The critics are right: Woody Allen's Match Point is a change of pace for the 70-year-old director because of its London setting and deadly serious tone. But it's also the most exhilarating and disturbing film he has ever made.
In many ways, though, Match Point has all of the Allen trademarks. The credits are still white-on-black, Allen has culled the film's score from his collection, the characters are ritzy and infidelity is inevitable. It is a testament to his versatility that he works with similar motifs and is able to create something brilliant, sexy and unbelievably suspenseful.
At the center of Point is luck. How far does it drive our lives? Chris Wilton (Jonathan Rhys-Meyers) believes luck - good and bad - means everything. As the film progresses, another eerie question surfaces: How far are we willing to go to continue living our happy lives?
Early in the film, Wilton befriends a wealthy family whose daughter, Chloe (Emily Mortimer), is the kind of sweet and generous girl he latches onto immediately. Problem: Chloe's future sister-in-law, Nola (Scarlett Johansson), is a sultry American dish. Even after Chris weds Chloe, he won't let that stand in his way.
Nola is going to be the femme fatale who lures the happy husband away from his loving wife, right? Nope. Allen tweaks the predictable setup of the infidelity thriller in the most fascinating and eventually shocking way. Instead of Nola, it is Wilton who craves the infidelity and drives the affair to reckless proportions. He wants to have his adulterous cake and eat his cushy married life too.
Allen is a director famous for drawing great performances from his actors, and Point is no exception. Johansson perfectly renders Nola as coolly aloof, and Rhys-Meyers successfully pulls off being both the protagonist and being despicable, depraved and audacious beyond belief. In one of the film's best scenes, he convinces Nola to whisper her phone number to him while his wife is standing steps away.
The film flows with such elegant restraint - old opera records crackling in the background, a gently roving camera drifting through an apartment as Chris and Nola roll around in bed - that the twists and turns in Point's magnificent final act are too shocking to even hint at here. Arriving in savage, unpredictable gut punches, they are an incendiary reminder of why Allen is the best director alive. Sure, he hit a slump after 1999's Sweet and Lowdown
but listen up: He's back, so get used to it. 17
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Matt Burns
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Nola (Scarlett Johansson) saunters toward Chris (Jonathon Rhys-Meyers) after a scintillating game of table tennis in Woody Allen's Match Point.
Adultery, opera heighten suspense of infidelity thriller
