A thorough tale of a man on the
make who makes two women and ends up in a murderous noir
Woody lucks out with a Hollywood-ish thriller adapting his Crimes theme
First in a series: Post-9/11 Blues, Internet-infected Brave
New World: A revisiting of 2001-10 pop
(and political) culture
Also fits this series:
“We’ll always have Woody”: A look at Woody Allen films
The heart has
its reasons which reason does not understand.
—Blaise Pascal (1623-62),
mathematician and philosopher
…I want to obey
the story and if you obey the needs of the creation of the piece of fiction,
the meaning reveals itself.
—Woody Allen
in Eric Lax, Conversations with Woody
Allen (Knopf, 2007), p. 123 (speaking in February 2006)
Every decision
that was made on the picture, not just by me but by everybody, just worked. I
don’t know if I can ever repeat it or make a film as good.
—Allen in Lax,
p. 98 (speaking in May 2005)
One of the few
[films] that didn’t [take on decreased qualities in production] is Match Point. It seemed I was actually
enhancing it as I mounted [made] it.
—Allen in Lax,
p. 252 (speaking in Spring 2005)
[In the
production of Match Point]
[E]verything just fell in.
—Allen in Lax,
p. 359, with a “tone of wonder” in his voice
Subsections below:
A landmark work, in terms of his career
Allen achieves a competent “Hollywood
film,” afield of his preferred art-film metier
A mix of a dark European theme plus trusty ingredients, new and old
An earnest young man starts his rise in society, all innocent at first
The sexual side of things enters
The affair launches in hungry form, with a sequence of wily scenes
The decline in Chris’s character
Is Allen too hard on women in his best works?
[Edits 5/6/14. Edit 5/7/14. Edits 5/12/14. Edit 5/20/14. Edit 5/22/14.]
Woody Allen originally wanted to do this film set in the United States (with the rich family
ensconced in the Hamptons) and made here, as he had so many of his films
leading to the summer of 2004, when Match
Point was filmed. But the financing came from Britain
before he could get financing in the U.S.
(see Lax, p. 25), so off to Britain
he went. (One big help in Britain was that there weren’t the union workers
there that are common to productions in the U.S., and the process was less
regimented, as Allen says in Lax, p. 163.) Of course, he has made several films
in Europe since, ending up a little like Orson Welles,
another New York–born film auteur who eventually became so un-embraced by
Hollywood that he could only get financing from within Europe (there are
obvious differences between the two directors, also).
A landmark work, in terms of his career
The result is a film that has
several distinctions, making it stand out (largely positively) like a sore
thumb among Allen’s work of the past 20 or more years; but it is actually less
the anomaly some might think. First, from the sleek DVD packaging (and even
original film ads in newspapers), with the sensual bearings of stars Jonathan Rhys Meyers and Scarlett Johansson, it seems almost too surprising, maybe even an
Allen-style joke, that the film is identified as written and directed by Allen.
Second, it was distributed by DreamWorks, which in itself is not so peculiar,
except that when you expect (from the online promo or the DVD packaging) a
sleek entertainment and you see the DreamWorks logo-sequence when you first put
the film on, with the boy fishing in a pond from a crescent moon, you then wonder,
Did Steven Spielberg sign off on this?
Third, the film made several
times its cost, more than $85 million (which included overseas ticket sales),
according to the film’s Wikipedia article),
which is so atypical of Allen’s work that, again, it seems almost like an
Allen-style joke.
And fourth, a more ironic joke,
when viewers see the film and the social-climbing and femme fatale doings, and then in its last 40 minutes the film gets
into a well-tooled, well-edited murder phase, these viewers, especially if they
are, oh, age 30 or younger, may say, “Whoa, wait a minute. I’m freakin’. I see a British class-related
story, plus it’s Woody Allen and not a whole lot of jokes, plus Scarlett
Johansson looking hot, and the whole thing turns into a tough murder story—and
yet, overall, the film isn’t too bad—but I’m askin’, What is this? Did someone do a brain transplant on the Woodman?
This is so off his usual track in so many ways.” (OK, my rendering of a young
person’s voice isn’t all true to life.)
Well, as I took pains to show in
Parts 1 and 2 of this mini-series
starting with Crimes and Misdemeanors,
which itself was a step in a new direction for Allen in 1989 (but was a sturdy
work based on 15 years of advancing himself and doing his most original work up
until then)—Allen had already walked in the territory of doing a Crime and Punishment story (the
Dostoyevsky novel). (And the 1989 film got
delayed recognition in 2010 [End note 1].)
Allen achieves a competent “Hollywood
film,” afield of his preferred art-film metier
Another aspect of this
achievement, which is not thematic—which I will look at appreciatively via details
later—is that in Match Point, Allen
actually had the luck—due to a solid script and a raft of competent actors,
along with an eager-and-capable BBC Films as his ad hoc partner studio—to put
together a sort of Hollywood work, a solid tank of a serviceable movie, at
about two hours long (unusual for him; he usually clocks in at 1:30 or 1:40),
with all its details aligned in service of a sort of tried-and-true genre work.
It is like Billy Wilder’s Double
Indemnity (1944) or Stanley Kubrick’s The
Shining (1980)—a well-engineered, diverting (to many) example of its genre,
something that gives solid entertainment and even rewards multiple viewings for
its technical sides, but which is cold in its outlook on humanity and, for that
reason, may be respectable and good for students of film technique but not
something you can love for its breadth (or warmth) of heart. Allen himself has
shown a distinctly more broad-hearted approach in films like Hannah and Her Sisters (1986) and even Crimes and Misdemeanors, among others.
Thus, when Allen talks (as he
does at several points in Lax [see my epigraph quotes above]) as if Match Point is his best film, this could
easily be the sort of self-assessment an elder artist makes about his latest work (e.g., Joseph Heller saying
in a 1984 Washington Post interview [October
8, 1984, p. D13] that he felt his new novel God
Knows was his best, but admitting that—presumably because of the recentness
of the work—this was a “natural” opinion if not an “objective” one). And it may
be this film pleased Allen because there were the fewest compromises to his
original script-bound vision. But I think if you
systematically review his total set of works, it is an important late film for
him, not least for revisiting the austere height of his Crimes/Dostoyevsky theme, but surely it can’t be better than, say,
a sort of album of “the best sections of”—or, simply, a representation of all
of—Annie Hall, Manhattan, Hannah and Her
Sisters, and Crimes.
A mix of a dark European theme plus trusty ingredients, new and old
I won’t cover all that thematic
ground here. In fact, Match Point
compresses the specifically Dostoyevsky treatment to the last third, unlike this
taking up most of the tragic side of Crimes
and Misdemeanors. The first two-thirds of Match Point is setup for the murder, and itself is both a
not-anomalous product of Allen and yet an advance, in part, I would guess, due
to happy accident. Allen had a breath of fresh air in the production venue of Britain,
as he partnered with the BBC. (The credits at the end of Match Point show a heck of a lot more British names, in all sorts
of roles like gaffer and/or such, than his films made in America ever do. And several of the
producers below the level of executive are, judging by the names, English.) His
way of working out details of a story by reviewing the early-edited totality of
what he’s shot and then doing reshoots and reworkings was possibly held much in
check here.
But in Britain he had
on-point actors, and he didn’t ask a whole ton from anyone except the leads, Rhys
Meyers and Johansson. The summer period in which it was shot (I’ve heard
puckish remarks that summer in Britain
is about three weeks in August) adds to the sense of beauty here (notice the
yellow meadow grass in the turning-point sex scene).
The large aspect of Match Point of the social (and personal)
rise of a young man from a relatively Spartan background is the sort of story
that may bore some, but is an important foundation here—it interests me, after
I’ve written in relation to the theme for years (roughly 1984-95, not all
published), and I’m also the sort who doesn’t mind the dossier-reviewing
sections of Apocalypse Now, which
might bore others to the gourd. But the career-rise phase of MP adds to a comfortably paced film
that, really, I think intrigues people the most in its femme fatale aspect, a role carried (slightly lonesomely) by
Johansson and without whose spark and beauty the film might seem pretty
also-ran-ish.
In short, Allen weaves themes
into this ambitious drama that he has either covered directly or touched on
over many years. OK, Allen’s language in the film—according to criticisms noted
in the Wikipedia article—doesn’t all jibe
with English manners, conventions, and idiom. (Well, then we’re even: the rightly
esteemed English director Ridley Scott has
fumbled trying to represent microscopic aspects of American style in such films
as Thelma and Louise [1991] and Matchstick Men [2003], but we Yanks
don’t care that much; in most respects, for what it’s trying to be, his work is
still fine.)
But Allen had a solid enough
script, and fortuitously it seemed to mesh enough with British competence and
middle-class morés (though I think the Hewett family, the rich business family
Chris is grafted into, could still have been well rendered as American, with
adjustments in manners), that the resulting film is generally pretty
technically adept, and engaging. (The spelling of the Hewett surname follows
the film’s Wikipedia article.)
I saw it when it was in the theater
and have since seen it numerous times on DVD, not just this year. It is
fascinating, even if I would consider it atypical of Allen in various big ways.
But let’s look at a lot of details, with a strong sense of fun. We can
appreciate this film, and yet laugh at certain bits in it too; we can well
realize why critics have considered it his best since maybe 1989, and also
understand more why it seems the “dark” thing it is, ending up revealing to us
a Chris Wilton (Rhys Meyers) who seems like a cold fish of cheap-spirited, and
maybe seriously confused, ambition.
By the way, by summer 2004,
Allen no longer had his long-lived production team in a couple ways: his
longtime editor Susan E. Morse, who worked
with him from Manhattan (1979) through Celebrity (1998), was gone; and his favored cinematographers—such as Gordon Willis,
Carlo Di Palma, and Sven Nykvist—were all out of the picture. His
cinematographer here, who would also work with him on Scoop (2006), was Remi Adefarasin,
who lends a sensitivity and a certain exploratory or floating supple-ness in
his dollyings and pans here.
An earnest young man starts his rise in society, all innocent at first
Chris Wilton seems inoffensive
enough—rather like Joe, the “football” (soccer) coach he played in Bend It Like Beckham (2002), which Allen
saw and inspired him to hire Rhys Meyers for Chris’s part. Rhys Meyers’ earnest
manner helps sell the part early on. Chris is seeking a job as a tennis pro
(instructor) at a high-end club; he explains to his interviewer that you have
to want being a pro, and Chris didn’t
want it enough, nor could he fully warm to the traveling, and he didn’t have
the talent of Andre Agassi and such players anyway. Whether he gets points for
modesty, he gets the job. (We find later he came from a Spartan upbringing; his
father was a somewhat imposingly religious sort. We don’t hear about his
mother, I think.)
He rents an apartment, and the
representative of the renting facility (“real estate agent” as I saw him called
somewhere isn’t quite right) gives his spiel, providing some of the only
offhand, spontaneously finessed humor in the film. The actor is Paul Kaye
(according to Lax, p. 98), and his cockney accent (I think it is) make his
speech sound like that marbles-in-the-mouth way some (and only some) British
have to us Yanks; this quality is such as makes it almost impossible to know all
of what he’s saying, yet we glean just enough to get the basic meaning, and we
smile at such verve-driven, gabbled-out talk. He even improvises with reference
to a wok (the Oriental frying pan) being left in the apartment from the
“geezer” who’d had it last.
So far, Chris seems like any
other young man starting out: all hopes, sincere presentations at interviews,
trying his best…. Rhys Meyers seems “clean-nosed” enough till here, while later
in the film he has a sort of steely-eyed look and occasional abrupt hesitation
in his speech—whether intended or not—that cohere with his character’s proving
to be a bit ambiguous, and in any event arguably capable of the gruesome act he
is going to commit late in the film.
Chris meets Tom Hewett, played
by Matthew Goode, who has an upper-crust,
lilting way of talking, striking us clodhopper Yanks as maybe a bit effeminate,
or at least spoiled, but quite believable as the upper-middle-class scion of
his comfortable family. His father (played by Brian Cox) has a company that seems to be involved in
financing other companies (such as overseas), and (I believe, but am not sure) the
son works there, too. After a session of Chris’s teaching Tom some tennis, they
find they share an enthusiasm for opera. Tom invites Chris to attendance at an
opera performance his family has tickets for. And thus begins Chris’s becoming
ingratiated on, and soon insinuated into, the Hewett family.
When Chris meets Tom’s sister Chloe,
played by a suitable Emily Mortimer,
slightly homely/simpatico in a British-ingenue way, and with an artless (and
slightly emotionally shallow) manner that makes her one of the more pleasant
and uncalculating characters in this
milieu, the two become an item, not due to any particular machinations on
Chris’s part. Chloe soon—only with the best of intentions on behalf of her
working-his-way-up boyfriend—asks her father to see if he can get Chris a job
in one of his companies.
The innocuous career-start
aspect. For a film that patiently unfolds Chris’s more honorable
ascension in English society, and for a young man who early had a drive to
succeed in tennis but was not steered by fate or desire as a youth to business
financing, the way his career comes together is a good (if in its details
novel) depiction of something that, very generally, is common enough in
America. When so many of us Yanks are fated to scratch and scrape together our
careers by main force amid the debris of circumstance, a story of a young
person’s earnestly stitching together his or her fate can be touching.
(Meanwhile, the ethical “core” of Chris, referred to a few times via various
characters, where he has a yeomanly way of working his way up [he even says
“Hard work is mandatory…”] intermixes, rather surprising to some of us perhaps,
with his affirming the key role that luck plays in life. Luck in this film
being, of course, a conspicuous theme and at times a little terror.)
The more ambiguous element of
economic/societal influence on a youth. Allen (as I said) originally
saw this as a story set in the U.S., where I’m sure his eye on a rich-bitch
family fully allegiant to the American deity of The Almighty Dollar, would have
been razor-sharp. Instead, he fashioned the story for Britain, and called it a British
story (Allen in Lax, p. 164: “I wasn’t making an American picture in London, I
was making a British picture, it was a British story.”). Apart from his
occasionally not getting linguistic idioms right (according to the film’s
Wikipedia article), his take on broader aspects of British life may be off-base
at times or in ways annoying to British viewers. It may have been pretentious
for him to think he could skewer the type of semi-wealthy working
upper-middle-class of Britain, as opposed to what could have done very nicely
(and based on more thorough experience he had) regarding the rough American
counterpart.
But as is evident from this
film’s being finished and leading quickly enough to resounding success, no one
in the land of shepherd’s pie, beefeaters, and G & T’s told him in early
stages, “Kibitzer go home!,” and I think we can readily accept this film as
only nominally set in Britain, but suitably situating his Chris Wilton in the
embrace of a wealthy family as would have been a good representative of any English-speaking industrialized nation’s
family-and-work life, in order to root what was arguably the better half of
Allen’s thematic agenda with MP: the
way materialistic motives can tempt, warp, and otherwise distract human
personality, family values, and working toward good ends, or at least the way
those can set up horrendous conflicts between two very potent but contradictory
holds on a striving young man’s passions.
Just as the “Champagne comedies”
of the late 1930s that Allen has romanticized (such as is noted on the DVD
liner notes for The Purple Rose of Cairo)
really didn’t represent any truly recognizable part of real American life, the
upscale British world of 2004 that he draws here is what might be called a
roughly-drawn intersection of what American writers—whether with Mark Twain’s
earthy humor or a New York Jewish comedian’s street smarts—would consider the
epitome of capitalist bourgeois living mixed with Old World estate-associated
social status, complete with a nobleman’s type of manor, skeet-shooting,
horse-riding, and oh yes, a set of shotguns in a cellar area, which the
resourceful fellow will find need not only be used on skeet.
As I’ve said in Part 2 of my Crimes and Misdemeanors review, this is
a story most distinctly—so far—modeled on Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy, and more generally
is a story as has been written by many, a young man’s starting out in life,
where the story can be any of a variety of concrete adventures, with the
thematic bones alternatively being a study of “inner” character and/or a look
at getting “somewhere desired” amid the tremendous (and often uncooperative)
flotsam and jetsam of circumstance…and it’s a classic American sort of story,
in this land of liberty, dreams, and the occasional erratic federal benefits
program. I myself have written a couple novel manuscripts (in the 1980s) along
these lines (and they are among my most incisive and heartiest works, I think).
The term bildungsroman is used for a novel of a young man coming of age, and
this need not focus only on young-adult career; further, the real-life sources
of such stories (in various personal histories) and the general literary form
certainly are robust, stolid things. And it may be that some people who never
had to worry much about starting their careers may be bored by this sort of
tale a bit. Anyway, for those who love this, the first two-thirds of Match Point offers Allen’s sleek example
of the form; but for those who came to MP
really for the sex-and-danger story, there’s a good, “kick-ass” chunk of that.
Which is where Scarlett
Johansson’s Nola Rice comes in. And the scene in which Chris meets her in a
table-tennis room—where he’ll show her (from his regular-tennis angle) a good
way to serve—is one of the more hackneyed in the film, but it still plays
pretty well, given the film’s overall interest. Nola, of course, is first seen
as Tom Hewett’s girlfriend, and Tom seems firmly attached to her, even though
his mother Eleanor (Penelope Wilton)
vocally doesn’t approve of her (Mother considers her “spoiled and
temperamental”).
(Sidebar—the
Celtic ethnic elements in the story. Interestingly, Allen makes
a token acknowledgement of consciousness of Chris’s Irish background as opposed
to the Hewetts’ English-ness—in general, and very vaguely put by me here, the
Irish have historically been regarded as the poor slobs within the island
constellation of the U.K. and Ireland [hence the long alienation of Ireland
from the rest, with even the Celtic-derived Scotland being pretty securely in
the fold with England, at least until recently, in terms of political stirrings].
But except for a passing remark, this sort of distinction doesn’t figure into the script much. Chris’s
Irish background could be an important element for someone writing a paper on
this film that included a character analysis, but that would be in the vein of
reading a little more into the depictions than Allen seems to have deliberately
opted for. Also, notably, when the police enter the scene late in the film, maybe
no fewer than two of them seem, to my philistinish American ears, to have
Scottish accents, but I don’t think this was a deliberate “statement” by Allen;
more likely it reflected who the BBC-associated casting director was able to
scout up for roles in the film.)
The sexual side of things enters
The way Chris and Nola take to
each other with an immediate sexual draw is well enough acted, and obvious
enough in the story development. In fact, the whole “affair” side of Chris’s
life should be clear enough to young viewers (and it certainly comprises the
“marketing draw” and ineluctable dance beat here) that I don’t need to analyze
much of it. It, indeed, is one enjoyable aspect to this film, as its
accessibility and way of ratcheting up suspense/intrigue in the film are
probably what to many gives the film its most juice. Hence, to analyze it would
be like trying to verbally analyze a sunset, or the film Young Frankenstein (1974), or one of the several Jim Carrey film
performances from 1994; you should just behold it and enjoy it, for whatever inevitable
pleasure it gives you.
A bar/restaurant scene with some
droll features. There is a multi-section scene in which Chris and Chloe
are to meet Tom and Nola for dinner at a restaurant. At first Chris and Chloe
are at a bar, with Chloe talking to Chris ingenuously about how she has
arranged with her father to give him a job offer. There is something a little
stilted about how the two talk, which in part suits the kind of conversation—sincere
but drily career-start-related—which inevitably would seem a bit artificial or
synthetic. But notice how Rhys Meyers looks to the side as he unfolds his talk
(including what starts with, “It’s strange, but coming where I come from”): I’ve
seen this several times, and each time I think he is reading cue cards as he
delivers some of his somewhat “earnest-appeal/formal” comments to
Chloe/Mortimer. This could very well be, as the scene is in a real restaurant,
and Allen could well have been under the gun to get the scene wrapped in short
order, and with his typically having actors do only two or three takes anyway,
maybe Rhys Meyers couldn’t memorize all the lines in time. (Mortimer, for her
part, doesn’t seem here to use cue cards.)
Sidebar:
Compare the steamier conversation (at another location) between Chris and Nola
after her unavailing audition at the Royal Court Theatre: In a fairly
extended scene with Chris and Nola speaking after she confesses to needing a
drink following a flame-out at an audition, Nola tells Chris a lot about
herself, getting noticeably drunk (and with her eyes not always meeting his) in
the process. Per Lax p. 165, this was the first scene filmed with Johansson
(and perhaps her suffering jet lag helped cement her suitable performance).
This conversation probably is a familiar enough type to any young Americans who
have become familiar with singles bars and the like, but it is key to this
film, without being too hokey, in showing how Chris and Nola’s pairing becomes
more “confirmed,” even while Chris seems to exercise a bit of steely-eyed
distance from the more vulnerable Nola. Johansson imbues her performance with
a quality that seems emotionally insinuating to us. Among two interesting points of content: Nola (rather
tritely) warns Chris that he will go far with the Hewett/career route, as long
as he doesn’t blow it (“How?”) by making a “pass” at her. Also, she dismisses
the Hewett family as “inbred,” and as “sick” in this. This refers to Tom’s
mother’s wanting him to marry a cousin. This aspect of the family’s
self-regard, its sense of entitlement, or whatever you want to call it—where
cousins may marry, the sort of thing you see in royal families (or families
that think they are royal)—is something Allen doesn’t follow up much in this
story. As far as any sexual “untowardness” goes among the Hewetts, he seems
more concerned with what a goat Tom can be (more on this later), which seems
more of an American characteristic.
The foursome at the restaurant
dinner table. After their career-germane talk at the bar, Chris and
Chloe decamp to a table when Tom and Nola have arrived. Here, there are a few technical
things to note. First, for a good deal of the four-person conversation, there
are shots of just the heads in isolation, which is atypical of Allen in his films since about Manhattan.
Allen has spoken in Lax, and certainly it is obvious from his later films, that
he usually uses master shots, meaning a long shot encompassing a lot of
different action and different actors’ parts. In one respect, doing this saves
on production cost. And with Allen’s stories and actors often delivering a sort
of “stage drama” where the verbal content is key, this is sufficient.
But in the case of this table
scene in Match Point, it may have
been that Allen had to salvage the best performances from different takes, and
hence had his now-longtime editor (Alisa Lepselter)
just frame individual heads (I have puzzled over some of the shots, with their
seeming slightly decreased resolution, to speculate whether this actually was
done). Whether this selective framing was done or not, the net result is
individuals speaking alone in shots, and this works so well—and conforms with
such typical American film practice anyway—that most viewers wouldn’t notice it
(as unusual for Allen). And anyway, the conversation among these young people
is gripping enough (even if the “academic” talk about the role of luck and
faith in life may strike some as a little dry and gratuitous).
The consummation of the Chris/Nola
affair-relationship. After Nola/Johansson has spoken with some welling
of bitterness about how she wouldn’t want to go back to her home in Colorado,
even amid her continuing frustrations in getting somewhere with her acting
career, we find she ends up looking linkingly toward Chris, who himself has
been eyeing her and talking to her with piqued interest (despite her being
Tom’s “main squeeze”); she has a sort of touched/newly ingratiated look. What
might this mean?
I have talked (in a 2012 blog
entry; see here) about the “firewall” women have between their
career drive and their mate-related tendencies. Individual women differ quite a bit, and in signature ways, regarding
this. Here, Nola may be suddenly conceding to a sort of intrigue in Chris
after—and dynamically set up by—her revealing her half-despair over her career
and her view of herself regarding her peers. Meaning, a woman, with her
personality type, who is running into frustrations as she is, is apt to
suddenly take a strong interest in a new male (potential mate) like Chris. This
is not a universal or formulaic matter; it is a pattern discerned in certain
contexts after the fact. In any event, the way Allen whips up this rise of the femme fatale in Chris’s life—and of course,
both young people have responsibility for their whirlwind association—is done
very well.
The affair launches in hungry form, with a sequence of wily scenes
Of course, the obvious and
spectacular way in which their bond is consummated is one of all the
circumstances’ being more extreme: the Hewetts, Nola, and Chris are at the
family’s estate. Mother Eleanor makes remarks about Nola’s intrepid tries at getting
a start in acting in a way that offends Nola. Nola, who has been drinking wine,
needs a break and leaves. She takes a walk outside in a summer thunderstorm.
(Allen is big on using tumultuous weather conditions—almost as if he is being a
German expressionist, or something—when his characters are in the throes of
sudden love developments, a trope of his I’ll return to when I review his Husbands and Wives [1992].)
Chris, partly honestly
sympathetic and partly, we assume, at the beck and call of the ol’ libido,
heads out after Nola. In a summer-blanched grassy field, with rain pouring
down, they have sex for the first time.
Sex scenes between the two then
become a habit for the film. We can enjoy the film overall and still find these
to be (at times) a bit comical despite themselves, i.e., not as intended.
Notice the situation, during
Christmas, where Chris and Nola (Chris’s life has become stiffly
compartmentalized by his confirmation in his “respectable” middle-class life) are
secreted away in her apartment, snow tumbling down outside, for another tryst.
He is putting what seems like baby oil on her back. Notice how Johansson
stifles a giddy smile or laugh as Rhys Meyers starts to do this. Either she
finds the scene rather ludicrous, or the feel of the oil makes her laugh.
(Adding to the layers of this
story, which is pretty dense in meaning and incident despite its apparent
slickness, Allen has Chris and Chloe go to the length of seeing a fertility
doctor, amid their [in both practical and biological respects] frustrating
tries at having a child, while Chris and Nola….)
A more amusing scene is when
Chris and Nola meet at her place for a midday roll in the hay (not so literal
this time), and in the throes of rampaging passion, she takes off his workday
necktie and ties it around his eyes and he turns around, back facing her, as he
is famishedly helping her undress. The whole situation almost looks sick, or as
if they’re having a fit. It reminds me of the lyrics of another Brit, Sir Michael Jagger, in the Rolling Stones song
“Shattered”: “Pride and joy and freaky sex / that’s what makes that town a mess,”
or some such. Yes, freaky sex here, but that’s more a New
York thing than a London
thing, no?
The decline in Chris’s character
Allen doesn’t spend time—and
probably felt it would be a waste—to look closely
at Chris’s motives as things change more broadly for him. The most we see of
Chris’s intellectual or self-reflective side is (early on) in his reading
Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, which
of course is a typical “cultural allusion” of Allen’s, which doesn’t hurt here
for those unfamiliar with his Crimes and
Misdemeanors. What is a little droll is that Chris’s interest in
Dostoyevsky impresses father Hewett, as proof of Chris’s not being “trivial.”
Of course, for those of us inclined to analyze things along the lines of social
science (whether shallow or not), we may ask, Is Chris a potential sociopath
who is “educated” the tragically wrong way by Dostoyevsky, where the Russian
writer insidiously influences him to consider murder as a way to resolve a
serious dilemma in his life? Or is he a young man who has gotten himself into a
horrible bind, and ends up settling on the murder option only as a cold “least
of evils,” with only a bit of intellectually justifying help from Dostoyevsky?
Either way, we find Chris to be
a rather cold fish of a person by the film’s final third, and we certainly
would blame him whether he had “inadvisable help” from a literary source or
not. Of course, Allen probably wouldn’t think that this is a story of a bad
influence by literature; we know he likes Dostoyevsky anyway (as allusions in
some of his films, such as Husbands and
Wives, attest). The real thematic issue is what evil a man is capable of,
if he doesn’t minutely decide more wisely, or doesn’t be more honest with
himself and/or significant others. In Match
Point, the story is beefed up with how Chris has gotten “wedded” to the
ideals/ethos of middle class and material success, along with his partnership
with a wife (and daughter of his boss) who is both rather bland (if
well-meaning) and sexually not a good partner (for whatever reason).
In Crimes and Misdemeanors, the tragedy Judah has gotten into is that
of a successful professional man, a doctor, in middle age who not only faces
the ruin of his marriage by the possible revelation of his affair with Dolores,
but her (as a threat to get him to honor her wishes) triggering an inquest into
his arguable financial misdeeds regarding a foundation he has helped lead.
Judah, like a tragic figure, focuses on some of the hard realities of
life—tragic figures are not simply people who can’t reason or see the facts
sanely; the sane in their minds mixes up with big mental mistakes, which
constitutes the key of the tragedy. Judah says at one point that he
will not be destroyed by a “neurotic woman.” And, if this were the only issue, it could be quite a solid and
hard-to-mitigate problem that (in life at large) crops up in various quarters
in American society. But the problem for him is that he opts for murder, though
not without a lot of soul-searching, including with his more coolly assessing
brother Jack.
In Match Point, things hustle along more pell-mell. Chris turns to the
murder option without all Judah’s
preliminary soul-searching. (Chris strikes us as opaque and surprisingly quick
in deciding to kill Nola, but he is more vivid in the aftermath, with his
emotional tumult once he has pulled the trigger….) We see the bind he is in—and
he even makes a game effort at talking with a friend about his dilemma: for
instance, he says he has more passion for Nola, but can’t see a future with
her. His relationship with Chloe is cooler, but his life as tied to her family
is quite comfortable. He tosses off a line—“Maybe it’s the difference between
love and lust”—such as Allen uses in as disparate love-themed places as A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy (1982) or
Husbands and Wives (1992), which in a
dramatic-line way reflects some aspect of trials associated with love, but may
seem like a dry, “token literary” gesture.
Some of the same “script
gesture” happens earlier in this story, where Nola and Chris are having a
passionate discussion about her being pregnant with his child: he can’t believe
he got her pregnant, when he has been
laboriously trying with Chloe for so long, to no avail. Then Nola says this may
be because their child was “conceived out of genuine passion,” though Chris
quickly dismisses this skeptically as “your interpretation?” This may reflect
Allen’s view that, as much a miracle as conceiving a child is, coming up with
moral interpretations as to how it fits into life when it can be most
inconvenient in some way that is significant regarding other life-plans means a
sort of desperate groping after a “moral narrative” of our lives, while
sometimes we might more honestly admit that some developments in life—even the
more positive—are about as chancy as the more negative and tragic ones.
Sidebar:
The Hewetts as morally ambiguous. It’s also worth noting that the
Hewett family is by no means a paragon of moral righteousness (with the
possible exception of Chloe), from the standpoint of non–Old World Americans
(whether Christian or Jewish or other). The parents and Tom all seem to often
have a drink in their hands, and whether or not the father’s business is
ethical (e.g., whether it foments pollution in far-flung places, facilitates
child labor, or the like), the family is definitely one of a kind of stuffy
“successful upper middle class” burghers who are quite comfortably well off and
reflect where they socially stand by, among other things, frequenting the
opera. Tom, in particular, is something of a roue, as he not only routinely
holds a drink (even though he sums up Nola, after they have broken up, as a
“lady of the sauce,” even adding that it runs in her family—fairly
unambiguously, Nola is a more pathological drinker), but Tom (not unlike Nola)
is also sexually in the randy-goat direction. The young woman he eventually
marries is pregnant at their wedding; and in fact, Nola had conceived a child
of his, but he had demanded, successfully, that she abort it.
Whether Allen
meant with all this to satirize, or cast a jaundiced eye on, the ethos of
British middle-class sorts who derive their standing (in part) from inherited
property or from being the beneficiaries of some well-kept investment vehicles
(or from fronting a rock band with, on stage, gym socks stuffed into their
pants crotch), certainly at the very least he wanted to situate Chris’s moral
predicament in a family/social setting that wasn’t exactly aces in the moral
rectitude department, as more artless Americans would assess. In this, his
details supporting this are many. (Chris recognizes his compromises in this
milieu when he says to a friend, with some irony, “I’m the boss’s son-in-law,
and he loves me.”)
He even gets in
a last remark on the Hewetts’ nature when, at the tail end of the film, Tom is
leading a toast with what sounds like, “To Terrence [the new baby]! And all
that sailing!”
In any event, Match Point is a seductive ride down the
road of some young people’s typical arrangements in life—career start, aim for
family, all that other sunny-skies-ahead stuff—with a sudden collision into appalling
calamity, all (1) of an interpersonal sort, (2) of a gross murder sort, and (3)
of a moral-decline (in Chris) sort. Young viewers might be shocked at the turn
things take, but if they had seen beforehand Crimes and Misdemeanors, they’d see in Match Point that Allen’s aim is true in one sense: to be as honest with ourselves and our
dilemmas as we can, because to take a sudden coldly expedient turn in acting as
if the end justifies the means and might be a way to “karate chop” a problem out of
our life, also deals a bad fracture to our moral being. (End note 2)
A last look at a spurned woman:
I’ve said regarding Crimes and
Misdemeanors (in Part 1, toward the
end) that, in the kind of pitched tragedy the Judah/Dolores and Chris/Nola
couples are in, neither side is all right or all wrong. But the temperature is
certainly ratcheted up for Nola in MP,
maybe as “befits” young people with their living life more intensely. In one
dynamic exchange she has—post-pregnancy-revelation—with Chris in her apartment,
she laments that she has “no psychiatrist to talk to, I can’t, everything is
so damned secretive!” She is truly isolated in a way that makes her situation
all the more desperate.
Is Allen too hard on women in his best works?
This is a tough question, in the
sense that it seems quite generalizing and arch, and also can be subject to different,
heartfelt answers from people of very different philosophies. I might almost
have phrased it, “Is Allen a misogynist?,” but I think the word misogynist is overused today, like the
words stalker, unstable, delusion,
and other such words—which seem (unknown to the users) to reflect enough
anxiety and uncertainty on the part of the average person in the American
middle class that these words that used to stand for extremes are increasingly bandied around to throw at merely
disagreeable people regarding whom the users are reading their worst,
generalized fears into these people more than seeing them for what they are
(ambiguous or not).
To answer my question partially,
I think Allen, with female characters he puts in the worst extremes, still usually gives these women “room to
breathe,” a chance to show some dignity, and often their dire predicaments are
more a reflection of his seeking to look at human experience—embracing both
sexes—in a world that he sees as darker than a lot of us would like to admit,
rather than saying, more narrowly, that women in their own right, irrespective
of circumstances, can be awfully difficult sometimes, and thus this adds
considerably to the larger world’s darkness.
Dolores Paley in Crimes and Misdemeanors and Nola Rice in
MP may seem like unreasonable bitches
in, for instance, demanding feverishly, of the man they’ve had the affair with,
that they speak baldly to the man’s wife, to bring the affair out in the open, with
the not-unreasonable expectation of the best outcome of allowing themselves to
be freer to have the relationship with the man that the affair initially
“promised.” This doesn’t simply mean these women are monomaniacal harridans,
but that the circumstances into which their
(formerly) beloved men, with un-best motivations of their own, have put them have led them—if with
certain wily human passions intervening, on both sides—to make the demands they do.
But this also comes amid an
absurdly dilemma-like situation for the male, which he—as the story has
it—ultimately chooses to resolve by murdering the “other woman.” You might not
entirely like the overall Hobbesian view of life that Allen suggests with this
dramatic “nexus,” this sort of zero-sum situation, but at least you can say that up until the murders, the
demanding “other women” are doing the best they can, or doing little worse than
the men that have set them up in that way, in an awful situation.
From another angle, Allen may be
someone whose world view is dark and, accordingly, he shows the world—which
seems to be, for practical purposes, a “man’s world” no matter how dark one
views it—as being inhospitable to women, or at least apt to stimulate women’s
more unreasoning sides. But this is not terribly different from, say, the
thematic propositions of novelist Joseph Heller (see my review of his novels here; the longer version is here), whose fictional world largely
centers on men, and whose female characters usually are not as distinguished as
the most fully depicted men—though Heller did give us vivid, intriguing female
characters—or at least strong “counters” to the male protagonists—in the
daughter in Something Happened and in
Belle, the wife of Bruce Gold, in Good as
Gold.
Director Stanley Kubrick, who has also been criticized for having a bleak
worldview, and certainly focused mostly on men (and their grand foibles) in
his movies, did occasionally allow some females to shine, such as Alice Harford
in his last film, Eyes Wide Shut
(1999), or arguably the mother Charlotte Haze in Lolita (1962).
In the cases of Heller and
Kubrick, and arguably of Allen, as they got older and their works in some sense
got more mature, they were willing to have strong enough women enter their
stories, if not in leading roles. Or, if the women were in situations that
brought some nastiness out of them, the authors still gave these women dramatic
room to breathe and be fairly well-rounded. This can be kept in mind as it is
said, even today, that actresses have liked to have an opportunity to feature
in a Woody Allen film because he writes good roles for women.
I hope to address the issue of
Allen’s admission to suffering lifelong, mild depression (and my own
speculations and opinions on how this may relate to his art), and also the
thornier and more controversial area of his 1992 family crisis, in my next
review, on his Husbands and Wives
(1992). (This film also has a good performance by Judy Davis as a spurned woman
who entertains us and earns our respect with some fireworks of pissy anger and
indignation she brings to bear.)
End note 1.
As I said in Part 1 of this
mini-series, in 2010 C&M won some
20/20 Awards, for generally the same points as it got Oscar nominations for in
1990 (it was Oscar-nominated—and won 20/20 Awards—for supporting acting by
Martin Landau and the original script; and it won a 20/20 Award for best
picture, but it wasn’t nominated for this for an Oscar in 1990, while Allen did
get an Oscar nomination for Best Director), according to the film’s Wikipedia page.
End note 2.
Near the end, in a stagy
sequence that has Chris being confronted by the ghosts of Nola and Mrs. Eastby
[sp?] after he has killed them—a dramatic artifice that grows on you with
multiple viewings—Chris says [maybe a paraphrase], “Sometimes innocent people
have to be killed to make way for a grander scheme. You were collateral
damage,” he says to Mrs. Eastby. The latter replies, “So was your own [unborn]
child!”
Appendix: The subplot in Crimes
regarding Cliff’s sister
One little feature of Crimes and Misdemeanors that would fit
the details I held off on in Part 2, could fit here. There is a start of a
subplot that might strike some as strange, as it seems to go afield of the rest
of the movie, and isn’t followed up terribly much. Woody’s character Cliff has
a sister (played by Caroline Aaron), who
is the mother of the teenager (played by Jenny Nichols) whom Cliff takes to old
movies, as part of an education he’d promised the girl’s deceased dad he would
give her. We see their outings more
than Cliff’s dealings with his sister.
But in one relatively early
scene, Cliff speaks with his sister, and teary-eyed, she tells of a horror she
experienced one recent night, in her post-widowhood dating life. She had met a
guy, and they had a good time at a dance club, and then when he accompanied her
home, there was a weird sexually related experience. Almost too awed at the
experience to reveal it, she tells Cliff: the man tied her up to the bed, and
got on top of her and relieved himself on her (the messier way). Cliff is,
suitably, appalled and disgusted. He remonstrates with her a bit….
Well, this dating subplot—which
seems to have echoes with Looking for Mr.
Goodbar—isn’t followed up much. But there is a tiny glimmer of how Allen
might have built on this, for comic purposes: near the film’s end, the sister
is talking to another woman at the big wedding party, and the other woman tells
her she has a man in mind for the sister: he’s in jail for insider trading, but
is due to come out in two years. Sounds like a comically grotesque advance on
the relieving-self man? Well, what could top that? If she then dated a “Vice
President and Associate Creative Director” at some medical promo…well, never
mind. After someone like that, she
may want to go back to the relieving-self man.
