#28 — Match Point (Woody Allen, 2005)
Is the clearest measure of a filmmaker’s talent the enduring capacity to surprise? When Woody Allen made Match Point he already had several exceptional films to his credit (many dire failures, too, the downside of his prolific nature), but I don’t know that he’d ever made one quite like this. Certainly he’d made films that could be accurately described as dramas previously, and the bones of the plot match pretty nicely when held up against the skeleton of the story involving Martin Landau’s character in 1989’s Crimes and Misdemeanors. Yet there’s a seriousness of purpose to Allen’s approach, a sense that he’s trying to find a way to tell this story that different from what he’s done before. Even when he doesn’t act in his films (maybe especially when he’s not acting), there’s a tendency of the other performers to gravitate to the cadences of rhythms of the well-known Allen persona. The gravitational pull of this habit is so strong that even very talented individuals can devolve into merely doing a Woody impression. That doesn’t happen in Match Point. Maybe it’s at Allen’s behest, maybe the actors made their own choices, probably it’s a combination of both. Regardless, that downplaying of Allen’s persistent voice opens up his films and illuminates his themes. Downplaying his voice, paradoxically, lets him speak louder.

Set in London, the film follows a young man named Chris Wilton, played by Jonathan Rhys Meyers. Chris has recently given up on his dreams of becoming a dominating player in professional tennis, a occupation tied to the film’s openly stated metaphor involving the twist of fate that occurs when a struck tennis ball hits the net and momentarily seems as if it can land on either side. It also represents Chris’s aspirations. He longs to climb to the uppermost rungs of the social ladder, achieving financial comfort but also the automatic respect he feels comes with achieving that sort of social status. Chris takes on the persona he believes will help him fit within that world, studying up on opera and adopting the sternness of someone who is a champion capitalist. He marries the daughter of a prominent family, gladly accepting the accompanying routes of nepotism that lead to corporate success. All this goes by very quickly in brisk, sharply constructed scenes that, again, feel very atypical for Allen. The masterful writer usually fills scenes with bustling dialogue, grand tumbles of words. Instead, he opts for a lean succinctness, finding the best, most telling way to convey what’s necessary to establish the characters, their concerns and conflicts and then he moves on. It’s as psychologically rich as anything he’s done before, but invested with a newfound directness.

Matters get complicated when Chris falls for an American aspiring actress and begins a heated affair with her. When she proves to be somewhat unstable, threatening to reveal his marital betrayal, thereby undoing his carefully constructed life of status and comfort, Chris decides he has only one avenue to end matters. Allen employs different tempos throughout the film, and this is where he really slows things down. The machinations Chris goes through, the terrible actions he takes, are presented in agonizing detail. This is not so Allen can dwell on the lurid details; it is so the full extent of the worry, anguish and guilt that accompanies the drastic measure. Allen gets at how it must feel for his lead character to takes these steps, and Rhys Meyers is a marvelous collaborator in making the feverish emotions palpably real. You feel his sweat on your own neck.

Despite the thriller trappings and the potent tension he creates, Allen isn’t interesting in simply goosing the audience. He has a point to make. His voice may be blunted, but his sensibility is fully present. Allen’s normal cynicism results in a film that argues there is no overarching moral justice, no effort by the universe to balance scales, to make certain that dreadful actions have appropriate consequences. Even guilt dissipates like blood in an ocean. Whatever shocks and shakes may come initially, eventually even the guiltiest parties will make peace with their actions, not necessarily out of some steak of amorality, but simply because time keeps moving forward and memories have only a limited sway. Allen uses his wisely crafted story as a means to explore the simple and profound question of who we are, how human behave, how a person can do something awful and simply move on with their life.

In the end, it comes back to the metaphor that begins the film, that tennis ball clipping the net, popping straight up in the air, potentially coming down on either side of the net, delivering a key point accordingly. There is no guiding hand there, either. It’s just luck. Even though it’s all set up clearly, Allen finds one more way to upend our expectations in how that plays out. Once again, there’s no shortage of surprises.

(Posted simultaneously to “Jelly-Town!”)