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Match Point
Directed by Woody Allen
With Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Alexander Armstrong, Paul Kaye (IV), Matthew Goode, Brian Cox, Penelope Wilton, Emily Mortimer, Janis Kelly, Alan Oke, Mark Gatiss, Scarlett Johansson, Philip Mansfield, Simon Kunz, Geoffrey Streatfield, Mary Hegarty, John Fortune, Rupert Penry-Jones, Patricia Whymark, Anthony O'Donnell, and Miranda Raison
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Woody Allen hasn't enjoyed this much positive buzz in years. Match Point opened this past December to rave reviews, and won for Allen a number of "Ten Best" awards, as well as an Oscar nomination for best screenplay. It's a comeback, because since 2000, Allen has suffered a string of complete flops (Small Time Crooks, Curse of the Jade Scorpion, Hollywood Ending) and semi-flops (Anything Else and Melinda, Melinda) that have nearly overshadowed his stellar career as a premier American film maker. Not entirely fairly-- Melinda, Melinda was slight but fun, and Anything Else counts for Allen as an interesting thematic break, the other films were, indeed, awful messes.

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Many critics viewed Match Point as an advance in Allen's career, just because it's not as conventionally a comedy as many of his other films. They also referenced Allen's 1989 Crimes and Misdemeanors, with it's Dostoevskian themes, as Match Point's antecedent, since this new film also deals with issues of guilt and social responsibility. And they are, for the most part, perfectly right, if a little obvious.

But to me, Match Point's particular referent is his 1983 masterpiece mockumentry Zelig. This may sound like a leap, but Allen's concerns in Zelig-- about a Jewish New Yorker in the 1930s, so afraid of who he is that he literally morphs into the people who are in physical proximity to him-- are similar here, even if he does borrow most of the plot from Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy.

Match Point tells the story of Chris Wilton (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) an Irish-born tennis instructor to London's well-to-do, who-- on his way up the social ladder-- begins making inroads with the incredibly wealthy Hewett family. After being Tom Hewett's (Matthew Goode) tennis coach and then friend, he begins dating Tom's younger sister Chloe (Emily Mortimer) and befriending their parents Alec (Brian Cox) and Eleanor (Penelope Wilton). They are all very nice, not-quite-so proper British-business aristocrats and everything would be perfect, except that Chris is not only desirous of an elevated social standing but of Tom's American fiancé, Nola Rice (Scarlett Johansson), a would-be actor with a directionless life that spells trouble for her and anyone who gets involved with it. Tom and Nola break up, Chris marries Chloe-- and driven partly by lust and partly by the boredom of marriage, Chris and Nola become lovers. Mistake. Actually, big mistake.

From here, Match Point looks more and more like An American Tragedy-- Nola becomes pregnant, Chris is trapped, and Chloe gets confused. Allen plays terrifically well with the possible scenarios-- there are references as well to Crime and Punishment, Hitchcock's Frenzy, and The Paradine Case, as well as Crimes and Misdemeanors. And while the suspense of the plot is sustained beautifully, the real heart of the film is embedded in the narrative of social exclusion and cultural mobility.

What makes Match Point work so well, is that Allen is completely sympathetic to the plight of Chris Wilton. As the social outsider, the "little guy" who just wants to get a break and be a player, Jonathan Rhys Meyers is perfect. Allen never treats him with anything less than respect, even when Chris acts against social propriety and his own interests. Chris is far better at faking visits to the Tate and admiring contemporary art with Chloe than he is at keeping his hands off of Nola and living a double life. We are completely sympathetic to him. He is never an anti-hero-- a concept whose use seems to have evaporated with the 1960s-- but nearly a hero trapped in an unfair world not of his making. The fact that the Hewetts are all basically decent people-- Allen never resorts to show them up as British twits-- makes the tragedy even grander. There's a hint of Patricia Highsmith here: Chris Wilton is a less psychopathic Tom Ripley-- but Allen is more concerned with tragedy of a social rather than psychological kind. Highsmith, at her best-- which was almost always-- was obsessed with how the human mind could go wrong. Allen here is more concerned with how society sets the stage for this.

In this way Match Point is resonant of Zelig. The major impetus in almost all of Allen's films is the place of the Jew in contemporary society. In Match Point, Tim Wilton-- although Irish-- is placed in this role. It's as easy to imagine Match Point set in the 1920s in New York with a Lower East Side immigrant who has only the slightest trace of his Yiddish accent, making his way into Park Avenue society. In Zelig, Leonard Zelig cannot help himself from assimilating-- indeed, his assimilation is neurotic and compulsive as he unconsciously transforms himself into the likeness of anyone near to him. And here Chris desperately and quite consciously attempts to remake himself. In Zelig, the tragedy is that its protagonist is always (until the end of the film) fleeing from who he is. In Match Point we see Chris Wilton's tragedy as everything he needs to give up to become the person he thinks he wants to be. Like all stories of passing-- in racial, sexual, gender, and economic contexts-- even stories with happy endings end sadly.

Author Profile:  Michael Bronski
	Michael Bronski is the author of Culture Clash: The Making of Gay Sensibility and The Pleasure Principle: Sex, Backlash, and the Struggle for Gay Freedom. He writes frequently on sex, books, movies, and culture, and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
	Email:	mabronski@aol.com