Well, it's safe to assume that Woody thinks life is a tragedy.

Rating: 10/10 (3 April 2006)

Woody Allen's most recent film "Match Point" finally arrived in the theatre here this week, and I saw it last night. Everyone was talking about how this was Allen's best film in years (some say since 1989). While I haven't seen much of Allen's work, I thought this was a great movie.
Plotwise, it plays like "Crimes & Misdemeanors" distilled to only the Martin Landau plot, without the Woody Allen/Alan Alda comic plot interlaced. In both movies, a successful man is having an affair, and when the mistress won't keep quiet, ponders whether he should kill her to cover up his secret. This could be called derivative, but I actually liked it more than C & M, because the Martin Landau plot is by far the more interesting of the two. In MP, Jonathon Rhys Meyers plays the Martin Landau role (philandering spouse), Scarlett Johanssen is Anjelica Huston, and Emily Mortimer plays the wife role (Claire Bloom in C & M, but Mortimer's role is at least three times larger). While C & M was a very intellectual meditation on whether or not God exists, MP is about how much of our lives are determined by totally random, often implausible factors that we can't control.
For instance, both movies have fundamentally the same ending: the murder is carried out, and while some suspicion falls on Landau/Meyers, they ultimately get away with it, and, even more horrifically, they each reach an accommodation with themselves, accepting their decision. As well, another person is fingered for the murder. This happens in both cases, but how it happens and how it is played is different. The details of how Martin Landau gets off are essentially unimportant, since the focal point of the film is whether he can accept what he has done. However, MP has an extended epilogue to the murder where we see how random events (including one really brilliant twist on something that had earlier seemed a visual flourish) allow Meyers to get away with the crime.
Ultimately, Chris (Meyers) and his oblivious wife Chloe (Emily Mortimer, terrific) conceive a child, and Chris gets another promotion in the company owned by Chloe's father (Brian Cox, essentially the same "nice dad" roll he played in "Red Eye").
I'd recommend that anyone who likes thrillers (honestly, it would be impossible to guess Allen had directed this if his name wasn't on it), or Woody Allen movies.