Most critics have been rather down on Woody Allen for some years. His recent pictures have seemed very lightweight indeed — Small-Time Crooks and The Curse of the Jade Scorpion particularly. These were obviously jeux d’esprit, though somewhat lacking in esprit. Consequently, his latest movie, Match Point, has been hailed as a return to form — Allen having been rejuvenated, perhaps, by his unprecedented move away from his beloved New York to London for movie-making purposes.
And, yes, Match Point is in many ways a good movie. It is solidly constructed, understatedly good-looking, and gripping — in a grim sort of way. It is not a great movie; most importantly, it is barely a Woody Allen movie. Apart from his long-standing concern with adultery, it has little of his thematic or stylistic stamp. The fact that all the characters except one are English or Irish also makes it feel like less of a Woody Allen movie. But, mostly, it’s the lack of much humour.
At his considerable best, Allen pulled together and blended in his own highly idiosyncratic voice his two main influences: the soul-searching existential dramas of Ingmar Bergman and the wisecracking wit of the Groucho Marx school of comedy. The result of this merging is a kind of intelligent comedy that is deeply grounded in the messy drama of human life — something precious in a time when what goes as comedy is usually a string of potty jokes. When Allen’s comedy and drama come together fully, he makes masterpieces, and he has made more masterpieces than most filmmakers — Annie Hall, Manhattan, Broadway Danny Rose, The Purple Rose of Cairo, Radio Days, Crimes and Misdemeanors, Bullets over Broadway …
But Allen has also had a yen for the pure existential drama in the sombre Swedish mode, as he demonstrated when, immediately after winning an Oscar for Annie Hall in 1977, he made his heavy Bergman tribute, Interiors. Unfortunately, Match Point is such a movie.
Jonathan Rhys Meyers plays Chris, a young Irishman coaching tennis in London. One of his pupils, young upper-crust Tom (Matthew Goode), introduces Chris to the rest of his wealthy family, including his sister, Chloe (Emily Mortimer), and his American fiancée, Lola (Scarlett Johansson). Chloe takes a shining to Chris, which represents a golden opportunity for Chris to achieve some social mobility — and rapidly, at that. But he complicates matters, almost wilfully, by developing a sexual obsession with Lola.
Early on in Match Point, we see Chris reading Crime and Punishment (as well as, simultaneously, a reader’s guide to Dostoevsky). This is not just a clue that he’s trying to improve himself, and that he needs the helping hand of a guide to do so; it’s a pointer as to what this movie is going to be about. If Chris is a Raskolnikov, though, he is not overwhelmed by conscience. At one point in the movie, Tom quotes someone, saying: “Despair is the path of least resistance.” Chris counters that he thinks faith is the path of least resistance. But what he does and what happens to him in Match Point seem closer to a demonstration of the former proposition.
Match Point is a bleak little movie, unrelieved by warmth or humour. Even what is perhaps Allen’s darkest movie, Crimes and Misdemeanors, had laughs, for heaven’s sake. The dialogue in Match Point is not witty, and it is hampered by a somewhat toneless ear for how the English upper classes speak: often the talk feels stilted, and not in a way that tells you about the stiltedness of the characters. Mostly, they are hard to gauge. There’s no one here to like or sympathise with — only to feel sorry for.
In Stardust Memories, Allen played a comedian who didn’t want to be funny any more. Perhaps now he doesn’t want to engage our human sympathies, either. Despair, after all, is the path of least resistance.