Match Point (Woody Allen, 2005)

[Lino]

The trailers are finally up:

http://www.dreamworks.com/matchpoint/

If you've noticed, this one is meant to make american audiences think that Allen is now making hot and trendy movies...

Whereas this french trailer below is for those european fan-based audiences that still like to think that noone makes better Bergman pastiches than Woody:

http://fr.movies.yahoo.com/promo/matchp ... ailer.html

The power of advertising indeed.

[jorencain]

Wow, that US trailer is ridiculous. How could someone allow that music to be in there?

I can't wait to see this. I've heard nothing but positive things, and I know that Woody is pleased with Scarlett Johansson, since they're filming a comedy together now (also in England).

[justeleblanc]

The American trailer I guess is going for the CLOSER crowd...

Finally a Woody Allen movie that's worth seeing and talking about again!

[Andre Jurieu]

I can't wait to see this. I've heard nothing but positive things...

A few critics (I believe Glenn Kenny and Mark Peranson for sure) have said the hype from Cannes is unwarranted, and that the film features another instance of Allen turning his female characters into caricature. They've noted it's his most watchable film in a long time, but it still has his troubling trademarks.

The American trailer I guess is going for the CLOSER crowd...

Yup.

[godardslave]

hey, I would be happy to emote unconvincingly through a Dostoyevskian plot with Scarlett Johansson anytime.

[lord_clyde]

In Roger Ebert's great movie article about Crimes and Misdemeanors he mentions the "other" great Woody Allen movies include Annie Hall and the upcoming Match Point, and while his thumbs often point in the wrong direction (imo) I have found him to be pretty accurate in his great movie selections. So yeah, I'm psyched.

[Dylan]

Very cool Spanish poster:



Anybody know if the American poster has made it online yet?

And yes, the trailer makes it look too modern and pretty misleading, especially since it doesn't even mention Tennis (and who would've thought that modern slow-techno dance and Hans Zimmer-like underscore would ever show up in a Woody Allen trailer? As far as I know the film uses mainly opera pieces), but we know by now that most films are advertised to get younger audiences into theaters, and something tells me that this (and word of mouth) will lure just about anybody in the theaters, and it's very possible that this will be Allen's most widely seen film since "Hannah and Her Sisters." Anyway, this is my most anticipated film of the year, and I can't wait to see it. It definitely looks like it can successfully be grouped in with his serious films, like "Interiors."

Dylan

[Dylan]

New poster:



I like it, Jonathan Rhys-Meyers looks cool and I love the shadow. I'm getting very excited to see Woody's latest drama, and I can't wait for a more concrete release date.

Dylan

[Fletch F. Fletch]

Andrew Sarris loved it: http://www.nyobserver.com/culture_sarrismovies.asp

[Dylan]

Official site now open:

http://www.matchpoint.dreamworks.com

Strangely, when I click on "Enter Site" it doesn't do anything, though it might be my internet. I like the design though, which is the final art for the US poster.

Dylan

[Barmy]

I saw it tonight at Lincoln Center, preceded by an interview with WA.

This is a great film. A VERY negative pov on "human nature".

[devlinnn]

I saw it tonight at Lincoln Center, preceded by an interview with WA.

This is a great film. A VERY negative pov on "human nature".

Any chance of expanding on what WA had to say for us sadsacks?

[Barmy]

The WA interview was conducted by Wendy Keys, who is one of the most useless interviewers on Planet Earth. The substance of what he said was, for the most part, nothing that we don't already know, but it was fun just to see him speak. He did a number of riffs on the hopelessness and uselessness of human existence, which, I know, he does all the time, but again the delivery in a live setting was a lot of fun.

One interesting thing he said was that he does not audition actors. He said that he normally meets with them for just a minute or so ("don't bother sitting down!") when asking them to work on a film project. No doubt a bit of an exaggeration.

He said that he rarely praises his own films, but that he felt that "Match Point" was a particularly strong piece. He repeatedly described Jonathan Rhys-Meyers as "hot". WA also was attracted to Jonathan because WA felt that he was very good at expressing human suffering.

During filming of MP he found that Scarlett Johansson had a great sense of humor and good comic timing--skills that of course are not in evidence in MP. So he wrote his next film, "Scoop", to utilize those talents. He described the film as "trivial". WA appears in "Scoop" as a seedy magician. Scarlett plays a college newspaper reporter.

[jorencain]

I'm extremely jealous. Wish I could have been there.

One interesting thing he said was that he does not audition actors. He said that he normally meets with them for just a minute or so ("don't bother sitting down") when asking them to work on a film project. No doubt a bit of an exaggeration.

I don't think that this is much of an exaggeration. My sister was just telling me last week that Woody Allen is a total asshole, according to Johnny Galecki ("David" from "Roseanne"), whom she somehow knows. He was super pissed because Woody apparently invited him to come out to NY for an "audition". After a few seconds of being in the same room together, Woody told him, "Sorry, you're not right for the part. Thanks anyway." And that was it. So, asshole or not, that does seem to be how he auditions people.

[Barmy]

That's a funny story. Although I'm not sure JOHNNY GALECKI is entitled to get up on a high horse regarding his treatment by Woody Allen. Was Woody supposed to hang around with Johnny-boy even after he decided not to use him, out of consideration for his FEELINGS?

[Carson Dyle]

Thought I'd weigh in on the topic of WA's auditoning of actors. I went to a Match Point screening and Q&A this afternoon. The Woodman said that he hates auditioning actors because he feels so bad for them. So rather than make them suffer through a reading with him, he prefers to watch them on tape and then set up a brief meeting to confirm that they have the qualities he saw in whatever piece of film it was he screened. For Jonathan Rhys-Meyers, he watched Bend it Like Bekham. A brief meeting confirmed that Rhys-Meyers had the qualities WA was looking for, so Rhys-Meyers got the job. I'm surprised that someone like Johnny Galeki -- or at the very least his agent -- would be unaware that this is Mr. Allen's process. As for Woody's being an "asshole," if I were an actor, I'd rather know right away I didn't get the part.

I thought the film was very good. I had no idea what the premise was, so maybe that's why I didn't find the first part boring. And as for the ending, it was completely in keeping with what preceded it. The very first speech and image in the film tell you exactly what point WA is trying to make. I'm not saying the point is overwhelmingly profound, just that it didn't come from left field, as one of the earlier posters suggested.

[tavernier]

A.O. Scott's review in the NY Times:

December 28, 2005
MOVIE REVIEW | 'MATCH POINT'
London Calling, With Luck, Lust and Ambition
By A. O. SCOTT

Because Woody Allen's early films are about as funny as any ever made, it is often assumed that his temperament is essentially comic, which leads to all manner of disappointment and misunderstanding. Now and then, Mr. Allen tries to clear up the confusion, insisting, sometimes elegantly and sometimes a little too baldly, that his view of the world is essentially nihilistic. He has announced, in movie after movie, an absolute lack of faith in any ordering moral principle in the universe - and still, people think he's joking.

In "Match Point," his most satisfying film in more than a decade, the director once again brings the bad news, delivering it with a light, sure touch. This is a Champagne cocktail laced with strychnine. You would have to go back to the heady, amoral heyday of Ernst Lubitsch or Billy Wilder to find cynicism so deftly turned into superior entertainment. At the very beginning, Mr. Allen's hero, a young tennis player recently retired from the professional tour, explains that the role of luck in human affairs is often underestimated. Later, the harsh implications of this idea will be evident, but at first it seems as whimsical as what Fred Astaire said in "The Gay Divorcée": that "chance is the fool's name for fate."

Mr. Allen's accomplishment here is to fool his audience, or at least to misdirect us, with a tale whose gilded surface disguises the darkness beneath. His guile - another name for it is art - keeps the story moving with the fleet momentum of a well-made play. Comparisons to "Crimes and Misdemeanors" are inevitable, since the themes and some elements of plot are similar, but the philosophical baggage in "Match Point" is more tightly and discreetly packed. There are few occasions for speech-making, and none of the desperate, self-conscious one-liners that have become, in Mr. Allen's recent movies, more tics than shtick. Nor is there an obvious surrogate for the director among the youthful, mostly British and altogether splendid cast. If you walked in after the opening titles, it might take you a while to guess who made this picture.

After a while you would, of course. The usual literary signposts are in place: surely no other screenwriter could write a line like "darling, have you seen my copy of Strindberg?" or send his protagonist to bed with a paperback Dostoyevsky. But while a whiff of Russian fatalism lingers in the air - and more than a whiff of Strindbergian misogyny - these don't seem to be the most salient influences. The film's setting is modified Henry James (wealthy London, with a few social and cultural outsiders buzzing around the hives of privilege); the conceit owes something to Patricia Highsmith's Ripley books; and the narrative engine is pure Theodore Dreiser - hunger, lust, ambition, greed.

Not that the tennis player, Chris Wilton (Jonathan Rhys-Meyers), seems at first to be consumed by such appetites. An Irishman of modest background, he takes a job at an exclusive London club, helping its rich members polish their ground strokes. He seems both easygoing and slightly ill at ease, ingratiating and diffident. Before long, he befriends Tom Hewett (Matthew Goode), the amiable, unserious heir to a business fortune, who invites Chris to the family box at the opera. From there, it is a short trip to an affair with Tom's sister, Chloe (Emily Mortimer), a job in the family firm and the intermittently awkward but materially rewarding position of son-in-law to parents played by Brian Cox and Penelope Wilton.

When "Match Point" was shown in Cannes last spring, some British critics objected that its depiction of London was inaccurate, a demurral that New Yorkers, accustomed to visiting Mr. Allen's fantasy Manhattan, could only greet with weary shrugs and sighs. Uprooting a script originally set in the Hamptons and repotting it in British soil has refreshed and sharpened the story, which depends not on insight into a particular social situation, but rather on a general theory of human behavior. London is Manhattan seen through a glass, brightly: Tate Modern stands in for the Museum of Modern Art; Covent Garden takes the place of Lincoln Center. As for the breathtaking South Bank loft into which Chris and Chloe move, it will satisfy the lust for high-end real estate that has kept the diehards in their seats during Mr. Allen's long creative malaise.

In this case, though, what happens in the well-appointed rooms and fashionable restaurants is more interesting than the architecture or the décor. Mr. Rhys-Meyers has an unusual ability to keep the audience guessing, to draw us into sympathetic concord even as we're trying to figure him out. Is he a cipher or a sociopath? A careful social climber or a reckless rake? The first clue that he may be something other than a mild, well-mannered sidekick comes when Chris meets Tom's fiancée, an American actress named Nola Rice (Scarlett Johansson), in a scene that raises the movie's temperature from a polite simmer to a full sexual boil. (The scene also quietly acknowledges a debt to "A Place in the Sun," George Stevens's adaptation of Dreiser's "American Tragedy." The parallels don't stop there. Mr. Rhys-Meyers's hollow-cheeked watchfulness recalls Montgomery Clift. Which makes Ms. Johansson either the next Elizabeth Taylor or the new Shelley Winters. Hmm).

What passes between Chris and Nola is not only desire, but also recognition, which makes their connection especially volatile. As their affair advances, Ms. Johansson and Mr. Rhys-Meyers manage some of the best acting seen in a Woody Allen movie in a long time, escaping the archness and emotional disconnection that his writing often imposes. It is possible to identify with both of them - and to feel an empathetic twinge as they are ensnared in the consequences of their own heedlessness - without entirely liking either one.

But it is the film's brisk, chilly precision that makes it so bracingly pleasurable. The gloom of random, meaningless existence has rarely been so much fun, and Mr. Allen's bite has never been so sharp, or so deep. A movie this good is no laughing matter.

[denti alligator]

Matt, where are your reactions to this which you posted a couple weeks ago?

[montgomery]

It amazes me that people say this is a new direction for Woody Allen. They're saying this about the man who did Annie Hall after Love and Death, Interiors after Annie Hall, and evolved with each film thereafter (with the occasional misstep, and a rut starting in the 90s). The fact that the majority of the reviews fail to mention the similarities with "Crimes and Misdemeanors" proves, I think, that most reviewers are not Woody Allen fans.
"Similarities" is too weak a word. If Scorsese made a movie today in London about a war veteran who lives alone and befriends a child prostitute and goes on a killing rampage, and reviewers failed to mention a similarity to Taxi Driver, but instead said that he "revisits some themes" of his past work, I think those reviewers would pretty much be discredited. It's funny, because at the end of "Crimes and Misdemeanours," Landau's character, Judah Rosenthal, tells Woody Allen's character about a great idea for a film. The film he's describing, of course, is the one we've been watching, but in fact, it more accurately describes "Match Point," since the latter shows what the former only tells us in that monologue (you could actually pitch "Match Point" to a studio using Rosenthal's monologue word for word--not so about "Crimes."). Of course, "Crimes" was a much more complex, profound film (perhaps Allen's best), so Match Point looks all the more flawed. Although the title of "Crimes" is a sly reference to Dostoevsky, Allen would never have been stupid enough to show Rosenthal reading "Crime and Punishment" as Chris does in Match Point. In Match Point, Allen tries to make "luck" the theme of the movie, but it actually has very little to do with luck (and has there been a Woody Allen in the past 10 years where a character hasn't said something like "Life is luck," or "Love is just luck" or some variation on that?)
Although Match Point is exactly like an Allen picture, specifically one of his recent, lesser films, I think audiences must be responding to the lack of Allen's presence, which includes New York and, more importantly and apparently revolting to most audiences, jewishness. I'm not trying to sound paranoid, but I think there's some truth to it. If he had made this film in NY, even with the same actors, I think it would be dismissed by the critics and public like all his films lately. The change to London gives the film a modern sheen, and totally removes it from Allen's milieu, which audiences apparently find off-putting.
The lead actors in this film are terrible. Rhys-Meyers drags this film down with his one-dimensional performance. Although his character is supposed to have charisma enough to charm his way, without any apparent effort, into the British upper-class (including a suspicious mother who hates Johannsen's character), he is completely unlikeable in every scene in the movie. He scowls at everyone, and acts haughty and uncomfortable all the time. It's astounding that his wife is so chipper and confident, since there's never a moment in the film where he even makes an attempt to show her some affection. Landau was so much more effective in the same role, so conflicted, and it's shocking when his character murders and gets away with it morally. But Rhys-Meyers looks like a sociopath from the very beginning, and it's almost hilariously phony when he cries after commiting the murders. His uncanny resemblance to Malcolm McDowell made me think of another, more interesting, film about luck, "O Lucky Man!" Although McDowell's performance in that film is a little more comic than might be appropriate here, his incredible charm, innocence and eagerness would have been perfect here. No Luck...
And Scarlet Johannsen! Christ! I always thought she was bad, but I was cringing from embarrassment every time she spoke. Watching her here, I was reminded of these horrifying Maury Povich episodes called "My 10 Year Old Daughter is a Sex Addict," where these little awkward girls comes out in skimpy clothing and and scream "I know y'all want me." Johannsen is attractive, but she's so convinced that she's Bridget Bardot or something, some goddess, always licking her lips, no subtlety whatsoever, she looks like a little girl who's not as precocious as she thinks she is. I found it disturbing; laughable at best. The chemistry between them was non-existant, and the fight scenes were hilarious.
All that said, it was his best film since "Sweet and Lowdown."

[denti alligator]

All that said, it was his best film since "Sweet and Lowdown."

Agreed.

Wow, great review montgomery! I have to agree with just about everything you wrote, though it's been ages since I saw Crimes and Misdemeanors, so the connection was not as immediate as it maybe should have been. I was so put off by Scarlett J's acting--I couldn't believe Allen would let her deliver her lines like that. My dad called it "hokey." It was.

The movie's first 2/3 was really uninteresting. It picked up after that in terms of tension. But you knew what was coming, so it wasn't that tense. I did like the ring bit near the end and the reversal of the meaning of "luck" that comes with that shot. That was brilliant. Everything else was pretty bad. Oh well. I still had a little fun.

[marty]

I respect people's reservations about Match Point but I saw this film at last year's Cannes Film Festival where it screened out of competition and, having no idea what the film was about except that it was shot in London, I loved it and it's Woody's best picture in 16 years. I thought Jonathan Rhys-Meyers was terrific despite my reservations about his performance in the film's first few scenes which appeared forced and unconvincing but as the film progressed his character (and performance) grew on me. Same for Scarlett - I can still hear her character's voice in my head. For my money, the best and most enjoyable performance in the film was from Emily Mortimer. She should be contending for Best Supporting Actress awards but has yet failed to be recognised. Brian Cox also gave a devilishly good performance.

I can understand the criticism the film has received but I can't lie and say I didn't enjoy it, despite its flaws (really, which film doesn't have any flaws if we get to details??). If it's a guilty pleasure for liking the film because I can see its flaws, then it's my guilty pleasure. I am dying to see it again when it gets released here in early March. I would much rather watch Match Point again than the Dardenne Brothers' The Child which ended up winning the Palme D'or.

[leo goldsmith]

Brian Cox also gave a devilishly good performance.

When? He was barely in the film.

I more or less agree with all of the criticisms of the film and yet still, like many, enjoyed the film in places. Maybe I wouldn't if it weren't a Woody Allen film -- I'm not sure.

Actually, one thing that I might like to rewatch it for is the performances, which I initially disliked for their woodenness, but am now thinking that they were perhaps deliberately so. JRM in particular is very stilted, but he "turns on" brilliantly in a couple of scenes. The final encounter with the police is beautifully awkward, I think -- it's a very complicated scene that I think he handles in a very clever, understated way.

Johannsen, on the other hand, ain't much of an emoter, but her presence onscreen (even though she's not there much either) is really what drives the film.

[marty]

When? He was barely in the film.

Brian Cox may not have appeared much in the film but he delivered some great funny lines in typical posh English accent. It was memorable for me anyway.

Maybe I wouldn't if it weren't a Woody Allen film -- I'm not sure.

I think there are quite a few who would be thinking the same.

Actually, one thing that I might like to rewatch it for is the performances, which I initially disliked for their woodenness, but am now thinking that they were perhaps deliberately so.

Definitely thinking the same as well. For example, when Rhys-Meyers and Johansson first meet, their banter is very deliberate and theatrical almost in the way they are delivered. This was distracting for the first few scenes but then the film gradually pulled me into its world. This may be an Americanised or stylised view of the Englsih as many in the UK have criticised the film for its view of English people but it works in terms of the film's style and context, I think anyway. I didn't care whether it was realistic of how Englishmen and womena behave, speak and live their lives today as the film seemed stylised in the way that the English were seen in films 20-30 years ago. The scene in the countryside where Rhys-Meyers and Johansson first kiss is so stylised for cinematic effect that we have seen it a million times before in movies (ie The Notebook) but it worked within the highly stylised nature of the film and its almost, dare-I-say it for fear of being criticised by the purists in this forum, homage to classic British cinema and American film noir.

[bunuelian]

I saw this last night and loved it. I think many of the reviews in this thread are focusing way too much on the acting and casting and not enough on some of the other complex elements that give the film its depth. No, the "everything is meaningless" portion isn't all that deep by itself, but how it gets there is quite masterful. And is the "everything is meaningless' conclusion really the film's thesis?

Plenty of things arise in the film to make it worth seeing again. I'd like to see it again just to focus on the Buddhist elements, which arise several times in succession: the artwork appearing in Johansen's apartment, at first only in the background as a small photo, then filling more of the screen as a poster on her wall, and culminating in Rhys-Meyers' confession: "I'm suffering." Indeed.

Getting obsessed with critiquing the acting is, in this film and (frankly) many of Allen's films, a mistake. But then again, I generally don't give a damn about acting. I found myself focusing on things other than the actors for long portions of the film.

[Dylan]

“Match Pointâ€