It's a familiar routine by now. A new Woody Allen movie appears on the horizon, and we start to hear how well it was received at this film festival or that special screening. "It's his best movie in years," the buzz begins, "his return to form."
And then the movie arrives, and it turns out to be Hollywood Ending or The Curse of the Jade Scorpion or Melinda and Melinda, and the buzz dissipates overnight, and we sink a little further into the belief that it's too late, that there never will be a "return to form," that Allen's washed up.
So when that old cycle started up again a few months back, as we began to hear how good Match Point was, it was easy to assume that we were just going to have our hearts broken again.
But wonder of wonders, the buzz holds up this time: Match Point really is the best movie Allen's made in at least fifteen years, probably his best since 1989's Crimes and Misdemeanors (with which it shares much in plot and themes).
The setting is not Allen's usual Manhattan this time, but London, where Chris Wilton (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) takes a job as tennis pro at a posh country club; one of his first students is Tom Hewett (Matthew Goode). Tom and Chris hit it off, and Chris meets the entire Hewett family. He begins dating Tom's sister, Chloe (Emily Mortimer), but finds himself irresistibly drawn to Tom's fiancee, Nola (Scarlett Johansson), a struggling actress from Colorado.
Tom's attraction to Nola is more about lust than love, but it's clear that he feels for her a kind of passion that's entirely absent from his feelings for Chloe, or for the comfy office job he's been given in one of the many Hewett companies.
It would be unkind of me to give away any more specifics about the story, but Allen's explicit theme here is the role of luck in human lives, and we are repeatedly bounced back and forth in very clever ways, as what appears to be a stroke of good luck turns out to be a disaster, and vice versa.
The cast is, with one exception, top-notch. Jonathan Rhys Meyers convinces himself that he's not responsible for the actions he's "forced" to take by luck and fate, and he almost manages to convince us, too; Emily Mortimer is heartbreaking as Chloe, who can never figure out why her marriage, and her husband, aren't quite as happy, as they ought to be. Brian Cox and Penelope Wilton turn in sharp performances as the Hewett parents; Wilton's dithering, borderline-alcoholic mother is a lovely bit of comic acting.
The problem is Scarlett Johansson, who is oddly flat throughout, and never seems comfortable in the role of femme fatale. Even when she's screaming, she's not so much seem angry as just loud. Fortunately, the movie's not really about Nola (though she does get lots of screen time); it's about Chris's reaction to Nola. She is, in essence, the movie's McGuffin; all we really have to believe is that Chris can't resist her, and Johansson is so strikingly gorgeous here that there's no reason to doubt his lust.
(Johansson is also starring in Allen's next film, Scoop, also filmed in London; her co-stars in that one will be Hugh Jackman, Ian McShane, and Allen himself.)
Despite the miscasting of Johansson, everything else about Match Point is so well done that the movie is absolutely worth seeing.
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