Odd, clever film

Rating: 8/10 (9 August 2006)

Odd, clever film, if a cold one. At first, it almost numbs the viewer with its frankly clichéd scenario of marriage for money and cheap adultery. This is stuff of melodrama  the production's emphasis on opera is no coincidence  and yet, surprisingly, Woody Allen chooses not to emphasize the emotional aspects of his story, which might seem the best, or at least the most usual, way to make material like this work. Instead, he presents us with characters who aren't really even characterized  despite the over-the-top setting (it's amusing that critics called this a departure for Allen; it's true that here we get the Stately Homes of England instead of the Upper East Side, but it's still his same upper-class fantasy world), they're simply left to be dull, ordinary people, from naïve Chloe and her family to Nola, who, despite the magnetic effect she has on the men of the film, isn't really anything more than a typical stupid young American abroad, first trying to live a starving artist life (and succeeding too well for her liking) and then turning into a panicky, dependent child when she learns she's pregnant. Into this mix of un-characters comes Chris, a person so blank I had trouble remembering his name, about whom we learn nearly nothing over the course of the film. He's a foreigner who comes from humble beginnings (the others very Englishly nickname him "Irish," despite his successful downplaying of his accent) and yet we learn nothing of his background beyond his reasons for leaving pro tennis. It's (somewhat unbelievably) suggested that Chris is a great reader, but, like many real people, for the greater part of this story he is neither a thinker nor an actor. He accepts the affections of Chloe (and the privileges associated with them) more out of politeness than anything else, even to the point of marrying her; when Nola enters into the picture he acts, but still doesn't think. By the time he decides to murder his now-inconvenient paramour in an incredibly careless way (with a shotgun! in her flat!), we're strangely absorbed that such action could come from such a ho-hum character in such a ho-hum plot, and then shocked when he actually goes through with the killing, wondering how this unthinking, unclever, almost amoebalike character possibly thinks he can get away with it. Though similarly prettyboyish, Chris is neither a blood-lusting overachiever like Patrick Bateman or an I-just-wanna-be-loved sociopath like Tom Ripley  he hasn't the calculating ambitions (or the charm) of either, and it's hardly plausible that he could stumble out of his unpleasant situation as thoughtlessly as he stumbled into it. But stumble out of it he does  Allen's misanthropy extends to the entire world of this film, and just as Chris's frankly doltish wife is easily distracted from her husband's odd behavior, so too is the one police detective who manages to put the obvious clues together easily talked out of his theory by a chipper subordinate. Though not marketed as a comedy, "Match Point" offers a coldly comic version of the world, and viewed in this light the film becomes almost paradoxically entertaining. Allen almost ruins it at the end with a twee bit of existential artifice that seems juvenile in the context of the adult tone to that point, but perhaps the oddest thing about "Match Point" is how watchable a mix of not- pleasing-in-themselves elements it is. It's probably too clever for its own good by half, but it contains enough incongruity to surprise just about any viewer. 8.5 out of 10.