Match Point (2005)

***/****
starring Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Scarlett Johansson, Emily Mortimer, Matthew Goode
written and directed by Woody Allen

by Walter Chaw Match Point is a quasi-Patricia Highsmith flick about a rudderless Ripley cruising like a shark amongst England's polite society, and the extent to which it works has to do with the degree to which its philosophy of chance and living with ghosts attaches itself to the zeitgeist. The picture opens with a shot of a tennis ball lobbed low and in slow-motion into the top of a net, an image that has as its echo a key moment where a wedding ring tossed towards a river rebounds against a fence into the street. The voiceover talks about the common fear that our lives are governed by happenstance and entropy, transforming the ball going forward into a metaphor for winning–and back into one for losing. Using this as gospel, it's interesting to wonder what it means that, when push comes to shove, our hero's victory is defined by his defeat. Match Point is Woody Allen's best film in some time, which is a left-handed compliment at best; better to say that it's another decent millennial fable about class, the vicissitudes of fate, the reptilian hunger of infiltrating the social strata, and living with ghosts.

Begin with father issues. Irish tennis pro Chris (Jonathan Rhys-Meyers) has a father who lost his legs and found Jesus ("Hardly a fair trade," chuckles Rupert Everett manqué Tom (Matthew Goode)); and struggling American actress Nola (Scarlett Johansson) has never known hers. When Chris befriends Tom at the exclusive club where he's been hired as a tennis instructor for bluehairs and Tom subsequently introduces him to sister Chloe (Emily Mortimer) and their parents (father Alec (Brian Cox) and mother Eleanor (Penelope Wilton)), Chris is naturally attracted not only to the family's wealth, but also to the symbol that Alec represents. A scene in which Alec breaks down an antique shotgun preparatory to a day of shooting skeet at their country home shows Allen playing with a sort of Strindbergian/Freudian representation. Chris's pull into Tom's family is more than Chloe's attraction to him (and their eventual, heatless marriage)–it's the promise, irresistible to a guy of Chris's age and standing, of a mentor. For Nola, betrothed to Tom as the film opens, the lack of a father figure seems to have had the effect of crushing her self-esteem, encouraging her into ill-timed, badly-considered affairs with unavailable men. Like Chris, for instance.

It's one of the places you can mark Woody Allen's influence, this genial ease with relational pop psychology; another is a vinyl soundtrack; and still another a bound aesthetic that, curiously, fits Match Point's BBC texture and atmosphere to perfection. The Woodman's move to Jolly Old was the perfect thing for the aging auteur–you can hardly hear the chiselling patter of his nervous double-speak or detect the impromptu uncertainty of his desire to appeal to a Manhattan audience maybe clued in to his old tricks. Instead, we encounter an ironclad, entrenched control in the redundancy of the dialogue, the paralleling of triple-pregnancies, and the recurrence of the tennis trope, with the net as the thin line describing eternally love and match point. When Chris has a panic attack in his spacious, windowed office and asks his secretary if she ever feels claustrophobic in there, you're likely to answer for her in the affirmative. Match Point is airless. It has a feeling of inevitability about it. From the moment we see Chris reading Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, you suspect you know the fate for any old biddies in the piece (and you do), and from the first time poor, simple Chloe wishes she were pregnant, you have a sense of how things will go in all affairs, illicit or otherwise.

It's a serious distraction in a film that's neither a mystery nor a thriller, leaving one rightly to wonder how to classify Match Point. If it's a Ripley picture, you could say that it deals with class and identity–but it's not exactly that, although the positioning of the Yankee ingénue and the Irish jock at the gates of sub-aristocracy suggests that it will be. And if it's a noir, then you'd expect there to be more nods to convention (like a secret past, a femme fatale, or a mystery). No, I think that Match Point is about precisely what it says it's about: dumb luck and getting away with it–and there's poignancy in that for an artist entering his eighth decade. The cast is fantastic, too: Rhys-Meyers's clammy artificiality serves his Chris particularly well while Johansson continues to carve space for herself as the most arresting, sensuous, and accomplished actress of her generation. That she's unfortunately saddled with the Allen moment of shrill female hysteria and comes through with dignity roughly intact is even more impressive as Allen compounds his sins against young women by cutting between Chris chatting up his father-in-law for cash and rubbing baby oil on Nola's back. The tragedy of Match Point is that it has no higher aspirations for itself than to tell its small, sordid little fairytale (it's Lemony Snicket for growed-ups) with the confidence of its inevitability. Similarly, its triumph, for what it is, is that same modesty. Shame that Allen indulges in a dialogue with ghosts, an unconvincing police investigation subplot, and that over-enunciated tennis metaphor. Looking for the grand scope of the operas his characters so enjoy, he finds instead the same old café debates about Kirkegaard, McLuhan, and The Rules of the Game.