Match Point [DVD] [2006]

Woody Allen's first film shot in London is very different from most of his previous work. The acting is uniformly excellent, the sets and panoramic views are magnificent and really show off the best of modern London, the pace works well, and the drama gradually sucks you in. The story is fairly serious, there is little humour (zany or otherwise).

One warning - it would be easy to assume from the title and some of the packaging/advertising pictures which appear to show Scarlett Johanssen in a tennis costume that this is a tennis story such as "Wimbledon." It isn't; this is a drama-thriller about relationships, betrayal, and chance. The title is based on a tennis analogy.

Some people will really like this film, others will find it hard work or depressing. About three quarters of the way through there is a shock twist, the story changes from drama to thriller and doesn't end the way most people will have anticipated. The good aspect of this is that the film isn't boringly predictable, the problem is that some viewers will have great difficulty in suspending disbelief that the final outcome could possibly happen.

The central character, Chris Wilton (played by Jonathan Rhys Meyers) is a former tennis professional from a poor Irish background. The film starts with him doing a voice-over about the fact that in tennis sometimes the ball catches in the top of the net. If it tips over, "you win," if the ball falls back to your side, "you lose." Viewers who play or watch tennis will realise that when this happens on Match Point, what you win or lose is not just that point but the entire game.

Much later in the film, you see a round object hit the top of a barrier as it falls, and the camera zooms in in exactly the same way as it zoomed in on the tennis ball catching on the top of the net during Rhys Meyer's opening voice-over. This is the "Match Point" of his life - which side of the barrier the object falls will have life transforming consequences for the central character. But possibly not in the direction many viewers will expect at that point in the film.

Jonathan Rhys Meyers delivers an excellent performance as Chris Wilton, flawless except perhaps that he seems to have too perfectly removed the least sign in his looks, accent, mannerisms or dress that he supposedly comes from a poor Irish background. Arriving in London, he gets a job as a tennis coach, and one of his clients, Tom Hewett (Matthew Goode) introduces Chris to his super-wealthy family. Tom's sister Chloe (Emily Mortimer) falls very deeply in love with Chris: her father Alec (Brian Cox) is also impressed by him, and before he knows it Chris is being groomed both as Chloe's future husband and for a glittering business career in one of Alec's companies.

Chris is quickly seduced both by Chloe and by the life of wealth and comfort which her family offers. The one barrier on his path to a life of success and affluence is that he is badly smitten by Tom's actress fiancee Nola, played by Scarlett Johanssen. Perhaps the most implausible of the many unlikely elements of the film is that Scarlett Johanssen's character is not meeting with success in her acting career - for all the suggestion that she loses her confidence at interviews and auditions it is hard to credit that the gorgeous, smouldering femme fatale she plays throughout the film would be unable to land any acting roles.

The love triangle between Chris, Nola, and Chloe leads steadily and inexorably to disaster, but not the disaster which the viewer thinks you can see coming. At first Chris seems to be faced with a choice - on one side his wealthy and comfortable life with a woman who loves him, on the other, poverty and the woman who he really lusts after. You are never quite sure which of them - if either - he truly loves. But the choice he actually makes is much darker.

Emily Mortimer is in danger of getting typecast as the nice girl who falls badly for a man who lets her down, but perhaps this is because, as in "Sleeping Dictionary" and "Young Adam," she plays this role very well.

Besides Rhys Meyers, Johanssen, and Mortimer, the rest of the cast are excellent, including James Nesbitt as a police detective.

The shared taste which gets Chris his initial introduction to Tom's family is a love of opera, and the soundtrack features many opera greats including arias from La Traviata, Rigoletto and Macbeth, both recent performances and old recordings by Caruso and others.

The biggest issue which many people, especially those who know London well, will have with the film is the credibility of the conclusion. I don't think anyone can have told Woody Allen that Britain has a fifth of the world's CCTV cameras and London has more of them than any other city on earth. This gives me a real problem with the final denoument - I can't really write any more than this without giving away the ending.

Overall this was a clever and stylish film. I'm glad I watched it, but would put this down as one to rent rather than buy.

When I saw this movie, I didn't realise that Woody Allen had made it until afterwards. Which is to say that it does not conform to his usual comedy recipe. In fact, this is a very different Woody Allen film; you could say it's a tragedy rather than a comedy. Either way, Allen is a skilled storyteller. Match Point is an excellent study of just how far people will go to get ahead and stay ahead. Scarlett Johansson is utterly desirable as the girl that Jonathan (Bend it like Beckham) Rhys-Meyers should end-up while Rhys-Meyers himself steals the show with a totally convincing performance as the ambitious Tennis Pro. The other actors including the ubiquitous Brian Cox play well observed characters. Together they set up the plot very well. I notice that the film has garnered less than universal praise from other Amazon reviewers. This is because it is a film - like many of Allen's other offerings - that requires you to think and draw your own conclusions. The film is full of twists and turns and keeps you guessing right to the end. For all these reasons I highly recommend it. it is a perfect DVD for a night in.

I found this film totally compelling from start to finish, and it seems to me that Woody Allen does a remarkably good job of transposing his style from Manhattan Island to London's well-heeled set. At one point we see a character reading Crime and Punishment and in a sense what happens in the film is just as extreme, amounting to a similar kind of wager that Allen pulls off with great style. Part of this is attributable to the excellent acting. Emily Mortimer is amazingly good as the wife, and Scarlett Johansson and Jonathan Rhys Meyers make the sexiest of illicit couples. It is probably the most blatantly erotic of Allen's films, where the eroticism is played straight, which is both required by the film and a way of using his actors' particular assets to the full. The casting of Meyers seems a particular coup to me, in that you feel another actor would not have been as good. He is uncannily able to suggest a kind of detachment while somehow remaining enigmatic and eliciting just the right degree of empathy for three quarters of its running time. If there were none, the film would fail. The fact that Emily Mortimer elicits more is what makes the film successfully balanced; but the Meyers character is very reminiscent of Dostoyevsky's hero in this regard. Although not laugh-out-loud funny the film has a subtle humour in its incongruity, and is entertaining without ever being slick. It actually reminded me of Louis Malle's Damage in a number of ways, but the tone is less sombre; altogether it stands as further proof of Allen's extraordinary range. Perhaps in the final analysis it just lacks a bit of soul, but in its own terms it is brilliant.