Match Point

Woody Allen’s latest film ‘Match Point’ has Chris Wilton as one of Allen’s more interesting, edgier protagonists.

Wilton is a thirties something guy who is looking to establish a new career after having played on the professional tennis circuit for many years. Wilton takes a job as a tennis coach at a prestigious London tennis club, and forms a close friendship with one of his pupils, Tom Hewitt.

The friendship opens many doors for him. He gets a good position in Hewitt’s lucrative family company. He woos and marries Tom’s warm and loving sister Chloe, and she falls pregnant. His life is taking shape, he has found the security, the social position and the family life that he has been searching for. There’s just one thing….

Chris has been having a torrid affair with Tom’s ex fiancé, Nola Rice, a struggling American actress. Whereas Chris has been able to keep his passions in check, Nola is becoming clingier, and is pressuring Chris to leave his wife. Chris starts to panic, if he doesn’t do something definitive about the affair, he can see that all the financial and personal security he has attained will disappear…

With ‘Match Point’ Allen is in similar emotional territory to that which he explored in his brilliant 1989 film ‘Crimes and Misdemeanors’. ‘Çrimes’ also featured an extra marital relationship that had spun out of control.

‘Match Point’ had a winning recipe. Allen combines a suspenseful and and tricky narrative with a haunting operatic soundtrack, some highly charged erotic scenes, and plenty of Woody’s latest musings.

Allen had his main character Wilton voice some of his latest ponderings, such as when Wilton uses a tennis analogy:- “The man who said ‘I’d rather be lucky than good’ saw deeply into life. People are often afraid to realise how much a impact luck plays. There are moments in a tennis match where the ball hits the top of the net, and for a split second, remains in mid-air. With a little luck, the ball goes over, and you win. Or maybe it doesn’t, and you lose’.

Allen, the despairing pessimist was captured in Wilton’s speech when he says, ‘It would be fitting if I were apprehended…and punished. At least there would be some small sign of justices…some small measure of hope for the possibility of meaning’.

Allen, as always, assembled an accomplished cast to play out his latest scenario. In the leading roles, Jonathon Rhys Meyers as Wilton, Emily Mortimer as his wife, and Scarlett Johansson as his mistress, were excellent.