Match Point (2005)
Directed by Woody Allen
Chris, a former tennis pro, takes a job as an instructor and befriends his wealthy young student, Tom. After being introduced to his family, Chris is soon engaged to Tom's sister, Chloe. Despite the professional and financial advantages that this relationship affords him, Chris becomes obsessed with Tom's fiancee, American actress Nola.
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What critics say influenced Match Point
Writer/director Woody Allen ("Melinda and Melinda") tints his own "Crimes and Misdemeanors" with George Stevens's "A Place in the Sun," leaves his beloved New York completely behind for the first time ever and delivers his best film in years.
The electric encounter between Chris and Nola (Scarlett Johansson) over a ping-pong table is Allen's answer to "A Place in the Sun," in which Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor did their mating dance over a pool table.
And like Shelley Winters in George Stevens' "A Place in the Sun," Nola becomes something resembling pure demand.
It needs to be mentioned, though, that Johansson -- even though her character is made out to be more and more a nagging, whining bitch as the movie progresses; she's Shelley Winters in "A Place in the Sun," without any of the compassion shown that character -- survives the picture unscathed.
Yet the more obvious model for Match Point is Theodore Dreiser’s classic novel An American Tragedy, which was made into A Place in the Sun with stars Montgomery Clift, Elizabeth Taylor, and Shelley Winters.
Accordingly, Match Point is Woody in Serious Mode, fastidiously humorless, cut from the same cloth as Interiors, September, and, predictably, Crimes and Misdemeanors, the main template for many a critical comparison -- both pictures are companion pieces of hollow misanthropy, immersed in mock-Dostoyevsky, facile darkness-of-the-soul pontificating, and an anger/fear of a senseless cosmos.
Set entirely in London, and filled with British characters save for one American (Scarlett Johansson), “Match Point” represents a cross between Dostoevesky's “Crime and Punishment,” Robert Altman's class-conscious period mystery “Gosford Park,” and Allen's 1989 “Crimes and Misdemeanors,” a highlight of his dramatic efforts.
No Allen movie since Crimes and Misdemeanors (16 years ago) has left as lasting an impression.
Those familiar with the director's masterpiece Crimes and Misdemeanors knew the buzz wasn't entirely justified.
But even with his darker works like Crimes and Misdemeanors, there was always a safety net of satire so no one had to deal completely with the immoral nature of the characters.
In the film's dark undercurrent -- the rationalization of ruthless deeds, the elusiveness of justice -- there are glimmers of "Crimes and Misdemeanors."
When first ecnountered, playing ping-pong, Nola is dressed in a tight white outfit, generating the kind of eroticism that recalls the first sight of Lana Turner in “The Postman Always Rings Twice.”
Chris' personal and professional path, along with his prognostications on luck, echoes Patricia Highsmith's fictional Ripley character, Thomas Ripley (e.g., The Talented Mr. Ripley, Ripley's Game), an amoral, sociopathic bi-sexual, social climber, thief, and murderer, and the central character in Strangers on a Train, Guy Haines, a tennis pro who wants to marry for love and social mobility.
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As a youngster driven by ambition and easily seduced by the comforts of wealth, Rhys-Meyers renders an erotic, riveting performance that recalls the handsome and appealing villains in Hitchcok's work, such as James Mason in “North by Northwest.”
A whiff of "Tom Jones" attends this script, and there is an echo of "A Place in the Sun" (based on "An American Tragedy").
The diabolical logic in Match Point reminds me of nothing so much as Charles Chaplin’s much-underestimated Marxist logic in Monsieur Verdoux (1947), though Woody is less a rabid Marxist than a resigned fatalist with respect to the ways of the world.
Like Altman in Images (1972), Woody plays with names.
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The 70-year-old Woody Allen ("Annie Hall"/"Interiors") in his 36th film shleps to London to film a morality play that's a serious drama without his usual one-liners, but instead is spiked with a more subtle darker humor.
Comic moments give way to dark irony in subdued fashion; Match Point remains as serious as Interiors, reflected by the musical score that forsakes his usual light-hearted jazz for heavy does of tragic Verdi arias.
In fact, the film has more in common with Robert Altman's "Gosford Park" or most anything by Alfred Hitchcock than most of Allen's oeuvre (save, perhaps, "Crimes and Misdemeanors" and "Interiors").
In Interiors (1978) he channeled the starkness and angst of Ingmar Bergman.
Woody Allen is better know for his comedies, obviously, but he's done quite a few dramas over the years, with more (the Martin Landau storyline in "Crimes and Misdemeanors") or less ("Interiors") success.
Chris' personal and professional path, along with his prognostications on luck, echoes Patricia Highsmith's fictional Ripley character, Thomas Ripley (e.g., The Talented Mr. Ripley, Ripley's Game), an amoral, sociopathic bi-sexual, social climber, thief, and murderer, and the central character in Strangers on a Train, Guy Haines, a tennis pro who wants to marry for love and social mobility.