|
MATCH
POINT
Handsome, bright-but-poor dude
wants to get ahead, takes a job where
he meets rich people, dates his boss's
daughter who falls in love with him, at
the same time screwing a dumb, pretty
fellow worker whom he makes pregnant;
when she demands that he do the right
thing, he murders her. Sound familiar?
It's the basic story of Theodore Dreiser's
1925 novel An American Tragedy.
Dreiser
has been lucky in directors who filmed
An American Tragedy: Josef
von Sternberg in 1931, with Phillips Holmes,
Sylvia Sidney, and Frances Dee; and, arguably
less fortunate, in 1951, when George Stevens
directed it as A Place in the
Sun, with Montgomery Clift,
Elizabeth Taylor, and Shelley Winters.
Now Woody Allen has adapted--without credit--An
American Tragedy as an Anglo tragicomedy
called Match Point, an
intriguing, witty, suspenseful delight,
fraught with Allen's trademark black humor.
In Woody's movie, Chris Wilton
(Jonathan Rhys Meyers), a young tennis
pro from a poor family, is upwardly not
just mobile but orbiting. He works at
a posh tennis club in London, where he
gives lessons to an equally hunky young
man, Tom Hewett (Matthew Goode). They
discover a shared passion for opera, and
Tom invites Chris to sit in the family
box at The Royal Opera for a performance
of La Traviata. At
the opera, Tom introduces Chris to his
industrialist father (Brian Cox) and his
attractive, tennis-playing sister Chloe
(Emily Mortimer). Like Tom, his father
and sister take up Chris: Chloe plays
tennis with him, and her father offers
him a job in his sprawling firm. Match
works. Chris and Chloe get married. She
is desperate to have at least three babies.
Nothing happens, except that Chris and
his brother-in-law Tom's gorgeous American
fiancée Nola (Scarlett Johansson) start
a passionate affair that continues during
Tom's marriage to Chloe. Despite much
medical consultation, Chris cannot impregnate
his wife but does knock up Nola, who demands
he, too, do the right thing: leave his
wife and marry her.
What's a guy to do when his luck runs
out? Production notes for Match Point
say, "A clue to Chris's true
character might be found in his well-worn
copy of Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment."
But Dostoyevsky is Allen's
McGuffin. Chris is no Raskolnikov, so
deeply and desperately in debt to his
landlady that he murders her with an ax
and then, when her sister unexpectedly
returns, murders her, too. Just as Allen
develops the basic plot of An American
Tragedy for Match Point ,
Chris develops Raskolnikov's dumb and
self-destructive alibi for a perfect crime.
But there is an amusing parallel with
Dostoyevsky in Chris's meeting with two
detectives who briefly consider, then
totally reject, the notion that Chris
is the killer.
Suspense continues building to the end,
when Chris seems to have gone too far.
But, as he says, nothing is more important
than luck, and Chris is a lucky guy. So
is Woody Allen, who has made a movie with
a tricky, plausible plot and attractive,
talented actors, his best since Mighty
Aphrodite. Ironically, he had to
film in Britain, after U.S. financing
dried up.
What fails is Allen's choice of music.
After the early, shared interest in opera,
certain arias and a duet are interjected
over and over: from Pearl Fishers
(Bizet); Otello (Verdi);
and Elixir of Love (Donizetti,
all irrelevant to the action or the characters
onscreen. If you don't know the music,
it's a bore, and if you do, it's an irritating
affectation. Except for this, Match
Point is just what the expression
means: the point that determines who wins
the match. Woody does, and so do we. It's
Woody's 70th birthday present to all of
us.
John L. Hochmann
|
