The vision in the eye of the beholder

Rating: 10/10 (14 July 2006)

I am in general quite hesitant to watch Woody Alan's movies. I find them too pretentious, snobbish and just too "american" to deal with. However, "Match point" was a different story. Unlike so many movie out recently, it has so MANY dimensions and story themes. Usually a movie is made by just one of the many dimensions reviewed to the eye of the beholder in the movie.
Let me try to quickly point our why I give it 10 out of 10 for this reason only (not to mention that the action was superb, carefully matching the story lines). 1. The traditional Greek tragedy story line. Just listen to the music, and read the definition from Aristotle who write that tragedy results in a catharsis (emotional cleansing) of healing for the audience through their experience of these emotions in response to the suffering of the characters in the drama. He considers it superior when a character passes from good fortune to bad rather than the reverse; at the time, the term "tragedy" was not yet fixed solely on stories with unhappy endings. Chris is such a classic example of a character that went from good fortune to bad and reverse so many time, accompanied splendidly by the music. 2. The cotinuous reference to luck and the "match point" theme. It was done in a splendid way so many times! 3. Love and lust theme. Or in other words the feelings we can live with and the feelings we need to live with! 4. Longivity! Chris could not create a live when he was not putting his mind into it. Or something else... But anyways, despite of the mechanical aspects of the act, he managed to create live when he did make love the women he cared about. Not only when he had to do it for the sake of making babies. 5. "Crime and punishment". No this is not Dostoevsky neither Shakespeare, even though we had our "Hamlet" moment, but it was clearly shown that no crime goes unpunished. The detective knew he was guilty. He was going to be sent to jail as he did use a well known weapon he could had access to. BUT we are shown, again in relation to the Greek tragedy theme, that like "Antigone", the moral values could be much harder than any punishment men could cause as our here is practically dead at the end of the movie. Yes he DID deserve to be send for life to jail, but the jail in his soul he is living in is much harder punishment that anything else could cause him... 6. Family values. Yes this is a family values movie. The father character is just great. Always supportive and almost flawless. Is Chris trying to be like this? We will never find out, as his future is doomed...
Happy to read your thoughts. Cheers. Mike