Match Point: Movie & DVD Review (2006)

(Originally published 2006)

The new Woody Allen movie, "Match Point," opens with a shot of a tennis ball lobbing back and forth over a net, with former Irish tennis star Chris Wilton (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) making a telling observation in voice over:

"The man who said I'd rather be lucky than good, saw deeply into life," he says. "People are afraid to face how great a part of life is dependent on luck. It's scary to think so much is out of one's control. There are moments in a match when the ball hits the top of the net, and for a split second, it can either go forward or fall back. With a little luck it goes forward, and you win. Or maybe it doesn't, and you lose."

With the ball suspended over the net, Allen freezes the frame, fades to black and begins his terrific new film, which finds the director stepping out of his head--where his films have existed for so long--and out of his beloved New York, where his films have grown too familiar and, for some, somewhat stale.

"Match Point" offers an absolute change in form; it's the movie in which Woody Allen becomes an expatriate. Here, he leaves the States to set his film in Great Britain, where his focus isn't on his characters' neuroses, but on romantic obsession and class differences, the struggle for a better life within a closed society, with crimes and misdemeanors laced throughout the show.

<>As written by Allen, the movie crafts a complex web of deceit when Chris is hired by an exclusive country club to teach tennis to the wealthy English clients whose lives he quietly covets. In short order, he meets the good-natured Tom Hewett (Matthew Goode), who takes such a liking to him, he introduces him to his family--father Alec (Brian Cox), who is rich and powerful beyond comprehension; mother Eleanor (Penelope Wilton), who rather likes her share of the drink; and sister Chloe (Emily Mortimer), who is shy and bright and sweet, and who is so taken by the absurdly good-looking Chris, she immediately sets her sites on him.

For Chris, who came from nothing, everything suddenly seems golden, particularly given Chloe's attraction to him--it's his ticket to a better life. But when he is invited to the Hewetts' country house for a weekend of shooting, he meets Tom's absurdly sexy fiance, Nola (Scarlett Johansson), a failed American actress, and all bets are off.

As Chris enters the room in which Nola has just defeated her competitor at a game of ping-pong, she looks at Chris with a trace of pity and says, "So, who's my next victim. You?" Picking up the paddle, Chris smashes the ball and defeats her, which causes cool Nola to lift an eyebrow and light a cigarette. "What have I walked into?" she says through a haze of smoke. "What have I walked into?" he asks.

What they've each stepped into is lust, which eventually overcomes them and their senses. Here are two opportunists who could have it all with the Hewetts if they played their hands correctly. Still, with hormones taking over, that's a bit easier said than done. For femme-fatale Nola, keeping herself in check is easier than it is for Chris--at least initially. But as the movie unspools and their attraction gives itself over to sex and promises, lies and tragedy, there is no turning back--for one character especially.

With its excellent performance from the Golden Globe-winning Rhys Meyers, who has sealed the next few years of his career on the basis of this movie alone, to the marvelous turn by Johansson, who already is at work on Allen's next picture set in England, "Scoop," "Match Point" is a mounting pleasure, the sort of movie that slyly pulls you in until you're as hooked as the lovers themselves.

What's ironic about "Match Point" is that its success has little to do with luck or with chance. The movie is good because of its skill and talent. If it weren't for a few telltale motifs Allen chances throughout--the opening credits, for instance, which are indelibly his--one would be hard pressed to know that this was Allen at all. Given the movie's echoes of 1999's "The Talented Mr. Ripley," Anthony Minghella is the director who more often comes to mind. Still, this is indeed Allen and what it finds is what he revealed in his youth--a filmmaker willing to take risks, only in this case without the anarchy of those earlier films, and with a sharper focus.

Grade: A