Match Point (2005)

Hailed as the best Woody Allen film in a decade, Match Point is at heart a revised rendering of Theodore Dreiser ’s An American Tragedy, only here set in London. Allen hadn’t made a film oversea’s since Love and Death in 1975, in fact he has been almost exclusively a New York film maker for the past 30 years. Though many of his New York films are quite good (Annie Hall, Hannah and Her Sisters), Allen’s movies had been suffering since at least The Curse of the Jade Scorpion in 2001. But with Match Point, even though the subject matter is still vintage Woody (this film strongly evokes his earlier Crimes and Misdemeanors as an immoral morality play), everything about it seem’s reinvigorated. Reminiscent of the praise Alfred Hitchcock received in 1972 for his return to England film Frenzy, Match Point feels like the work of a young film maker with vision, not a calcified old one prone to self parody.

It is a story of a young Irish man (excellently and cooly played by Jonathan Rhys Meyers) who has already pulled himself up from poverty, if not into particular wealth, via the pro tennis circuit. But Chris is unsatisfied there and leaves professional touring to teach the sport at a posh London country club, spending his free time listing to opera and reading Dosteisky. His interests combine when he meets wealthy young Tom Hewett (Matthew Goode) at the club and is drawn into his wealthy family circle, before long he is dating (later marrying) Tom's sister Chloe (Emily Mortimer) and working for his father (Brian Cox). The cards have lined up nicely for Chris, he has been lucky, a persistent theme of the film, save for his inability to get over his attraction to the sensual young American Nola (a sensual young Scarlett Johansson). An affair ensues, it is complicated by pregnancy, and all that Chris has spent his life building is now in jeopardy. What will this ambitious, often private, emotionally vague young man do, or more interestingly what will Woody Allen chose to do with him and his story. As An American Tragedy has already been made into one of THE great movies, 1951's A Place in the Sun directed by George Stevens, that Allen's rendering can be so present and involving speaks to the strengths of the director, the actors, the source material, and the human drama of the unknowable depths of anothers soul, even when you think you know them so well. A refreshing something new from Mr. Allen, ironicly out of something old. 5 out of 5.