this can’t end well for them, and Allen does a fine job exploiting that tension. There’s an escalating sense of claustrophobia as Chris gets locked ever more deeply into a life of privilege that he both desperately wants and desperately wants to escape.
One of the pleasures of the film is the way it slowly and carefully develops from a delicately observed character piece into an edge-of-your-seat film noir. Most thrillers don’t have the patience to get inside the emotional lives of their characters, just as most Indie dramas don’t have the patience for anything so vulgar as plot. In combining the two, this film reveals just how much both genres are missing.
The painful emotional honesty of the film’s first half makes the Hitchcockian final act all the more riveting. We understand Chris and Nola from the inside, we know how they feel and why they do everything they do. So when the situation unravels, as we know it must, the results are excruciatingly painful for us as well as for them.
The film does have the unfortunate habit of over explaining things. Occasionally a scene will make a character or plot point in a subtle way only to be followed by a clunky piece of exposition in which somebody tells us what the movie has already artfully shown. Worse still are the interruptions for philosophical exposition. The film contains several dull speeches about the nature of luck, to make sure we know what the THEME is.
But just about everything else in the movie works beautifully, from the splendid supporting cast, to the loving depiction of London, to the opera music score. This level of craftsmanship makes the film a pleasure to watch from its slick opening tracking shot to its tantalizing, ambiguous ending.
Match Point (2005)
Grade: B+
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