Jeffrey Wells comes out strongly in favor of Match Point. Is it possible that Woody Allen has found his footing again? This year alone, he released Melinda and Melinda and Match Point.
I'm feel I should be beating the drum more loudly for Woody Allen's Match Point because it's not just his best in a long time, but one of the best of the year.
It really is Allen's darkest and most precisely calibrated film since Crime and Misdemeanors ...clean, cruel and ironic as hell.
If there wasn't such a herd mentality in this town, if people weren't so political and equivocal, Match Point could actually be in the mix for Best Picture.
It's a slightly better film than Good Night, and Good Luck. It's not as much of a sad and broken-hearted thing as Brokeback Mountain, but it has as much confidence and self-awareness as Walk the Line. And it's five or ten times better than Memoirs of a Geisha.
Screw the herd mentality and the hell with political and equivocal. The more I think about Match Point, the better it seems. Woody is easily a Best Original Screenplay contender, and... well, at least that.
I said last May at the Cannes Film Festival that Match Point isn't quite as good as Woody's Crimes and Misdemeanors, but it deals the same kind of cards and has its footing in more or less the same philosophical realm.
And I've said this three or four times, but the finale kills.
Set in present-day England (mostly London, Match Point is about a tennis instructor named Chris Wilton (Jonathan Rhys-Meyers) who relationships his way into an upper-crust English family by way of one of his male students, a cheerful smoothie named Tom Hewett (Matthew Goode).
Chris is soon romancing and then marrying Tom's sister Chloe (Emily Mortimer), but almost-as-quickly getting involved with Tom's fiance, a struggling American actress named Nola Rice (Scarlett Johansson).
The story essentially turns on the matter of Nola becoming pregnant and insisting that Chris leave his wife for her, and how Chris deals with the pressure of this.
Rhys-Meyers handles his part skillfully and with exactly the right balance between terrible, gut-wrenching guilt and the suggestion of a sociopathic undercurrent. But it's Johansson, far and away, who gives the finest performance. She seems in possession of a fierce, almost Brando-esque naturalism here. She grabs Allen's dialogue by the shirt collar and slaps it around.
Match Point feels a bit pat from time to time. The talk feels a little too polite here and there, and certain aspects of the plot feel a bit forced. But that's Woody these days, and in this instance, in this realm, that's pretty damn good.
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