Match Point
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| Match Point | |
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| Directed by | Woody Allen |
| Produced by | Letty Aronson, Lucy Darwin, Stephen Tenenbaum, Gareth Wiley |
| Written by | Woody Allen |
| Starring | Jonathan Rhys-Meyers Scarlett Johansson Matthew Goode Emily Mortimer |
| Cinematography | Remi Adefarasin |
| Editing by | Alisa Lepselter |
| Distributed by | - USA - DreamWorks - UK/Australia - Icon Productions (theatrical) Warner Home Video (DVD) - Germany - Prokino Filmverleih (theatrical) Paramount Home Entertainment (DVD) |
| Release date(s) | 12 May 2005 (Cannes) |
| Running time | 124 min. |
| Language | English |
| IMDb profile | |
Match Point is an Academy Award-nominated 2005 film written and directed by Woody Allen and starring Jonathan Rhys-Meyers, Scarlett Johansson, Emily Mortimer, and Matthew Goode. Rhys-Meyers plays Chris Wilton, a tennis pro seeking a new direction for his life, who seems to find it all (friendship, a new career, love) when he meets the members of a wealthy British family. Mortimer and Goode play siblings in the family, and Johansson plays a struggling actress who is engaged to Goode's character.
The film is the first of Allen's films to be shot in England, and his first film since Love and Death to be entirely shot outside of the United States.
The film enjoyed financial and critical success and some critics even considered it a comeback for Allen after a series of flops like Hollywood Ending and Anything Else. Allen was nominated for an Oscar for best original screenplay, his first Oscar nomination since his 1997 film Deconstructing Harry. The film was also nominated for four Golden Globe Awards for the film, Allen's writing and directing, and Johansson's performance. Allen's Golden Globe nominations were his first since his 1986 movie Hannah and Her Sisters.
The story is a fable about the role that luck plays in determining everyone's destiny. As protagonist Chris Wilton notes in an opening voice-over:
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.
This is accompanied by a shot of a tennis ball repeatedly crossing the net on a tennis court until it finally hits the top of the net and bounces vertically upwards. The image of the ball in the air is kept in a freeze frame shot and the side of the court that the ball will land in remains unclear.
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[edit] Inspiration/Adaptation
Structural and thematic similarities exist between the movie and two novels, Dreiser's An American Tragedy and Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment. The movie also bears notable similarities in plot and theme to a previous movie of Allen's, Crimes and Misdemeanors. Perhaps the most influence stems from the 1964 Truffaut film The Soft Skin, in which a married man also has an affair that ends up in shotgun related murder.
[edit] Plot
After realizing that he does not have what it takes to become a successful professional tennis player, Chris Wilton (Jonathan Rhys-Meyers) takes a job as a tennis coach at Queen's Tennis Club. He befriends Tom (Matthew Goode), a rich young playboy, and he begins a somewhat passionless relationship with Tom's sister, Chloe (Emily Mortimer), whom he describes as "sweet." They are both members of the wealthy Hewett family, headed by father Alec (played by Brian Cox) and mother Eleanor (Penelope Wilton).
Wilton is as immediately drawn to Tom's fiancée, actress Nola Rice (Scarlett Johansson), as she is to him. The two act on this mutual attraction, though Nola later tells him nothing can come of it.
Some time later, Chris has married Chloe, with a promising career as a businessman in her father's firm. After discovering that Tom and Nola have broken up, he attempts to locate her and finally bumps into her at Tate Modern. He begins an affair with her; one that soon leads to Nola's news that she is pregnant. This accidental pregnancy is in stark contrast with the situation between Chloe and Chris, where Chloe cannot get pregnant despite all attempts to conceive a child. While Chris' passion for Nola remains strong, his whole life is so dependent upon the wealthy family that has taken him under their wing, that for a while he tries to have it all – a situation that Nola is increasingly unable to tolerate. Nola demands that he talk to Chloe about the situation and tells Chris that if he doesn't talk to Chloe, she will.
Chris begins to ensnare himself in the web of lies he is spinning. As a series of events threaten to reveal the affair, Chris feels cornered into a desperate situation. After discussing the matter with a trusted friend and former tennis partner, he decides that he wishes to maintain his comfortable life with Chloe, even though, for that purpose, he feels compelled to kill Nola.
At this point, a film that was mostly a drama about Chris and his relationships with and dependencies on the Hewett family becomes a thriller.
His plan is to make Nola's death look like a drug-related crime – which leads him to also target Nola's neighbor (played by Margaret Tyzack). Surreptitiously, he takes a hunting gun from his father-in-law's household. He leaves work, pretending to be going out to play tennis, but actually taking the disassembled hunting gun in a large sports bag. After gaining entry to the elderly landlady's apartment, he assembles the hunting gun while she is in another room, kills her in cold blood, and takes her medication and jewelry—among other possessions—putting them all in his bag. Then, he waits for Nola to arrive from work and kills her on the landing just outside her apartment – making it appear that she has disturbed the murderer's getaway.
As planned, he strengthens his alibi by meeting his wife at the theater to attend an Andrew Lloyd Webber musical (The Woman in White) right after the murders.
Wilton deposits his bag with the disassembled hunting gun and the stolen goods at the cloakroom of the theater where he joins his wife. After the musical, he brings the bag home. Later, when they visit his in-laws, he returns the hunting gun. He stuffs the stolen goods into his pockets and rejoins the family gathering. Later, he hurls the stolen goods into the Thames. The last item he throws, though — a gold ring — falls first against the railing, and then onto the embankment, rather than into the river as intended. The movie shows this dramatically as an analogy of the tennis ball hitting the top of the net at the very beginning.
As Wilton had hoped, the police (Steve Pemberton, Ewen Bremner, James Nesbitt) take it as primarily a drug murder of the neighbor, with the additional murder of Nola the result of her happening to pass by. During and after the crimes several risky situations occur, which could have revealed Chris' involvement. However, each time Chris gets lucky.
Nola's diary repeatedly references Chris' affair with her – which makes him an obvious suspect, so the police ask him to come to the station for questioning. Unaware of the diary, he first lies that he has not seen Nola much lately, but he is able to talk his way out of any initial suspicions by quickly admitting to the affair and begging them to keep his wife (and her family) out of it. His story is plausible enough for them to give him the benefit of the doubt. Although one police officer's theory corresponds to what actually happened, his colleague discards it as too unlikely.
The gold ring that Chris left on the embankment, with an engraving tying it to his crime, is fortuitously discovered by a drug addict who has it in his possession when he is found dead in the same neighborhood, making the ring the piece of evidence that saves Chris, rather than condemning him, as the audience was led to believe earlier.
[edit] Soundtrack
The film has an unusual soundtrack consisting almost entirely of pre-World War I 78 rpm recordings of opera arias sung by Italian tenor Enrico Caruso.
Opera connoisseurs have noted that the arias and opera extracts make an ironic commentary on the actions of the characters and sometimes foreshadow developments in the movie's narrative. The Caruso arias are intercut with extracts from contemporary performances which the characters attend over the course of the film. There are scenes at the Royal Opera House and elsewhere performed by opera singers, accompanied by a piano and not, as is usual, by an orchestra.
Arias and extracts include work by Verdi (in particular Otello and Rigoletto), Donizetti's L'elisir d'amore, Bizet's Les pêcheurs de perles, Carlos Gomes' Salvatore Rosa and Gioachino Rossini's Guillaume Tell.
A portion of Andrew Lloyd Webber's The Woman in White was used while Emily Mortimer was waiting for Jonathan Rhys-Meyrs at Palace Theatre.
[edit] Cast
- Scarlett Johansson as Nola Rice
- Jonathan Rhys-Meyers as Chris Wilton
- Emily Mortimer as Chloe Hewett Wilton
- Matthew Goode as Tom Hewett
- Brian Cox as Alec Hewett
- Penelope Wilton as Eleanor Hewett
[edit] Critical response
Match Point received generally strong reviews, with a 79% fresh rating at Rotten Tomatoes [1].
Film critic Roger Ebert awarded Match Point with a four star rating. Declaring it as one of Allen's five greatest films.
[edit] Box office
Match Point broke a long streak of box office flops for Allen, with a worldwide gross of $78,265,575 including $23,151,529 up to March 23, 2006 when the film's domestic run ended according to Box Office Mojo. [1]
[edit] Trivia
- The film's backdrop includes well-known London locations such as Tate Modern, Norman Foster's "Gherkin", Richard Rogers' Lloyds building, the Royal Opera House, the Palace of Westminster, Blackfriars Bridge and Cambridge Circus.
- The film's plot mirrors the novel An American Tragedy and the film A Place in the Sun, which also involve a poor man who, through the possibility of marriage to a wealthy woman, resorts to murdering a poor pregnant girlfriend in order to preserve his chances at a new life of wealth and privilege. Also, in Allen's film Crimes and Misdemeanors, Martin Landau plays a philandering husband who has his mistress killed when she threatens to expose the affair to his wife.
- Known for not being content with his work, Allen has claimed that Match Point is "arguably maybe the best film that I've made. This is strictly accidental, it just happened to come out right. You know, I try to make them all good, but some come out and some don't. With this one everything seemed to come out right. The actors fell in, the photography fell in and the story clicked. I caught a lot of breaks."[2]
[edit] References
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