Smooth but Shallow; Exists to Serve Its Trick Ending

Rating: 6/10 (17 January 2006)

"Match Point" is smooth but shallow; its main reason for existing seems to be its trick ending.
The trick ending is interesting, but it would have been more satisfying had it come at the end of an hour-long television mystery, rather than a feature length film, which should have, but didn't, delivered more depth and range.
"Match Point" consists mostly of shots of attractive, well dressed, upper class Londoners having polite conversations in stunning London apartments, cozy country estates, restaurants, and upscale art galleries.
This is all very well done. It's smooth and slick. Fine direction, naturalistic script, perfect sets.
Jonathan Rhys Meyers is first rate. His charisma, complexity, and star power, and his combination of tender, young, humanity and brutal contempt, brought to mind Laurence Harvey in "Room at the Top." If you want a voluptuous temptress who will threaten a marriage and slide from irresistibly attractive to shrill and creepy, you couldn't do better than Scarlett Johanssonn.
There is extramarital sex, handled very discretely. We've seen this material -- man cheats on wife and begins to panic -- many times before. The movie really needed to treat it in a new way to really come to life, and it didn't.
Near the end, a murder is committed, and the film attempts to address issues of human character, destiny, and meaning. Here the film falls short.
I won't reveal any spoilers here, and I won't reveal the trick endings. I will, though, talk a bit about the murder and the murderer.
I didn't believe that the character that the movie created would commit the murder he committed. The film is bumblingly obvious in its efforts to set this character up as a highly ethical, very decent, young man. He reads great literature; he insists on picking up the tab at lunch.
Otherwise, he's a bit of a cypher; we really don't know anything else about him, except that he's a highly ethical, very decent, young man.
In other words, the script uses him as a plot device. When the script wants him to be decent and ethical, he is made to appear decent and ethical in painfully obvious ways. When the script needs him to commit a murder, he commits a murder. The script wants to shock us, and so it creates this unlikely about-face.
The script wants us to believe that any one of us could commit this same murder. Baloney. I will no more commit a murder like this than I will be president someday, and neither will you.
The murderer's friends and family also make the film completely unbelievable.
The murderer begins acting strangely. His behavior would set off alarms in the most simpleminded of people. And, yet, though the murderer is surrounded by very, very sharp and successful international businessmen, people who make millions before breakfast, they *never suspect* his heavy sweating, his sudden, unexplained departures, transparent lies, emotional outbursts, twisted schemes, etc.
The script wants us to believe that any of us could be a murderer without our peers realizing it. It never makes this idea believable.
The script wants us to believe that the murderer believes that committing a murder is his only route. But everyone in the murderer's world supports him, loves him, forgives him, dotes on him. He is handed money, and jobs, and love, and forgiveness. In that environment, it would be much easier for the murderer to solve his problems by any route *except* murder.
"Match Point" is just not believable. Thanks to tabloid television, we've all had murderers in our living rooms. The murder committed here bears some resemblance to the Scott Peterson murder.
Thanks to the years-long, multimedia, dissection of Scott Peterson, and other murderers', characters, we know more about murder, and murderers. We know about their narcissism, and their bizarre warning signs. None of that insight has been incorporated into "Match Point." Ultimately, in spite of its slick and professional sheen, "Match Point" is hackneyed, unbelievable, and boring.