Woody's Trying to Change His Career

Rating: 6/10 (27 February 2006)

The best thing Woody Allen has done here is remove himself from the movie. It dawns that Allen has been boring us for years with plots featuring himself in the lead role, a move that eventually made all his films appear very much alike.
The plot of Match Point is similar to Dreiser's American Tragedy which was made by George Stevens in 1949 as A Place in the Sun with Monty Clift and Liz Taylor. In this one tennis pro and former tennis tourney participant Chris Wilton (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) meets a tennis student who is the son of a rich family from the financial community in London. Meyers marries their daughter Chloe (Emily Mortimer) but before this is smitten by the blond American actress Nola Rice (Scarlett Johannson) who is engaged to be married to his student. Chris begins quietly hitting on her. Later, the Missus of the family manages to torpedo the engagement. Chris steps up his seduction of Nola. Later, Chloe is having trouble getting pregnant.
At some point Nola gets pregnant and, believing Chris will leave his wife for her, refuses to have an abortion, sending Wilton into paroxysms of fear that he will be found out and lose Chloe and his lucrative position in the family.
Chris decides to murder Nola with one of the family's shooting party shotguns at her apartment. To mask the motive, he kills the nice old lady next door and steals her jewels, then kills Nola Rice as she steps from the elevator. He returns the shotgun to its berth at the Mansion, and throws all the booty from the 'robbery' in the Thames. Except that one gold ring doesn't quite get over the railing, and lands instead in front of the railing overlooking the river.
Scotland Yard questions Chris and discovers his romance by reading Nola's diary. Chris urges them not to ruin his marriage by telling his wife and her family. They agree not to.
But the lead detective wakes in the night to a eureka moment. He deduces the woman next door was killed by Chris to camouflage the murder of Nola. Discussing the case the next day at work with a colleague, he learns that another burglary in the neighborhood overnight has resulted in the capture of the real murderer, who had the effrontery to be carrying the golden ring stolen in the original Burglary-murders. Yes, its the ring that didn't quite clear the railing. Chris Wilton, in other words, has gotten away with murder, just as Allen did in Crimes and Misdemeanors in 1989.
The movie isn't great, but its better than the normal Woody film. I detected some choppiness in Johannsen's performance. When first meeting Chris she is terribly seductive and her acting superb. But later, as she falls in love, her portrayal of Nola becomes routine and banal. This doesn't quite make sense and undermines a romance that should have been taken down by the declining credibility of her lover. Instead, she becomes ordinary for no discernible reason except that Allan can't emphasize the romance and Chris's declining credibility as a committed lover at the same time. He has to furiously shovel plot at the audience instead.
The movie isn't quite good. I sense it is an attempt by Allan to both resurrect the career that was nearly ruined by his marrying his own step daughter, and to move beyond his comic films to something that is not in his hero Ingmar Bergman's league, but may reach the level of Alfred Hitchcock, whose films are imitated somewhat here. I think the film borrows an unexplored part of the Farley Granger character in Stranger on a Train. I will bet we see more attempts at Hitchcock from Allen, who probably got the idea from David Lynch's paean to Hitch, Mullholland Drive.