That was a great movie. Really well done.

[fflo]

SPOILERS! SPOILERS about Match Point here!

Okay, what makes it especially good is its ambiguity about what's the good luck & what's the bad. Not just, or even primarily, in that toggling way that was in the book I loved as a child, Fortunately, which followed the same format as my friend LTM's book (I think it was) with the title Good Thing, Bad Thing, which is some kinda famous ancient Eastern wisdom story format, too (the son who breaks his leg & is said to've been unlucky, "Perhaps" sez the dad, then the broken leg keeps him out of the draft, so he's thought lucky, "Perhaps" sez the dad, etc.). It's all in what seems like good luck being bad luck in a way that only our protagonist knows (in his private horror).

And that's about a fantasy/horror karmic sort of no winning when you thwart justice, as no seed of justice = meaninglessness.

It's a new take on Woody's long-running theme about living with philosophy in an existentialist state. You almost gotta wonder about his own big sin (that we know of) & guilt about getting away with it.

It's really late, and I'm ge-zonked, so it's no surprise I've bolloxed talking of it with this not-even-half-assed posting. But it was a good movie. Fer shurr.

Comments

[fflo.livejournal.com]

I like that whole not-what-one(-prob'bly-was)-expecting thing too. I dunno, though---that actor doesn't seem hot to me. Not in the least.

I left the movie with a decidedly NOT disturbed feeling. I think it's cuz, even though the film concludes that life is meaningless for Chris Wilton, since his good luck in getting away with it is (thus) actually bad luck (and I have no problem with scenes like the pivotal one in which his victims confront him in the night kitchen & that gem of a notion is given us---ghost characters not bothering me at all, that is), that meaninglessness is a result of his choice to transgress with extreme selfishness. So there's some sort of larger moral/karmic meaning to the very assertion of that (particular) cause of (his realization of) meaninglessness, constructed for us in his sweaty-browed (one of the most striking shots of his face, as I recall it), faux-throwaway wish for justice. And life may potentially be meaningful for us (a) if we choose to live by a code limiting selfishness to something a good bit short of murderousness & thus don't have to confront injustice in that particularly horrible first-person way he does, as a living embodiment of it; and/or (b) if we go to the movies and think about these things, and see how a movie has thought about them. I mean, it at least makes me feel good to walk out of a movie like that pondering what it's saying, and groovin' on how it went about saying it (which is really the thing that makes it a great film). (I'm of the school that it's not what is said but how it's said that not only makes art good art, but makes it art at all.)

I dug the opera running through the picture, too. Esp. the scratchy Caruso stuff. A very Woody way to provide a little of that pop-culture-throwback thing he does so well with music. His use of music in general is fab, don't you think? (Course, as I was just saying to dreampower yesterday, I loved Everyone Says I Love You, even, for its [widely decried] music.)

[fflo.livejournal.com]

I shall check it out!

Here's what Andrew Sarris said---pt. I

[fflo.livejournal.com]

Match Point: Woody Wins! With Witty, Anglophiliac Angst

Woody Allen's Match Point, from his own screenplay, was reportedly well received in Cannes earlier this year, especially (and not surprisingly) by the French critics. It was less well received by the British critics in London, where the movie was filmed. I have experienced mixed reactions from colleagues and acquaintances that have seen it either in Cannes or at local screenings here in New York, where it's scheduled to open near the end of the year. I liked it enormously---otherwise, I would not be jumping the gun to review it more than a month ahead of time.

In the impersonally narrated preface that begins the film, it is observed: "The man who said 'I'd rather be lucky than good' saw deeply into life. People are afraid to face how great a part of life is dependent on luck. It’s scary to think so much is out of one's control. There are moments in a match when the ball hits the top of the net and, for a split second, it can either go forward or fall back. With a little luck, it goes forward and you win … or maybe it doesn't and you lose."

Mr. Allen illustrates his thesis with a static shot of a net, across which a tennis ball is hit back and forth by two unseen players. Suddenly the ball bounces off the top of the net and is frame-frozen before it lands either forward or backward. Near the end of the film, this metaphor reappears in a newly urgent and intricately ironic context, affecting the fate---and, by extension, the luck---of the film’s protagonist. That was when I decided that Woody, warts and all, was back, and with a vengeance.

But don't expect the old serio-comic-romantic Woody of Annie Hall (1977) and Manhattan (1979), or the primitively antic Woody of Bananas (1971) and Sleeper (1973). Match Point isn't particularly funny, largely because it's almost entirely devoid of Woody’s patented brand of New York–style Jewishness, the source of much of his oy vey humor. Rather, he has invaded the home country of the WASP's whom he patronized in the past in his most humorlessly pretentious films. Yet Match Point is wittier and more coherent than anything he has done in ages; it is well made and well thought out to its very last shot. The point is that, as he turns 70---after a 40-year career in which he has directed 36 films, and acted in and/or wrote the screenplays for 10 more---Woody is near the top of his game.

If, in its climactic malignancy and immorality, Match Point resembles any previous Allen opus even remotely, it would have to be Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989), which I recall downgrading at the time for letting Woody's nebbishy main character off the hook by shifting the burden of guilt for an evil act to a pseudo-protagonist played by Martin Landau. If I much prefer Match Point to Crimes and Misdemeanors, it's because his latest protagonist, Chris Wilton (Jonathan Rhys-Meyers), a retired professional tennis player who never won the big matches and has now turned club pro at a posh London establishment, could be considered a self-loathing negative-fantasy replica of the director himself.

In the past, Woody the actor was presumed to be the alter ego of Woody the auteur, and much of the bite in his humor came from the moral superiority his quick-witted mouthpiece asserted over the questionable actions of other characters, and of the deplorable tendencies of society as a whole. As it happens, there is not the slightest flaunting of moral superiority by Mr. Wilton's upwardly mobile tennis pro. He seems to be always thoughtfully pondering his options as he virtually drifts into a highly advantageous marriage to Chloe Hewett (Emily Mortimer), the sister of Tom Hewett (Matthew Goode), a tennis client he has just met at the club.

[cont'd below]

what Sarris said---pt. II

[fflo.livejournal.com]

Match Point is not awash in ambience as Chris begins his rapid ascent to a world of riches and social prominence. It all looks much too easy, and one wonders at first if Woody is in the right medium for what plays, initially at least, like a stage-bound comedy of manners---until, that is, Tom Hewett introduces our hero to his explosively sensual fiancée, Nola Rice (Scarlett Johansson), an aspiring American actress. Chris is immediately entranced, and sets out to gain her favors even as he is in the process of courting and marrying Chloe.

Neither Nola nor Chloe is treated as the womanly ideal incarnated by Diane Keaton or Mia Farrow in Woody's more open-hearted eras. Nola is disqualified from such consideration by gradually being reduced to an increasingly petulant sexpot with little acting talent and less and less self-esteem. For her part, Chloe begins with such little self-esteem that she pursues Chris as if he were her last hope to get married, an impression that her father, Alec (Brian Cox), and mother, Eleanor (Penelope Wilton), reinforce by their almost embarrassing eagerness to embrace Chris as their son-in-law. By contrast, Eleanor is so acerbic to Nola that her son eventually breaks his engagement, compelling Nola to return home to Colorado.

Meanwhile, Chloe begins badgering Chris soon after their marriage to get her pregnant immediately. She becomes even more impatient after Tom marries a more socially acceptable partner than Nola and in short order provides a grandchild for his parents, now doting grandparents.

When Chris discovers that Nola has returned from America and opened a boutique in London, he sets out to resume their lustful liaisons, and succeeds. His strenuous double life, however, begins to crumble around him when Nola informs him that she is pregnant and demands that he leave Chloe. It is match-point time for Chris: If he leaves Chloe, it's goodbye to his cushy life as the boss' son-in-law. Nor has he shown himself to be a brilliant businessman who can successfully strike out on his own. When he suggests an abortion to Nola, she becomes even more of a pathetically comic figure when she reveals to him that she has had two abortions already and doesn't plan to have a third.

Desperate measures are called for, and they are soon undertaken, but with enough twists and turns to implicate us all in the outcome. The diabolical logic in Match Point reminds me of nothing so much as Charles Chaplin’s much-underestimated Marxist logic in Monsieur Verdoux (1947), though Woody is less a rabid Marxist than a resigned fatalist with respect to the ways of the world. And after his tabloid adventures and his against-all-odds professional survival, who is to say that he shouldn't be absolved of the charge of facile cynicism? And how does he always manage to recruit such talented performers at reduced rates? If that isn't magic, I don't know what is.