MATCH POINT for THE WIN

Woody Allen’s “Match Point” is a film of such bald-faced cynicism and bleakness that I couldn’t help loving it.  The relish and exhilaration it finds in its soul-crushing misery is somewhere between the voluptuous, savory melancholy of “The Third Man” and the all-out misanthropy of “Full Metal Jacket.”  Its hero is a shiftless, despicable little bastard that I liked more than anyone else in the movie.  “Match Point” has no social motive any more magnanimous than bitching and moaning in a pub, and I respect its unrepentant singlemindedness.

Woody’s films always seem to start with atheism (or at least agnosticism), but not with smug, incurious disbelief, as it is usually portrayed, but atheism that wants desperately to believe, and that mourns the loss of a higher purpose.  Woody, it seems, wants badly to see meaning in the universe, but feels in his bones that he cannot.  “Match Point” articulates this existential sadness, perhaps more than any of Woody’s other films:  I got away with it, but that means the universe is without order.  The movie achieves this feeling through direction that is almost cruel in its sure-footed economy.  Aside from a few bits of Verdi on the soundtrack and some invisibly powerful camera movements, “Match Point’s” direction is “just-the-facts,” and this style serves it well.

Maybe it’s not as bleak as all that.  It sure isn’t cheerful, but it isn’t a dour slog, either; it has a light foot and enough humor that I felt thrilled at the end, not depressed.  It is perhaps the “least Woody” of all of Allen’s movies:  it’s not in New York; he makes a point of not using witty banter; he does not appear; and there is no subplot.  There is some physical comedy, but it comes so late in the movie, and is so astonishingly dark, that I don’t think anyone in the theater was laughing but me.  Only one line of pure Woody humor has been sneaked in, completely out-of-nowhere and funnier than it has any right to be.  It’s a sign of the film’s mastery that the movie only needs one such moment to be enough, and it only gets the one.

“Match Point” does, however, bare the closest resemblance to Woody’s previous masterpiece, “Crimes and Misdemeanors.”  While that movie follows an aging doctor who transgresses in order to protect the life he has worked so hard to create and love so much, “Match Point’s” protagonist gets everything he could possibly want without even trying and he honestly doesn’t like any of it very much.  Yet he’ll still take drastic measures to maintain the status quo, simply because keeping things the way they are is the path of least resistance, and because he can’t conceive of an alternative.

Woody isn’t celebrating his bleak, existential worldview, but seems to be mourning that, without some higher order, we become slaves to things, and what unsatisfying things those are.  He has specifically toned down his banter to highlight what bland little trolls these rich people can be.  All they talk about are things they own, things they will buy, things they will acquire.  The places they want to go and the children they want to have aren’t spoken of any differently.  Even at a murder scene, a CD/MP3 player has to be mentioned by brand name.

The movie stars that diminutive, girly, and perpetually strung-out looking object of my wife’s lust, Jonathan Rhys-Meyers of Dublin.  He is so reliable in films like “Titus,” “Bend It Like Beckham,” “Alexander,” “Vanity Fair,” “The Governess,” and “I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead” that it’s easy to take him for granted.  Although I haven’t seen “Velvet Goldmine,” his Elvis impersonation, or his forthcoming turn in “MI3,” it’s tempting to call this his finest hour.  It is an intensely contained, physical performance, located largely in his lips, eyes, shoulders, and hands.  It’s tempting to call the performance wordless, because every word he says to his wealthy new circle is ingratiating and fake.  The mechanical hollowness with which he keeps telling the aspiring actress “you’ll find something soon” is unnoticeably perfect (this is precisely the kind of good acting that doesn’t win any awards).  His opera-loving tennis player is verbally honest in perhaps only two scenes:  one in which he reveals the plight of his mistress to a friend, and the other a deadpan dream in which, when he finally uses his own voice, he has the eloquence of the Verdi he so adores.

Rhys-Meyers plays an Irish tennis pro gradually being drawn into the fat, blankly entitled, and self-satisfied clutches of a wealthy London family.  He befriends the son (Matthew Goode), beds the daughter (Emily Mortimer), wins the approval of the mother (Penelope Wilton), and gets a job from the father (Brian Cox).  Trouble comes along in the form of the son’s girlfriend (the criminally good-looking and realistically full-figured Scarlett Johansson), the struggling actress.  James Nesbitt (“Millions,” “Waking Ned Devine”) and chicken-faced Ewen Bremner (“Trainspotting,” “Blackhawk Down”) bring some levity as a pair of bobbies in the second half.

The way the Irishman gets married simply because he can’t think of any way not to disappoint the army of people pinning their lives and schedules around his union reminds me of a similar sequence in Scorsese’s “The Age of Innocence.”  In both cases, what starts as a two-person intimacy has exploded into a wedding machine that is basically indifferent to those two people.  The two women begin the movie as fully-formed individuals, but this is subjective filmmaking and Rhys-Meyers is our subject.  As he increasingly objectifies them both and distances himself from them, so does the film, until they are almost complete abstractions of blonde (seductress) and brunette (glorified piece of furniture).

They are unseen forces of nature, existing just outside the frame, like the invisible tennis players in the slow-motion match that opens the film (a reversed allusion to the closing shots of “Blow Up,” I might add).  He could not do to them what he does to them if he continued to see them as people.  A different movie might take their points-of-view, but then the virtuouso suspense sequence (an inversion-homage to Dostoyevsky) that highlights the second act would not be the same at all.  And that would also be a different movie, with a different lesson.  The framing Woody uses for this sequence is his way of acknowledging that, yes, “Match Point” is a “selective” vision of these events, and we should trust that there are people and feelings not within the Irishman’s ken.

In broad outline, “Match Point” isn’t really all that different from any other social-climber film noir.  The Irishman-in-London aspect even makes it sound like another great film, “Barry Lyndon.”  But, really, it’s that blast of despair, like cold water on your face, that makes this the best film I’ve seen so far from 2005.  It’s a movie that leaves you excited about how crappy and unfair life is.