By Matt Zoller Seitz

Match Point

Directed by Woody Allen

Context is everything, and Woody Allen proves it with Match Point. This London-set drama about a poor Irish hustler and ex-tennis star insinuating himself into a monied English family is not the autumnal masterpiece you’ve heard about; the first half is rife with badly written, stiffly-acted expository scenes, and there’s one central performance (Scarlett Johansson’s, I’m sorry to say) that’s just not up to snuff. And after two viewings, the denouement still strikes me as incredible, even when judged against the film’s blatantly foregrounded fascination with chance. Nor is Match Point a “return to form,” a phrase which suggests Allen had resumed making more or less the same sorts of films he’s made for years. No, this film is something in between: a hint of late-career reinvention, at once familiar and fresh, exciting both for what it accomplishes and what it promises.

And in retrospect, it seems obvious that the film’s strengths might not have asserted themselves had Allen contented himself with the old, familiar elements: Upper West Side narcissism; Jewish-gentile relations; jazz/swing soundtrack; major role played by Allen or a nakedly Allen-esque stand-in. By relocating to London, the director has forced himself and his viewers to reconsider what, exactly, constitutes a Woody Allen film, and given himself an excuse to revise his style. From the film’s stark, lyrical opening image (a static shot of a tennis ball arcing over a court in slow motion, then bouncing off the net and freezing in midair) to its cool, geography-revealing, faintly Kubrickian SteadiCam shots, through its final act, which is as intricately assembled as a Godfather setpiece and as appallingly funny as good Polanski, you get the sense that Allen must have realized he was stuck in a rut, and that the only way to get out of it was by taking his style apart and rebuilding it. ¶

Allen’s protagonist is former tennis-pro turned country-club instructor Chris Wilton (Jonathan Rhys-Meyers), a slightly reptilian charmer who ascribes most of success and failure to luck, and who has mastered the art of striving without seeming to. Formerly solid but never a great athlete (“You have to really want it,” he confesses), Chris presents himself as a bootstrapped success story for whom “...tennis was a way out of a poor existence,” a hardscrabble, well-mannered, self-educated young man who considers himself fortunate to have a decent job and a small flat where he can read Crime and Punishment in peace. By chance, Chris finds himself teaching tennis to a fellow named Tom Hewett (Matthew Goode), a rich aesthete who smokes cigarettes and loves classical music. By chance, Tom invites Chris to the opera, where he meets and impresses Tom’s dad, the soft-hearted financier and arts patron Alec (Brian Cox), Tom’s sharp-witted, judgmental mother, Eleanor (Penelope Wilton) and his sweet but dull sister, Chloe (Emily Mortimer).

Given what we know about Chloe, it’s not surprising when Chris begins aggressively courting her. Nor is it surprising when he becomes obsessed with Tom’s fiancée, Nola Rice (Scarlett Johansson), a stacked blond wannabe-actress, working-class like Chris, who botches all her auditions but plays a convincing femme fatale in life. (Her opening line,  “Who’s my next victim?”, is unconvincing, like every other one of Johansson’s line readings, as is her furtive glancing-about, and her habitual nervous smoking, which strikes me as a lame attempt to figure out what to do with her hands.)

No, what is surprising about Chris’ rapaciousness—and unsettling, and unpleasantly truthful—is the film’s suggestion that both Chris and the Hewett family are, in some unconscious, almost Edith Wharton-ish sense, in social cahoots, conspiring to decisively elevate Chris out of his old class and into a new one. Consider: Chloe is basically a breeding machine who aims to have three kids and please her controlling mom; Alec wants an heir; outwardly rebellious Tom wants to be comfortable, and approved of by mum and dad. 

Without giving away the ending, it can be said that Allen invokes Dostoevsky for a reason, and not just to cue lazy comparisons to Allen’s own Crimes and Misdemeanors. (If revisiting the same plot from a different angle were a crime, death row would be packed with filmmakers.) Chris isn’t simply committing a felony; he’s a young, self-taught intellectual with class resentment issues who’s simultaneously testing philosophical/metaphysical theories and attempting to obliterate a person who stands for the old self he’d like to erase. His plan would horribly enact a scenario that the Hewetts obliquely envisioned and approved.

For all its missteps, it is difficult not to be impressed by Match Point, because it’s arguably the first feature Allen’s made that’s unquestionably as in love with images as it is with words. In Match Point, Allen’s dialogue often consists of lines that sound like placeholders, lines that were supposed to have been replaced with good dialogue but never were. (“What’s a beautiful young American ping-pong player doing mingling among the British upper class?” Chris asks Nola. I wish Groucho were around to answer that.) When Chris disrupts a fairly placid meal with Tom, Chloe and Nola by asserting, “Scientists are confirming more and more that existence is here by blind chance, no purpose, no design,” and then calls faith an easy out, even Allen’s diehard fans may roll their eyes; it’s as if Allen the writer was checking thematic preoccupations off a list.

But when Allen shows Chris’ climactic misdeed is enabled by a string of coincidences—a couple descending a stairwell a moment too late, a father calling a daughter away from a disturbing discovery, an apartment dweller banging on a neighbor’s door, and then failing to follow up on the lack of response—we move beyond explication and into drama, then into more iconic, elevated, operatic terrain. (Allen’s soundtrack cherry-picks Verdi, Bizet and Rossini; the grandiose emotion expressed in the music contrasts humorously with Chris’ absurdly scurvy and brutal little plan, and the world’s absolute inability to deal with it.) Late in the film, the image of the frozen tennis ball is visually rhymed in another slo-mo shot that ranks with the most beautiful, chilling images Allen has ever photographed. 

It’s a shame Match Point isn’t unified enough to singlehandedly revive this filmmaker’s stateside esteem. Allen has stunk for so long that sneering at him has become a popular American pastime (and a lazy way for critics to insist that they are not, God forbid, shallow and bourgeois like most of Allen’s characters). Match Point could be a new beginning or a fleeting crest in a career that’s been mostly troughs of late. Either way it strikes me a transitional work, as groping, imperfect yet significant as Love and Death (which signaled a evolution from New Yorker/vaudeville gagfests to more literary/theatrical concoctions, the Annie Hall through Hannah and Her Sisters phase) and Radio Days (which kicked off an eclectic, anything goes approach that persisted ever since). The ball is freeze-framed over the net; I am curious to see where it lands.