Does "Match Point" Express Atheism?

Rating: 4/10 (25 December 2005)

I'm a Woody Allen fan who experienced "Match Point" as an interesting and watchable failure. Critics and the general public have been raving about the movie, saying Allen's work is back in top form. Since I've experienced Allen's greatness in such films as "Sleeper," "Annie Hall," "Manhattan" and "Hanna and her Sisters," I feel funny being out of sync with the consensus on this one, so I'm posting my reaction in hopes of learning something about the gap; perhaps my understanding will change and the gap will close.
It seems to me that the story has three acts, with the first act being unusually long, and the last two acts being unusually short. In the first act, which details Irish outsider Chris Wilton's rise to wealth via the British upper crust Hewett family, the narrative style is a familiar Allen staple: the character-driven, relationship drama. During this stretch, the movie has a straightforward predictability which, I realized with chagrin, plods along. All of this was enjoyable, but I had to admit to myself that everything was superficial; only the surfaces of the characters were being presented. Here's the reason: in the face of a tissue of Wilton lies covering his ambition, usury and adultery, the Hewett family remains cheerfully clueless; he's a clever cad who thinks fast on his feet, and, for the sake of drama, one or more of the Hewetts need to be his match; mother Hewett's dislike of potential daughter-in-law Nola Rice, the American actress fiancé of son Tom is misplaced; were she skeptical about Wilton instead, and closing in on his deception fast, the first act would have the rising tension and suspense it sorely lacks.
Act two makes a sharp turn away from the relationship drama, alternatively plunging headlong into Hitchcock territory. The scenes in the latter part of act one, which have Nola Rice, mistress to the married Wilton, confronting the inner man, crackle with tension and dramatic interest because she's a match for this wicked careerist. Sadly, these scenes are few and far between. Even worse, they occasion the desperate turn to violence by Wilton. When he picks up one of the Hewett shotguns, Nola falls prey to the buckshot, and thus the active drama, the present excitement of the movie dies. Again, the action is straightforward and predictable. In act two, without a proper emotional foundation having been laid, we're suddenly immersed in a police procedural that asks such questions as: Will he do it? How will he do it? Will he get away with it? All of this plot-driven, physical action has a jarring, awkward relationship to the character-driven, psychological action of the first act.
Act three, which makes a sharp turn away from the previous two acts, belly flops into the realm of Bergman metaphysics, where it flails about blindly. The murderous Wilton has pangs of conscience, so the ghosts of his victims confront him with silly, superfluous verbal recaps of the action seen just prior. There is a brilliantly structured payoff to the movie's grand theme: we're immersed within a cosmic randomness that alternates between lucky and unlucky. Because Wilton gets the lucky bounce of life, he escapes human justice. His reward? A life term in hell.
With the exception of the scenes involving Nola Rice, the uncouth, western American, Allen has created, by design, an emotionally flat narrative in which a clever, lucky man buries himself alive beneath the contours of a dignified, public image. In my opinion, this hardly makes the case for a capricious universe. I'm inclined to think Allen, by stepping in and blocking human justice, condemns his protagonist to a far bleaker fate. So there's a backfire because the moral universe of this story, rather than dissolving, deepens.
Allen's randomness-as-luck tells me that he wants to show our universe as a godless place where outrageous turns of fortune have no systematic causes, where no understandings, rational or otherwise, explain the details that fill our lives. Throughout the narrative of this movie, he's at great pains to insulate his protagonist from the customary, expected consequences of his actions. In so doing, Allen is intent upon decimating all rationalistic, moral viewpoints. For me, this film, along the narrow track of moral anarchy, displays an impressive, brute force of intellect. He has thought his way into a clever, structurally elegant deconstruction of moral order. He has also cast off the gossamer magic of his great films.
I dare speculate that Allen is a deeply angry man. His anger, I think, is directed towards a God he hates enough to deny. The God-hate, I suspect, has fueled the magic of the great Allen films. In those films, Allen balances along a tightrope of God belief/unbelief, sending up an ether of smoke from the white-hotness of his rage. As long as God is in the picture, however faintly and begrudgingly, the picture has magic. Within the presence of the magic, the rage alchemizes into world-class humor. As a member of a persecuted group, Allen stares down the face of hell, in the process transforming himself into a funny man delightful to be with. But now, without God, what remains is plodding mechanism. So the real price of the greatness is not endurance of the rage, but endurance of the unexplainable otherness called God. The demanding presence of God fatigues the artist, and the art dies. In the great films, Allen's anger is divine, but now, in this new film, it's merely human.