Match Point

Ever since Match Point premiered at the Cannes film festival eight months ago, Woody Allen has been receiving some of his best reviews in years. His new film has been lauded as a change of pace for a director who has long been stuck in his ways, and in some ways it is. It is set in England, not in New York (though earlier films like Love and Death and Everyone Says I Love You also took place, at least in part, outside the United States). It is a mostly serious dramatic feature, not a comedy (though earlier films like Interiors and Another Woman were even more explicit in their emulation of Ingmar Bergman's sobering style). And it dwells just a little more than usual on the actual eroticism of sex, whereas earlier films tended to focus on the social ramifications of adultery, rather than the sexual activity itself (though a few, like Husbands and Wives, were a tad more graphic).

Jonathan Rhys Meyers as Chris Wilton, a former tennis pro looking for better things in life

But to this former Woody Allen fan, Match Point comes across as little more than a retread of familiar themes and narrative devices. Worse, the urgency that marked some of his earlier dramas has been replaced by a sort of complacency. There was a time, during the 1980s especially, when Allen seemed to be seriously wrestling with questions about God and the meaning of life. This was most explicit in Hannah and Her Sisters, where Allen played a hypochondriac who experiments with different religions after a series of ominous medical tests forces him to face the fact that he will die some day, and in Crimes and Misdemeanors, where Martin Landau played a Jewish ophthalmologist who gets away with murder, literally, and worries that his success has proved that a just God doesn't really exist, and therefore life has no meaning. Admittedly, Allen's symbolism could be pretty heavy-handed—one of the eye doctor's patients was a rabbi who goes blind—but you at least got the feeling that these issues mattered to him. Not so much now, though.

Match Point begins with an image of a tennis ball flying back and forth over a net. Over this image, the voice of tennis pro Chris Wilton (Jonathan Rhys-Meyers) tells us that it is better to be lucky than to be good. Luck, he says, is what makes us who we are and puts us where we are—and despite all the effort that can go into, say, a tennis game, sometimes the outcome depends on a moment of pure blind chance, like when a ball hits the top of the net and spins straight up in the air, and could just as easily come down on one side as the other.

Tom Hewett (Matthew Goode) befriends Chris at the tennis club

There is an element of truth to this. I can vividly recall learning the facts of life when I was six or seven, and marveling that I could just as easily have been any one of a million different people, depending on which sperm had made contact with the egg; and, since my family spent a year in Communist Poland back then, I was acutely aware of the fact that my family and the country of my birth were only two of the myriad environments into which I could have been born; and I did, indeed, feel lucky to be who and where I was.

I mention this because fecundity and geographic fortune are recurring motifs in Match Point. Chris comes from a poor Irish family, and he has left competitive sports for a simple job as a London tennis instructor. He quickly befriends Tom Hewett (Matthew Goode), a member of the aristocracy who introduces Chris to his family, including his sister Chloe (Emily Mortimer), who falls in love with Chris and marries him and then tries very hard to conceive a child with him. One morning, over breakfast in their luxurious apartment, Chloe tells Chris about an earthquake that she read about in the news, which killed hundreds of people in China. It is the victims' bad luck that they were in the wrong place at the wrong time, and it is Chris's good luck that he and his wife can turn this faraway tragedy into small talk.

Chris is immediately attracted to Tom's fiancee Nola (Scarlett Johansson)

The thing is, only Chris seems to realize, or care, that luck is what separates him and his in-laws from the rest of the world. And when he meets Tom's fiancée, Nola Rice (Scarlett Johansson), he immediately takes a liking to this sensual but hard-edged American actress who just can't seem to win the approval of Tom's parents or get a break at her auditions. She, like he, has had the good fortune to hook up with the upper class, but she is still struggling in a way that Chris can appreciate. This leads to the usual infidelities, but Allen has never been all that good at drawing us into the minds of his characters. He would much rather spell it all out and have the characters describe and analyze each other through expository dialogue; he would rather, it seems, have a character ask "Why are you so cold to me?" than allow us to sense or experience this coldness for ourselves. And without this shared experience, it is difficult to stay interested in Chris and Nola's affair.

Indeed, for the first half of the film or so, we watch the characters move around like pieces on a chess board, wondering not so much what it would be like to be in their shoes but what larger point all this social and sexual activity is building up to. And when the payoff comes, it's a doozy, all right. Chris reveals himself to be capable of actions that most people would recoil from in horror, and Rhys-Meyers almost makes the character's frustrated and self-shocking efforts to cross that line seem believable. But not quite. There are a few suspenseful surprises left, especially when a couple of police officers (played by James Nesbitt and Ewen Bremner) enter the picture, but the movie never shakes its sense of contrived artificiality, and Chris's trite self-justifications—a topical reference to "collateral damage" here, a quote from Sophocles there—feel pretentious and tacked on.

Emily Mortimer as Chris's wife, Chloe

Unfortunately, by developing his characters so superficially, Allen makes it impossible to feel the depth of the horror that he is clearly aiming for. His past films, whatever their flaws, had characters with some weight who plunged into the abyss when they came to believe that life was meaningless. But the characters in Match Point are so light they almost float; it's the difference between dropping a rock and a piece of paper. Along the way, Allen recycles many of his familiar tropes, from a reference to two characters' "intertwined neuroses" to the panic attack that another character endures when things aren't going his way. It may be true that Match Point marks a change of pace from Allen's more recent films, since it is nowhere near as forgettable as the movies he has made over the past decade; but it often harks back to his earlier, and dare I say more relevant, work.

Talk About It

1. Chris says everything in life comes down to "blind chance, no design." Does the film support his view? Note the many references to luck. Note also how someone assumes that one crime victim got it by "blind chance," when we know the crime was actually "designed." Is it always wrong to see design in what appears to be blind chance? How do we tell the difference?
   
   
2. Chris and his in-laws briefly debate whether faith or despair is the path of least resistance. What do you think? Does it vary? Does it make a difference? Is one path necessarily better than the other depending on how much resistance is involved?
   
   
3. Chloe is optimistic that she and Chris will "get lucky" and conceive a child; in the meantime, Nola becomes pregnant and says, "It seems like a blessing, it's a sign." What role do random chance and divine Providence play in the creation of new life? What does this film say about the nature of life inside the womb? Outside the womb?
   
   

1. Chris speculates that his feelings for Chloe and Nola may be "the difference between love and lust." Do you think he actually loves either woman? If not, why not? If so, then how does he show it?
   
   
2. One police officer says, "We're not making any moral judgments, we're just investigating a crime." Can the two be separated that easily? If you were the police officer, how would you have handled that situation?
   
   

The Family Corner

Match Point is rated R for some sexuality. The sex consists mostly of people moving under blankets, ripping off shirts, or massaging each other; however, nudity is implied, not shown. There is some profanity of the "God" and "Christ" variety, and when one character says of his father, "After he lost his legs, he found Jesus," another character says, "That doesn't sound like a fair trade." There is also some violence, mostly offscreen.

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Copyright © 2006 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

What Other Critics Are Saying

Match Point, the latest film from the prolific Woody Allen, is receiving a great deal of applause from mainstream critics. And it is noteworthy in that Allen has made a film quite distinct from his previous works: It lacks the relentless witticisms of his comedies; it is set in London rather than New York; and it features a cast of actors from "across the pond" including Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Emily Mortimer, Matthew Goode, and Brian Cox, with America represented by Scarlett Johansson.

But thematically, the film returns us to the familiar amorality of Allen's recent releases. The film begins with a monologue from the central character about how our lives are ruled by chance. What follows is a tale meant to demonstrate that point. We follow Chris (Meyers), a former tennis pro who is looking for a new adventure and willing to manipulate matters to indulge his impulses. He'll remind moviegoers of Patricia Highsmith's The Talented Mr. Ripley, or the seducer played by John Malkovich in Dangerous Liaisons. We follow his devious exploits as he marries one woman (Mortimer) for money and then indulges in a reckless extramarital affair with an American actress (Johansson) out of lust. Will he pay for his sins? The film shows Chris wrestling with his conscience, and suffering some trauma as his wickedness catches up with him. But ultimately, these consequences seem fleeting and insignificant.

Allen concludes with a baffling send-off that will have viewers discussing whether or not Chris is deceiving himself, or if "the good life" really is just a matter of getting lucky.

Mainstream critics seem giddy with Allen's anarchic perspective. The New York Times' A.O. Scott writes, "The gloom of random, meaningless existence has rarely been so much fun, and Mr. Allen's bite has never been so sharp, or so deep. A movie this good is no laughing matter."

Personally, I found Match Point engaging from beginning to end. The performances in the film are praiseworthy (newcomer Matthew Good lives up to his name), and the cinematography is elegant and engaging. It's an admirably crafted picture that disturbs us because it should. But ultimately, I find Allen guilty of glamorizing the sin while he makes the path of the righteous man look boring, cold, and dissatisfying. My full review is at Looking Closer.

Christian Hamaker (Crosswalk) writes, "Although Match Point is absorbing, it is a deeply troubling portrait of how godless characters struggle, but fail, to maintain basic standards of morality, and of how sin leads to further sin. Repeated transgressions lead to a disturbing crime toward the film's conclusion, and the question of whether justice will be served remains in doubt until the final scene. The punch line may leave a sour taste for many, but so much damage has been done to the character's conscience by that point, and so many biblical truths writ large, that it's difficult not to come down in favor of the film as a picture of how continued sin leads to a hardening of the heart."

Christopher Lyon (Plugged In) says, "Several critics have suggested this film might be the director's best since Crimes and Misdemeanors. The comparisons to that engaging film are hard to miss. But Match Point delves into darker territory." Lyon also argues with Allen's conclusions about the existence of God and the relevance of behaving ethically rather than self-centeredly. "I agree with Allen that there's no middle ground, no reason to hope that human goodness alone offers any real meaning in a world without God. Goodness without God is empty and powerless. Goodness from God is eternal and redemptive."