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Match Point The Factor of Chance
A freeze on a tennis ball that has just hit the tape and bounced up, is how Allen starts his movie. How will it fall? Is this how life goes too, on the luck of the bounce? If we can forget for a minute the focus on intangibles, the film actually explores important aspects of design in forging ahead with ambitious schemes. The protagonist, Chris Wilton, is a failed tennis pro. While the film was not made to study the mentality that makes up for sporting success, there is a suggestion that the man in question has been rather lazy, unable or unwilling to make the required effort. Nevertheless it is evident that he is hungry for some kind of success. He is good looking, somewhat vague but always very careful not to offend anyone. Place this amorphous but scheming character in the amoral mood of modern London and we are set to have some fun. He finds a job at an exclusive tennis club as an instructor and immediately befriends Tom, an amicable but rather naive heir to a financial empire. In alluding to tennis, Match Point parallels the course of a modern professional match: a terse, tense affair between single minded individuals. Like a close game, Allen never turns off the suspense, which seems hinged on his ability to transfer the sense of the fraught tingling nerves of Chris Wilton's actual state of mind to the audience while at the same time showing how he portrays a calm exterior to the other characters in the plot. We can see Wilton is being false but we can also see that his behaviour, on the surface, is perfectly above board. He knows that the people he is dealing with hold the keys to everything he aspires to and yet he knows that he must make it seem like it was all friendly and casual. It has all the ingredients of a classic trickster movie but in Match Point Allen pushes the suspense beyond what might be normally allowed in a spectacle to the point of disquieting frustration. Perhaps he made the film for the true afficionados of melodrama, just as certain aspects of a tense tennis match may only be interesting to the most hardened and knowledgeable of fans. The disquiet emerges from the way Chris Wilton is playing, not just with circumstances, but with people's sense of natural moral equilibrium. The crucial element in his plan is of course to marry into the wealth and power that he is targeting. This, Tom's sister Chloe willingly obliges by falling head over heels in love with him. The fallibility of human perceptions is not his fault, but our man knows that the key to the trick is to make the observer believe that what things seem are actually how they are. In developing this plot Allen carefully extends, into an even darker territory, the inter-linked themes of hypocrisy and naivette which he first established in one of his previous films, Crimes and Misdemeanours. But wait, what does our man really want? Doesn't success come with a trophy? Apart from material success, isn't there something the guy might want just for himself? Is there a glimpse of true feeling in the man? Well there is, and it comes in the shape of the sensual toffee blonde Nora Rice played by Scarlett Johansson. Her role in the drama links Wilton and the audience back to some sense of reality. She offers everything to him, true love, a 'real' life and thus his only chance for redemption but, unfortunately, his scheming has entangled him very deeply in the confidence of his wedded family. In a certain sense, the family becomes his master and he its slave. The outcome is tragic, deeply tragic. To attain success, he has ended up by giving over his soul to serve (willingly or unwillingly) the greater interests of its master. Woody Allen does more than just take tennis as a metaphor. He seems to adopt its techniques. He runs the film using the dymanics of tennis rallies to set up an interesting back and forth rhythm inside the plot. The protagonist is constantly being thrown, like tennis shots, events and circumstances, some predictable and some unexpected. The plot then unfolds according to how he returns the 'shots'. Anyone who has been coached in tennis knows that playing good shots is as much about shifting the body weight as it is about using the racquet well. Allen seems to apply this principle of shifting weights to the film as the plot alternates the light and heavy moods of the scenes. As we approach the film's carthartic moment, it even switches genres: from a pyschological drama to a violent crime thriller. The deliberate sense of realism in the fumbling ineptness of Wilton as he contrives his crime, is reminiscent of Sidney Lumet's Dog Day Afternoon where the audience can't help becoming strangely ambivalent about its sympathies. The way in which the film unfolds entirely around the mind of the protagonist resonates with Shakespearean aplomb. However in Shakespeare's plays, the villains meet their comeuppances. It is a moot point whether Allen delivers a final judgement on our man in Matchpoint. On the surface, Allen remains a modernist and gives us an ambiguous ending. Professional tennis has evolved over the years into a multi-million dollar business. The sporting etiquette has changed from fair play to winning at all costs. Modern players bite their teeth, rant and grind their way through long tortuous matches, all in the hope of gaining personal glory and wealth, which in reality, are reserved only for a small elect group. The spectacle is ugly but nonetheless compelling. How much of destiny is determined by luck and how much by design? To cities like London people have congregated in flocks, basically to achieve something just for themselves. Blind ambitions drive the town. Woody Allen's observation that this phenomenon resembles tennis is very acute. He compares modern life to professional sports with its cruel contrasts between winning and losing. If the factor of chance is paramount in pursuing success, what kind of mind would toy with the inevitable outcomes? From where would the motivations come to go through with the plans? The film contains great philosophical depth. The comic element evident throughout the whole discomforting experience is clever, as is the suggestive link to the theme of 'luck'. The character portrayals (beautifully directed and acted) are brilliantly knit into the plot and the layering of moral undertones into scenes of ordinary life is masterful. While it only received lukewarm critical responses, this particular fan hopes that Match Point is the work that pushes this enigmatic, lovable director into the ranks of cinema's giants; game, set and match! Rome, 29 April 2006
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Woody Allen's favourite subject matter has for some time been the foibles of the upper middle classes. His popolo, the well heeled citizens of the Anglophone world live well, largely shielded from common prosaic concerns across those invisible economic dividing fences that exist in cities like New York and London. He is interested in lifestyle and how this affects people's assumptions and behaviour. In 'Matchpoint' he manages to amplify the microcosmic concerns of a domestic vignette into a tragic drama of sophoclean proportions. The mature Allen is far more complex and satisfying than the maker of sophisticated situation comedies such as "Annie Hall" or "Manhattan". The film is set in the centre of contemporary London, buzzing with wealth and excitement.