Flawlessly filmed, Intensely Subtle, a Tight, almost Ibsen-like Drama

Rating: 8/10 (17 July 2009)

Match Point (2005)
Woody Allen's latest films, which I like a lot, are not overtly original. We are miles from Bananas, Stardust Memories, and Zelig. We are not even in the same room as other intimate dramas like Annie Hall or Hannah and Her Sisters. Match Point almost feels like a perfectly executed exercise in making an ordinary film, but making it so well we are spellbound and willing. There is a feeling as you watch that something more should happen, and maybe that's the genius of it, when something more does happen and it isn't so outrageous after all. Except in the usual sense--outrageous for Allen, and for a few other special filmmakers, used to mean charting new territory.
The movie is so finely balanced it's hard to find what to note in particular. But maybe, as a photographer, I'll start with the camera-work, not because it's stellar, but because it's invisible. And this invisibility is the film's trademark, some might say its only flaw. If you do watch the camera-work, though, you'll see no amazing light, no sweeping or swooping moving shots, no hand-held jitters, no black and white aura (all things Allen has used in the past). Instead, the visuals are in service to the story--superbly professional and subtle.
Everyone and every thing is out to support the story. Remember, Woody Allen is a writer, and maybe a writer above all. His fascination with an innocent person doing something wrong--from cheating on his woman to murder--appears more frequently in his films, and he makes it so terribly real, and subtle, and vivid, it becomes a real shock on the screen. And yet a shock with coat and tie, just theatrical and polite enough to avoid being literally shocked. Instead we experience a kind of theater-shock, the surprise and delight (and dismay) at seeing the character do something shocking, beyond the fourth wall.
This isn't meant to be double talk. I'm stressing how finely tuned the performances are woven together to enhance the basic events as a beautiful stage act. Yet it's on film, and filmed and directed with elegant subtlety. Three of Allen's most recent movies--Match Point, Vicki Christina Barcelona, and Cassandra's Dream--take a similar approach to life, crime, and infidelity, rooted in earlier films like his masterpiece Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989) and Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993). By itself, it's a body or work to distinguish any director. I know people who dismiss many of Allen's films basically because they aren't what they expected, his middle period serious films like Another Woman (1988), for example, but that's a shame. He's still at it, in a more conventional vein, for sure, but brilliantly, memorably.