To be tried by Ghosts

Rating: Null/10 (29 April 2006)

The ghost scene in Match Point is neither dream nor reality; it is allegory. Allen employs an allegorical mode in which the characters become abstract representations of themselves to justify the philosophy behind the film. This is a mode of drama outside the constraints of realism. The audience is not witnessing an actual event. They are being presented with a justification of the protagonists actions according to the dark nihilism (and all its dehumanizing effects) that the director has otherwise publicly embraced. Therefore, such a mode is a tool for the director to speak through his characters.
Indeed, for all his flights of comedy, Woody Allen inhabits a dark universe that is random, meaningless, and amoral; there is no inherent value or meaning to the universe. This is the message of the film. (And an insight into the man: do we laugh to keep from crying?)
Personally, I preferred Allen's version of this story over that of Theodore Dreiser's original novel, dramatized for the screen as A Place in the Sun (1951). There, the protagonist is caught, tried, and sentenced to death (sorry folks). There is something corny about such a clean morality. Oscar Wilde remarked that the meaning of fiction was that the good prosper and the bad are punished. There is no moral Justice operating behind the random universe of Allen. As an aside I must point out that, for all the talk of Hitchcockian influence upon Match Point, in Hitchcock's universe no one ever got away with their crime in the end. Though in Hitchcock justice is often duplicitous; meaning everyone is punished in the end, the good and the bad.
To juxtapose such a literary mode of film-making (to be tried by ghosts is the stuff Greek tragedies are made of) with the almost slapstick of the next scene, in which the Scotland Yard detective awakens in his revelatory sleep, certainly speaks in a most general manner to the content of the detectives dream; however, it seems more to me that Allen is merely being playful.