Wonderful Work, Mr. Allen!

Rating: 8/10 (29 January 2006)

This is a marvelous tale, of fate and luck, of love and ambition. A tale very well told indeed.
Though set in London, the culture depicted seems to draw all its strength from Woody Allen's Manhattan. We have a rootless zeitgeist combined with a contrasting and singular rootedness in The City. That's the world of Woody Allen whether set on one side of the Atlantic or the other. This special world seems to be the one he was born to describe. The literary, articulate, smooth, urbane, well-to-do Manhattanite aristocracy of art and manners is a culture that, whether it actually exists or no, is a world that surely deserves its place in fiction. Some might find such a world viscerally unappealing. Yet the depiction of a world so cosmopolitan, urbane, smooth, well-to-do, and amoral (Dennis King's term in his review of Match Point; and he's right) is a pleasure to behold.
The first half of Match Point establishes this world, in a slow, desultory manner. After a first few minutes among this well-to-do slice of London's best and brightest, surely the natural reaction is that we've stumbled into a boring soap opera.
Suddenly, though, the pace, and my adrenalin, leap upward: for here is this banal Chris groping in a gun cabinet for a skeet shotgun ... and the thought suddenly dawns, "My God he's going to kill her!" Suddenly I feel myself plunged into an action thriller, the last thing I was expecting from this cool, quiet movie. Yet once in progress, all seemed so authentic, so natural.
For the rest of the picture, I was on the edge of my seat. And from audience reaction, I wasn't the only one. The pace picked up but remained curiously restrained  and suspense and story unfolded perfectly.
The acting and characterizations were wonderful. Jonathon Rhys Meyers as Chris brings this strangely disturbed and disturbing character to vivid life. Matthew Goode as the cool, witty Tom is excellent. Brian Cox surprised me in an appealing turn as Tom's father Alec. Penelope Wilton as Tom's mother Eleanor does fine work. Emily Mortimer as Chloe, Tom's sister and Chris's wife is very convincing indeed. But by far the best work is done by Scarlet Johansson as Nola. What a wonderful actress: here in a very different characterization from her excellent work in Ghost World, Lost in Translation, and Girl with a Pearl Earring. Johannson's Nola is sexy with a tough edge barely covering her underlying vulnerability. Nola is by turns a seductress, "damaged goods" with an identity subsumed within her sexuality and at the same time uncomfortably aware of how limited that identification is.
Nola's ability to convey simultaneous responsiveness to Chris' inappropriate advances, while mixing her response so variously, adds such depth to her character. So, when Chris first meets Nola, we see sparks with Nola assuming a clearly accustomed role of Dangerous Flirtatiousness. Then, in the bar after her failed audition, when Chris is pressing her again, she fails eye contact and both ignores and fails to ignore his verbal advances ... as if trying while inevitably knowing that she will fail, to resist. Then when she is fleeing in the rain and Chris catches up with her and she quickly succumbs to his advances, we see her in what we feel is also a very accustomed role: Hurt Vulnerability Succumbing to a (False) Male Rescuer's sexual advances. All of this is very convincing ... and tragic ... and perhaps establishes the only faint foreshadowing of the ultimate tragedy of her murder by Chris.
The interior dialog, expressed hallucinatorily, of Chris with the dead Nola and her dead neighbor, feels strange at first ... and then, again, strangely authentic. As if the things taking place inside of Chris had an objective reality that could not be suppressed by the random success of events in progress. Yet the prediction of Nola ... that he would fail ... proves wrong. By chance: again and again the beginning theme ... of Match Point ... that luck has such an important place in things ... was borne out again and again. Another set of dialogs ... that of the police ... comprised the first (I think?) away from Chris ... and added a polyvocal feature that was a real stunner ... yet works well for me.
There's a dialog between Chris and his old tennis buddy in which he's contemplating leaving Chloe for Nola. I couldn't help but think of a similar dialog: in The Family Man, when the Cage character is considering cheating on his wife. The reactions of Cage's friend, and Chris's friend, were enormously different. And seem to reflect a strong contrast between the self-absorbed values of urbane well-to-do class yuppies in London (or Manhattan) and the middle American family values of the Family Man. Interesting contrast.
In any event, the double-murder by Chris does not, on the surface, seem to disturb his world. Indeed, it protects it. Which is his intention. Whether by intent, or by sheer luck, or both, though, we find that Chris and Chloe are together, have a child and all seems to be proceeding swimmingly for the family by the end of the movie. What will happen next? Who knows? Chris may be able, as he said to Nola, to simply sweep all the guilt under the rug and go on. As in Hamlet, there is no reason that the central treachery should ever be discovered. Yet is this what we can expect from Chris? For he is still Chris. He is the man who did these terrible things; whose character flaws (if we can so style them) led him to the final "fatal necessity" of a double murder. If this is so, then one suspects that something like will happen again. This time, the luck of the tennis ball may go the other direction. Who can say?