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Edna always said Zelig was Woody’s worst film. Edna was wrong. Compared to Match Point, Zelig is a work of genius and funnier than cholera. Match Point was (and is and always will be) truly a dog of the doggiest type. Wooden dialogue, wooden plot, woodier than woody. Is it supposed to be funny or is it supposed to be taken seriously or is it just a load of shite from someone who has totally run out of ideas? The odd thing is that it is very well filmed and edited. It’s just the unrealistic and stilted dialogue and the dreary and unrealistic plot. Oh yes, and the totally wooden acting – clearly Woody didn’t know how to direct English actors. They appear like English actors pretending to be American actors pretending to be the sort of English characters Americans who have never met an English person imagine they must be. And reading from autocue as well.

Leaving the New York local indefinitely in the mid-2000s, Woody Allen proved wrong the accusation made toward him in Husbands & Wives which said that he could never leave Manhattan and see Europe. Since 2005 he has built himself a new nest across the Atlantic. His first stop was England, where he kicked off his tour with the stoic mosaic Match Point. On paper it’s a dramatization of his Crimes & Misdemeanors, in which a married man opts to murder his mistress when she threatens to speak up and ruin his reputation. But Match Point is so far from traditional Allenism that it’s easy to forget we are watching a Woody Allen film. Visually, the film is constructed so straight-forwardly that the director is beyond recognition.
Allen discovered a new muse in Scarlett Johansson, who went on to star in his following film Scoop and in Vicky Cristina Barcelona after that. As a struggling actress-to-be from Colorado engaged to Tom Hewett (Matthew Goode), an upper-class Englishman, she radiates amidst this world of stuffy upper-class subjects in which signs of England’s working-class are not so much ignored as they are simply non-existent.
Because Match Point draws much of its craft from Hitchcock, Allen’s use of his cast is highly admirable, and the lead performances are fascinating. One could argue that the concept worked better, as it did in Crimes & Misdemeanors, as black comedy, but the performances are superb. Jonathan Rhys Meyers is sympathetic enough at first to win us over. He plays Chris Wilton, a poor lad from Ireland who comes to England for better opportunities. He accepts a job as a tennis instructor at an affluent tennis club in London where he befriends Tom Hewett. He meets his sister Chloe and enjoys her company enough but little more. Chloe falls for Chris and encourages her father (Brian Cox) to offer him a job at his firm. Seduced by the life of aristocracy, Chris agrees to marry Chloe to ensure a permanent position in the Hewett family’s fortune.
Emily Mortimer is endearingly innocent as Chloe. Naïvely complacent to Chris, she is unaware of the dangerous situation surrounding her, which emerges when Chris meets Tom’s fiancée Nola (Johansson) and becomes smitten with her.
Chris and Nola are both outsiders in this world, as their experience at a restaurant proves when they balk at the Hewett’s suggestion of ordering caviar. Their gazes at each other across the table indicate that in each other they find a link to the worlds they come from and thought they could leave behind. Only by finding a way to marry into money did they both realize how unfit they were for the world of the Hewetts. It’s wrong to think of Match Point as primarily a Dostoevsky-inspired thriller since up until the last fifteen minutes or so it is pure tragedy in the true Dickensian sense. There is, to be sure, some whimsy in the film as the embarrassing moment when Chris is caught watching Tom and Nola make out in a closet and the subsequent wedding shots. Johansson’s and Meyers’s love scene in the rain is classically well-filmed, referencing the Victorian love stories that provide the heart and spirit of the movie.
The best thing about Johansson’s performance is that she doesn’t turn Nola into the traditional “other woman” and hardly a villain in any way. She is not controlling or manipulative, although Allen seemed to have wanted to take the character in that direction when Chris first meets her. She even tries to stop the affair while it’s still in its early harmless stages and becomes hysterical only after Tom leaves her for another woman and Chris impregnates her. Allen offers glimpses into the world of the working-class when we are taken to the low-rent district the disillusioned Nola is cast into and our sympathies are divided almost equally for the two women whose lives Chris seems oblivious about ruining.
The funny thing about Chris is that he is at first the inverse of Clyde Griffiths in An American Tragedy is that his infidelity and eventual crime is not initially motivated by blind ambition and greed. In a sense, his pursuit of Nola may even be admirable in that his love for her is sincere and he pursues it knowing that he will lose out financially if he abandons Chloe for her. Still, he is solely responsible not only for his ultimate crime but also for all the events that led up to it. Nola tries to ward off his advances knowing they will only bring trouble. But he pushes himself forward and gets them both in a jam when Nola becomes pregnant. It’s hard to imagine what outcome Chris was hoping for, if he was even thinking at all.
After she breaks the news to Chris that she is going to have his baby, Nola tells Chris that she expects him to do the right thing and leave Chloe. But it is too late. Chris is now too accustomed to the cushy life the Hewett family has provided for him. Those who saw Crimes & Misdemeanors will guess what course of action Chris will take when they see him secretly packing a shotgun. Despite dreading what’s to come, the game is still fun to play and Allen proves himself as crafty a teaser as Hitchcock. The last wrap up even pays homage to The Godfather, but the lingering mood is somberness at a level unprecedented in Woody Allen’s canon.
While not typical Woody Allen, the last moments of Match Point play with some of the psychological mysteries Allen often dabbles in, although to darker and more disturbing depths. It even leaves us with a question to ponder. Disposing of evidence from his crime, Chris drops a stray which ring falls similarly to how a tennis ball would fall when a player has lost a game. Ironically, it is this very ring that helps Chris win. But only by considering his future can we realize that if Chris has won at all, it is entirely on a short-term basis. His entrapment in a loveless marriage and the child it produced will be permanent reminders of how much he has truly lost.

Godard once said something to the effect that films are never finished, they are only abandoned. Match Point is a perfect example of that. With it, Woody Allen almost returns to Crimes and Misdemeanors to take another stab at similar concepts and devices, minus the comedy.

I think Match Point is my favourite Woody Allen film since 1997’s Deconstructing Harry. Match Point is an intriguing story not so much of class conflict as class betrayal. But make no mistake, this is not a murder story, this is firmly rooted in concepts of class and the murder serves that central purpose.

We follow the story of Chris, a working class Irish kid who clawed his way up the social ladder due to his tennis skills. What he wants is simple: to be among the British elite. He never clearly says it, but his intentions are quite clear. It’s just a question of meeting the right people, enjoying the right music, reading the right books, and marrying into the right family. Oh, and insulating oneself from the under-class to the point where they become invisible.

Throughout the film, those in roles of servitude (everyone from waiters to drivers to secretaries) are largely ignored by the elitist circles that Chris wants to penetrate. Servants are usually off-screen, their voices coming into frame in response to one of the main character’s requests. If a servant is shown, Allen makes sure to only show them from behind, as if they are faceless, or he endeavours to create a large space between them and the main characters in the mise-en-scene if their face is shown. But we are always made aware of the lurking presence of servants on the periphery of the story or the frame or just out of frame.

For Chris to completely immerse himself in the ruling class, he must take that last step and become as heartless and uncaring as those whom he mimics. He must ease himself of the guilt that comes with the murders he commits, and once he can pull that off, there is no law that will punish him. Just as in Crimes and Misdemeanors, the world proves to be a chaotic, careless place with no moral order except for that which we choose to follow or stray from.

When a Director is around long enough they have a chance to remake their own films. Ozu remake “A Story of Floating Weeds” (1934) as “Floating Weeds” (1959). Hitchcock did it with “The Man who knew too Much” (1934 and 1954). Cecil B. de Mille made “The Ten Commandments” (1923) and “The Ten Commandments” (1956). Now Woody Allen has taken advantage of the chance to remake “Crimes and Misdemeanours” as “Match Point.”

A recently retired tennis player takes up a tennis pro position at a club. From there he finds himself integrating into the life of a wealthy family. He takes up with a potential future sister-in-law. But when his easy life is threatened, he schemes at murder most foul! Like Crimes and Misdemeanours the protagonist commits the murder of his mistress and gets away with it.

Match point misses Crimes and Misdemeanour’s narrative sophistication. In Crimes, there are parallel narratives that examine morality’s role in making difficult choices. That’s missing in Match. In Match, Woody play’s with the three act structure. He front loads the story into the first and second act to build on anticipation. Its a nice experiment, but it ends up failing. There’s a lame attempt at a cat-and-mouse play in the third act, but its never developed.

All the acting is very nice in Match. The cast brings nice subtleties to the characters that are often missing from Woody’s films. In fact, the performances overall may be the best in his oeuvre.

What we have here is Woody Allen plagiarizing himself, essentially making a lesser version of one of this best films, CRIMES AND MISDEMEANORS. Allen’s later work is often very on-the-nose with its themes, and MATCH POINT is probably the most egregious offender, as the characters have many pointed discussions that spell out everything Allen is trying to say for those in the back row who can’t hear. MATCH POINT is probably Allen’s most overrated film, in reality it’s probably one of his worst.