Lucky Man
PODHORETZ, JOHN
Lucky Man In Match Point, Woody Allen recovers his Muse. BY JOHN PODHORETZ In 1979, Woody Allen made a movie called Manhattan in which a 43-year-old man has an affair with a 17-year-old...
...The last half-hour of Match Point becomes almost unbearably tense, as Chris tries to figure out how to keep hold of what he has and then sets in motion a plan that demonstrates just how ambitious he really is...
...There is, I think, a reason that Match Point is so powerful...
...In 1986, Woody Allen made a movie called Hannah and Her Sisters in which a man has an affair with his wife's sister, suffers no remorse for his actions, and ends up back with his wife, contented and unexposed...
...Match Point's other unexpected virtue is its superb pacing and plotting, as Chris starts taking dangerous risks while playing his ambiguous double game of marrying rich and achieving power...
...Even more remarkably, Match Point has virtues no Allen picture before it has displayed...
...But there were consequences for Allen—profound artistic consequences...
...From 1993 until 2005, he made a single watchable film, Bullets over Broadway...
...Chris is a lucky man and has luck on his side throughout this powerful movie...
...But unlike Allen's other explorations of transgression, Match Point is not a paean to immorality...
...He may have given up competitive sports, but Chris proves himself a brilliant strategist when it comes to making his own dreams come true...
...Now, perhaps as a 70th birthday present, Allen's Muse has suddenly returned...
...Like Hannah and Her Sisters and Crimes and Misdemeanors, Match Point is about someone who behaves immorally...
...He had already made it clear through his art that he did not believe that there were any consequences for engaging in immoral behavior...
...The same year Farrow made her tragic discovery, Allen's movies went rotten...
...His new movie, Match Point, is the best thing he's done since Radio Days 19 years ago...
...Nobody, not even Farrow, had any right to be surprised by Allen's shrugging dismissal of the moral opprobrium that greeted his conduct...
...Match Point moves as insinuatingly as its protagonist, a has-been professional tennis player from Ireland named Chris Wilton (Jonathan Rhys-Meyers), who takes up residence in London and seamlessly knits himself inside an aristocratic British family...
...Gone are the dull static shots that have characterized most of his movies, in which characters walk in and out of frame in front of an unmov-ing camera that seems almost as bored as the audience...
...In 1989, Allen made Crimes and Misdemeanors, in which a married man has his nagging mistress killed and goes through a period of guilty torment that simply fades over time, leaving him contented and unexposed...
...During that period he made ten other movies, all of them atrocious: the wan Manhattan Murder Mystery, the egregious Mighty Aphrodite, the appalling Everyone Says I Love Yea, the pointless Deconstructing Harry, the ridiculous Celebrity, the peculiar Sweet and Lowdown, the overdone Small Time Crooks, the undercooked Curse of the Jade Scorpion, the horrendous Hollywood Ending, the agonizing Anything Else, and the preposterous Melinda and Melinda...
...While Chris finds Chloe charming and sweet, he is floored by the intensely sexual Nola, and he begins an affair with her when she is at the lowest point in her life...
...BY JOHN PODHORETZ In 1979, Woody Allen made a movie called Manhattan in which a 43-year-old man has an affair with a 17-year-old high-school-er—a relationship that is welcomed and accepted by his friends...
...No other major filmmaker has ever made so many bad movies so consistently over so long a period of time...
...At the same time that Chris is succeeding in winning over the love of the entire Hewett clan, Tom's American fiancee Nola (Scarlett Johansson) is having a rougher go of it...
...A would-be actress, Nola finds herself under constant assault from her future mother-in-law, with no defenders in sight...
...You spend half the movie rooting for his success...
...friend Mia Farrow found nude pictures of her 17-year-old daughter—the same girl who was a sister to the two children he had with Farrow—in his dresser drawer in 1992...
...Chris becomes friendly with son Tom, begins dating Tom's sister Chloe, and is soon given a fast-track job by their kindhearted and generous father...
...but by the end, he is the last person on earth you would wish to be...
...For one thing, Allen's direction is startlingly fluid...
...Maybe Allen is right and there is no God—but this record suggests he might have had a Muse who deserted him in disgust when Farrow found those pictures...
...But even as his lucky streak continues to hold, he is shriveling up inside...
...Over time, Nola starts turning into a shrewish secret girlfriend reminiscent of Anjelica Huston's nagging mistress in Crimes and Misde-meanors—and Chris finds his comfortable new life threatened by Nola's demands and needs...
...The heart wants what it wants," Allen notoriously said after his girlJohn Podhoretz, a columnist for the New York Post, is THE WEEKLY STANDARD'S movie critic...
Vol. 11 • January 2006 • No. 19
