Tiebreaker

Woody Allen takes love and death to the courts in Match Point.

By Johnny Ray Huston

Italian Opera is paired with those Windsor-font credits that Woody Allen has made a trademark at the beginning of Match Point – just the first of many ironic instances in which the humane warmth of Verdi is used to frame the cold-blooded, if also tragic, social climbing of ex-tennis pro Chris Wilton (Jonathan Rhys-Meyers). Scarcely 10 minutes into the movie, Wilton is already at Covent Garden, home of Callas's greatest performance as Violetta, watching a performance of La Traviata while his meal ticket, a plain girl named Chloe (Emily Mortimer), watches him.

As the story unfolds, Caruso will cry more than once, yet opera isn't the dominant thematic backdrop of Allen's ballyhooed and BBC-approved trip to England. Neither is Russian literature (though Wilton is briefly glimpsed reading Crime and Punishment) or drama (even if a heavy-handed scene late in the film brings back a chorus of the dead for quasi-Chekhovian effect). Instead, Allen takes his title, the film's signature image of a ball floating back and forth across a net, and his core conceit – that stupid luck outweighs good or evil – from tennis.

In mining the sport's nuanced cinematic possibilities, Allen is far from alone. The last few years have brought the Bjorn Borg-like meltdown angst of Richie Tenenbaum and, more recently, the Donnay-swinging divorce antics of The Squid and the Whale's Berkman family – the younger son of that clan a Vitas Gerulaitis fan. Look elsewhere, my brother, and you'll find comparatively clueless recent ventures such as the embarrassing Wimbledon, which – with the "help" of digitally altered tennis balls – tries to reward Paul Bettany's character with the tournament triumph Tim Henman has never managed, while also begging one to believe in Kirsten Dunst as a top female athlete. Talk about a blinkered vision of charisma; it's as if Rafael Nadal and the Williams sisters never happened.

Allen's been guilty of more than his own fair share of whitewashing, but moving through a similar British milieu, he's quick to see that his main character embodies the formidable wrong-turn potential of washed-up athleticism rather than the return of the great WASP hope. One could say Chris Wilton was a has-been if he wasn't more of a never-was – a bit like Farley Granger's politically minded tennis pro in Strangers on a Train possessed by Robert Walker's murderous impulses. Ripley Serves might be an alternate title for the story of the Irish Wilton, who sees Chloe as a money mine, and struggling American actress Nola Rice (Scarlett Johansson) as his real lust, if not love. Unfortunately, Nola is engaged to Chloe's affable brother, Tom (Matthew Goode), and quicker than you can say – or read – Henry James or Theodore Dreiser, the whole affair becomes dangerous.

Wedding the gruff line readings of an aged Ava Gardner with the curves of Marilyn Monroe, Johansson is most definitely a movie star – and thus the standout in a long line of recent Allen ingénues – though her acting is by no means a rival to her allure. As a tennis player, Rhys-Meyers is about as convincing as Bettany; in an early scene that pairs him with Goode's Tom, it looks as if the pupil could give the teacher a lesson in form. But as a covetous creep, Rhys-Meyers is adept at tightrope-walking the top of the net separating a viewer's sympathy from disgust. Some of Match Point's queasy-peak moments come from the immersive way Remi Adefarasin's cinematography shadows Wilton as he slithers through the rooms of the rich, alternating between wonder and discomfort while yearning to call such trappings home. After the bland atmospherics of so many recent Allen films, it's hard to believe these sequences are the work of the same director.

Yet it might be an overstatement to say that Match Point is his best movie since Crimes and Misdemeanors, its most obvious counterpart in the Allen library. Once upon a time, Allen was mocked whenever he became more somber, as when the gallery of East Coast grumps in Interiors tried to bring Bergman to the Hamptons. The long string of trifles before Match Point makes it seem weightier than it is when, really, the rude and unapologetically American Deconstructing Harry is at least as creatively lively. At times, Allen's screenplay is wince-inducing, particularly when Chris and Nola's courtship begins over Ping-Pong (a jarring tonal shift in order to nod to A Place in the Sun), when the aforementioned Chekhovian guilt sequence stomps on potential subtlety, and when the narrative clunks to a not-so-clever twist conclusion.

By far the most intriguing and effective aspect of Match Point is the bleak, fatalistic ricochet effect created by the rare lack of an obvious Allen surrogate amongst the quartet of young leads. For one thing, it draws attention to some major-league misogyny, mostly played out via Chloe's incessant begging for a baby and the shrewishness of her mom (Eleanor Hewett). But if any director ever begged for reviewers to subject him to armchair analysis, it's Allen, and the lack of an obvious surrogate may just be a ruse – he likely identifies more than a little with Wilton. Damn the consequences, Match Point's antihero decides. It's a matter of degree whether the consequences – and the film – wind up damning him.

'Match Point' opens Fri/6 at Bay Area theaters. See Movie Clock, in Film listings, for show times.