Match Point of Our Love

Rating: 3/10 (27 March 2006)

It's been a long, long while since we've been strung out on love; and there's no mask of a smile that can hide what we're thinking of. From your heart I hear only distant echoes of empty love. I guess this must be the match point of our love.
Those are lyrics from "Match Point of Our Love," a Beach Boys song written long after most of their important work (except The Beach Boys Love You), which is built around a painful pun, and really doesn't have any right to exist. It has a lot in common with Woody Allen's "Match Point."
From the opening narration, which uses a tennis match as a metaphor for life to illustrate how important luck is (technically it's physics, but we won't dwell on that), the topic of luck is used as a painfully calculated motif. The worst is when a conversation between two investigating police officers is dragged on well past having any relevance whatsoever, so that one can "casually" remark that "some people have no luck at all."
How much of this film really does rely on luck, though? Sure, it was luck that Chris and Nola met again, but Chris' reactions to this were hardly luck. I suspect that Allen realized this, and that's why he put in two scenes involving "Crime and Punishment." But Allen does not play with that novel's ideas; he merely hopes that we've read it and relies on it to explain Chris' actions. Chris also quotes Sophocles at one point, in a blatant use of name dropping on Allen's part, as its relevance to the film is slight.
Mainly, my problem was with the screenplay. The performances were varied: Jonathan Rhys Meyers seemed like a more annoying, stupider Joaquin Phoenix, Scarlett Johansson played the femme fatale character better than any other actress her age could have, though the film's tone was off, and she became less convincing as her character was supposed to be more sympathetic. One of the police officers also gave an irritating performance, though that could have been the screenplay's fault; after waking up one night, he delivers the film's most laughably bad line. The other performances did not really draw attention to themselves. The mise-en-scene and cinematography are fairly good; together they manage to encapsulate the dullness of the British aristocratic life that Chris has accepted, and which has provided him with material items while leaving him more intangible things to desire. And while they show dullness, the dullness becomes interesting somehow. Unfortunately, the screenplay is bad enough that it is difficult to recognize these things.
A few final notes: Woody Allen is not Ingmar Bergman, despite what he seems to think (if you see the movie, you'll know which scene I'm talking about). And why do we see so much of Chris in his office? How is that at all important to the film? Is it just so that Allen can show that he knows how to say "Thank You" in Japanese? Allen san wa totemo atama ga ii desu yo! Yeah, right.