The Luck of the Irish
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
No tennis instructor wants to be a tennis instructor. As Chris Wilton (Jonathan Rhys Meyers), the main character in Woody Allen’s “Match Point,” tells it, teaching is a decent beginning for a failed pro coming to grips with his shortcomings, but he would sooner slit his throat than keep at it his whole life.
The payoff for most of Wilton’s kind is to lob balls and endless encouraging remarks in the direction of a different schlub every hour. But Wilton, an ingratiating fellow whose modest Irish roots are hidden beneath an English accent, proves to be lucky in his new career, as in much else.
He strikes up an immediate friendship with Tom Hewett (Matthew Goode), his first pupil at an exclusive London country club, who invites him to the opera. There the instructor charms Tom’s father, Alec (Brian Cox), his mother, Eleanor (Penelope Wilton), and his attractive, trusting sister, Chloe (Emily Mortimer). After one tennis lesson with Chloe, who is desperate for a companion, he accompanies the Hewetts to their country home for a little shooting and a lot of liquor.
Having just won the lottery, Chris cannot help but stumble over the one obstacle in his path. On a walk about the country home, he encounters Nola Rice (Scarlett Johansson), a voluptuous and dangerous American blonde. “Who’s my next victim?” Nola coos, decked out in whites for a game of table tennis. Chris, overcome with lust, shamelessly takes a pass at Nola as he offers to improve her backhand, but Tom arrives and puts a damper on things when by announcing that Nola is his fiancee.
And so the pieces are in place for Mr. Allen’s ruminations on desire,guilt,love, striving (the film is distantly informed by Theodore Dreiser’s “An American Tragedy”), and most of all,luck.After debating the merits of comedy and tragedy in his last film, “Melinda and Melinda,” Mr.Allen here settles on melodrama and murder. Plot and pacing are the film’s greatest strengths: It moves briskly along, aided by the compositions of Giuseppe Verdi and the singing of Enrico Caruso. From the opening scene, a “let cord” in which a tennis ball clips the net and falls back to whence it was struck, “Match Point” is absorbing.
Chris and Chloe marry and move into the British version of those impossible apartments Mr. Allen sprinkles around New York City (a posh three-bedroom overlooking the Thames). Unlike Mr. Allen’s past characters, they can afford it, as Chris has taken a job in Alec’s investment firm. Yet still Chris obsesses over bedding Nola, who entreats and then rejects him. She splits up with Tom, then briefly flees to America, then returns and runs into Chris at the Tate Modern. An affair ensues, and tensions build, culminating in a gruesome crime.
As the affair becomes less about sex and more about Nola’s desire to pry Chris from Chloe, the film does begin to drag.Yet these scenes are hardly unnecessary, as Mr. Allen needs to back Chris into a corner. He must either “do the right thing,” as Nola asks, and stick by her,or ditch her in favor of a carefree life with the mechanical Chloe, who spends most of her time describing the tedious methods by which the two of them can conceive their first child (Chloe wants three, and while she is young).
Chris does whatever he can to avoid resolving this conflict, and luck aids him every step of the way. He sneaks around behind Chloe’s back, indeed, right under her nose, without being caught. A long-awaited family vacation to Greece goes belly up after an illness, giving Chris more time to scheme. When finally he settles on a course of action, his clumsiness repeatedly threatens to give him up. Mr. Allen is at his best when Chris’s luck matters the most, concocting an exquisite scene that mirrors the film’s opening moments. Centimeters prove the difference between success and failure.
For all of Mr. Allen’s achievements in this fine film, his one failing is substantial. Chris, as a protagonist, utterly dis appoints. Mr. Allen wants us to believe that this almost-great tennis player has a bit of an artist buried inside him – “a poet with a racket,” as a former rival on the tour says when he and Chris meet on the street. But this opera-fancier and fan of “Crime and Punishment” has no spirit whatever.
Mr. Allen seems to have meant for the audience to have some sympathy for Chris, some reason to take part in his struggle. No such connection is possible. Chris will say or do anything to curry favor with someone who can help him advance in the smallest way; he is a loathsome human being who speaks not a single heartfelt word the entire film.
That said, neither Mr. Allen himself nor any actor impersonating him appears in the film, and London is a better place for it. Mr. Rhys Meyers’s talents emerge despite the shallow character Mr. Allen has created for him, Mr. Goode excels as a son of immense wealth, and Ms. Mortimer almost makes us believe that a woman of such fine looks and fortunate circumstances could be so naive and so, well, single.
Ms. Johansson trumps them all. Nola may describe herself as “sexy” and not much else, but Ms. Johansson is far more. Her Nola is by turns possessive, callous, vulnerable, cold, and hysterical.
Mr. Allen has been more or less driven out of the United States, abandoned by critics on this side of the Atlantic and forced to foreign sources (and settings) for his funding. But it has turned out to be fortunate – in London, he is fresh once again. It shows, as Chris Wilton could testify, that sometimes it is better to be lucky than good.