Match Point
Match Point is a 2005 psychological thriller film written and directed by Woody Allen, and starring Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Scarlett Johansson, Emily Mortimer, Matthew Goode, Brian Cox, and Penelope Wilton. In the film, Rhys Meyers' character, a former professional tennis player, marries into a wealthy family, but his social position is threatened by his affair with his brother-in-law's girlfriend, played by Scarlett Johansson. The film deals with themes of morality and greed, and explores the roles of lust, money, and luck in life, leading many to compare it to Allen's earlier film Crimes and Misdemeanors. It was produced and filmed in London after Allen had difficulty finding financial support for the film in New York. The agreement obliged him to make it there using a cast and crew mostly from the United Kingdom. Allen quickly re-wrote the script, which was originally set in New York, for an English setting.
Critics in the United States praised the film and its English setting and welcomed it as a return to form for Allen. In contrast, reviewers from the United Kingdom treated Match Point less favourably, finding fault with the locations and especially the British idiom in the dialogues. Allen was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay.
Plot
Recently retired tennis pro Chris Wilton is hired as an instructor at an upscale London club. He becomes friendly with wealthy club member, Tom Hewett. Tom's sister, Chloe, is smitten with Chris, and they begin dating. During a family gathering, Chris meets Tom's American fiancée Nola Rice, an aspiring actress. They are immediately attracted to each other.After Chloe persuades her father to give Chris an entry-level job at his company, he gradually blends into the family. While the clan gathers at the Wilton country house, Tom's mother, Eleanor, condescendingly questions Nola's struggling acting career, causing a dejected Nola to leave the house during a thunderstorm. Chris follows Nola and confesses his feelings for her. They kiss and have sex in a wheat field, but Nola considers the encounter a mistake while Chris wants an ongoing affair. Chris and Chloe marry, while Tom ends his relationship with Nola after falling in love with someone else.
Chloe is obsessed with becoming pregnant, though Chris acts ambivalent and tries to track down Nola. When he happens to run into her, they begin an affair. When Nola becomes pregnant, Chris panics. He tells her to get an abortion, but she wants them to raise the child together. Chris becomes distant from Chloe, who suspects he is having an affair, which Chris denies. Nola presses Chris to divorce Chloe. Though Chris finds Chloe boring, he is unwilling to give up his promising career and the affluent lifestyle their marriage affords him. Chris feels trapped and lies to both Chloe and Nola.
Tired of waiting, Nola angrily confronts Chris outside his office and threatens to tell Chloe everything. Desperate to cover it up, Chris later takes one of his father-in-law's hunting shotguns. He calls Nola saying he has good news and wants them to meet at her place. He gains entry into her neighbor Mrs. Eastby's flat. He stages a burglary by ransacking the rooms and stealing jewelry and prescription drugs, hides in the hallway, and fatally shoots Nola when she returns. He then goes to meet Chloe at the theatre. Scotland Yard concludes the crime was likely committed by a drug addict. The next day, when the murder appears in the news, Chris sneaks the shotgun back into the gun case, and he and Chloe announce to the family that she is pregnant.
Detective Banner contacts Chris to request an interview concerning the murder. Before meeting the detectives, Chris throws Mrs. Eastby's jewelry and medicines into the river. By chance, her wedding ring bounces off the railing and falls to the pavement. At the police station, Chris lies about his relationship with Nola, but Banner surprises him with her diary, in which Chris is extensively featured. He confesses his affair but denies any link to the murder. Chris appeals to the detectives to avoid involving him further to protect his marriage. They agree to be discreet.
Late one night, Nola and Mrs. Eastby appear as apparitions and warn Chris that his actions will have consequences. Nola berates him for his clumsy planning and execution, as if he wanted to be caught; Chris defends his crimes, though wrong, were committed for a "grander scheme", and he can suppress his guilt. The same night, Banner dreams that Chris committed the murders. The next day, however, Banner's partner Dowd discredits his theory by revealing a drug addict found murdered on the streets had Eastby's ring. The detectives consider the case closed. Months later, Chloe has a baby boy. Tom blesses his newborn nephew with luck rather than greatness.
Cast
Production
The script was originally set in The Hamptons, a wealthy enclave in New York, but was transferred to London when Allen found financing for the film there. The film was partly funded by BBC Films, which required that he make the film in the UK with largely local cast and crew. In an interview with The Observer, Allen explained that he was allowed "the same kind of creative liberal attitude that I'm used to", in London. He complained that the American studio system was not interested in making small films: "They only want these $100 million pictures that make $500m." The production budget was an estimated $15 million.A further change was required when Kate Winslet, who was supposed to play the part of Nola Rice, resigned a week before filming was scheduled to begin. Scarlett Johansson was offered the part, and accepted, but the character had to be re-written as an American. According to Allen, "It was not a problem... It took about an hour."
Filming took place in London in the summer of 2004 over a seven-week schedule. Some of the city's landmarks, such as Tate Modern, Norman Foster's "Gherkin" building at 30 St Mary Axe, Richard Rogers' Lloyd's building, the Royal Opera House, the Palace of Westminster, Blackfriars Bridge, and Cambridge Circus form a backdrop to the film. The tennis club scenes were filmed at the Queen's Club. One of the University of Westminster's Marylebone campus lecture theatres was also used. UK-based graffiti artist Banksy's Girl With Balloon appears briefly in the film. One of the Parliament View apartments at Lambeth Bridge was used for interiors of Chris and Chloe's apartment. The restaurant scene was shot at the Covent Garden Hotel.
Themes
The film's opening voiceover from Chris introduces its themes of chance and fate, which he characterises as simple luck, to him all-important. The sequence establishes the protagonist as an introvert, a man who mediates his experience of the world through deliberation, and positions the film's subjective perspective through his narrative eyes. Charalampos Goyios argued that this hero, as an opera lover, maintains a sense of distance from the outer world and that ramifications therein pale in comparison to the purity of interior experience.The film is a debate with Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, which Chris is seen reading early on, identifying him with the anti-hero Raskolnikov. That character is a brooding loner who kills two women to prove that he is a superior being, but is racked by guilt and is finally redeemed by confession of his crime, the love of a young woman forced into prostitution, and the discovery of God. Chris is a brooding loner who kills a poor girl who loves him because he considers his interests superior to those around him, knows little guilt, and avoids detection through luck. Allen signals his intentions with more superficial similarities: both are almost caught by a painter's unexpected appearance in the stairwell, and both sleuths play cat and mouse with the suspect. Allen argues, unlike Dostoevsky, that there is neither God, nor punishment, nor love to provide redemption. The theme of parody and reversal of Dostoevsky's motifs and subject matter has been visited by Allen before, in his film Love and Death. In Love and Death, the dialogue and scenarios parody Russian novels, particularly those by Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, such as The Brothers Karamazov, Crime and Punishment, The Gambler, The Idiot, and War and Peace. In Match Point, Allen moves the theme from parody to the more direct engagement of Dostoevsky's motifs and narratives.
Allen revisits some of the themes he had explored in Crimes and Misdemeanors, such as the existence of justice in the universe. Both films feature a murder of an unwanted mistress, and "offer a depressing view on fate, fidelity, and the nature of man". That film's protagonist, Judah Rosenthal, is an affluent member of the upper-middle class having an extramarital affair. After he tries to break the affair off, his mistress blackmails him and threatens to go to his wife. Soon, Rosenthal decides to murder his mistress but is racked with guilt over violating his moral code. Eventually, he learns to ignore his guilt and go on as though nothing has happened. Philip French compared the two films' plots and themes in The Observer, and characterised Match Point's as a "clever twist on the themes of chance and fate".
Money is an important motivator for the characters: both Chris and Nola come from modest backgrounds and wish to enter the Hewett family using their sex appeal. That family's secure position is demonstrated by their large country estate, and, early on in their relationships, both prospective spouses are supported by Mr. Hewett Wilton with a position on "one of his companies". Nola reports being "swept off her feet" by Hewett's attention and presents. Roger Ebert posed the film's underlying question as "To what degree are we prepared to set aside our moral qualms in order to indulge in greed and selfishness? Wilton is facing a choice between greed and lust, but his sweet wife, Chloe, herself has no qualms about having her father essentially 'buy' her husband for her."
Jean-Baptiste Morain, writing in Les Inrockuptibles, noticed how the strong do not accept their own weakness and have no qualms about perpetuating an injustice to defend their interests. This wider political sense is, he argued, accentuated by its English setting, where class differences are more marked than in the USA. The film pits passion and the dream of happiness against ambition and arrivisme, resolving the dispute with a pitiless blow that disallows all chance of justice.