Review of Match Point (2005) by Paul Z — 19 Oct 2010

Match Point, an utterly absorbing and stimulatingly tight experience, seems to imply that you can just commit any horrible deed you want and get away with it, but really, we have to accept that life is arbitrary and existence is indiscriminate, often an insignificant and dismal experience with no purpose, and that love relationships are exceedingly arduous, and that in spite of everything we need to stumble on a way to not only survive but lead an honest and gratifying life. Many interpret that what the film is saying is that anything goes, but I think it essentially poses the matters: given an impossible situation in which we're all alone, how does a certain individual persevere, or even why should he choose to persevere? Sure enough, the choice is hardwired into him, and us. Spiritual people don't want to allow the truth that cancels out their myth. And if it is an arbitrary life, they're bust.

There are masses of us who choose to lead totally self-interested, careless lives. They feel, because nothing signifies any absolutes and one can prospectively get away with anything, they will. But one can also make the choice that we're alive, other people are alive, we're all hanging by the same interdependent threads and we've got to try to make it as honorable as we can for ourselves and everybody. This is why Match Point's story makes such perfect sense to me, because this is so much more virtuous and even much more Christian. If you accept the uncomfortable reality of human life and choose to be an honorable person despite it instead of living in denial that there's going to be some sacred prize or some penalty, it feels more sincerely dignified. If there's a prize or penalty and you act well, then you're acting well not out of such selfless intentions, the same professed "Christian" intentions.

The lack of God in the universe matters, however. It's a shame, and yet just when you can acknowledge that, ironically, can you then continue to lead what people call a Christian life, namely an honest, just life. You can only truly lead it if you recognize what you're up against at the outset and shuck off all the fabrications that lead you to make choices in life that you're making not truly for honorable reasons but for securing a nest egg in the next world.

Match Point is a millennial fable about class, the unpredictable reversals of destiny, the base thirst for gaining access to the social echelons, and living with skeletons in the closet. And this shifty fable of social luxury merges Allen's droll scripting with the puzzlement and difficulty of making such crucial life choices. Our main character likes the easy life he's married into but is claustrophobic. He's a character who gives us no traditional, conventional or ethical reason to care about him, but we follow him and hope that he gets what he wants. It's not that what he wants is bad, it's that it's a shame that that's what he wants. But this is his life at thisâ¦point. This is all he, and we, have. What difference does the outside world's morality make if the outside world has no bearing on his truest feelings and doings.

It's a silky ethical dilemma, well thought out to its very last shot. Much of the story's friction grows from the expectation that our man will soon be exposed. This genre anticipation is generally gratified in stories concerning infidelity, deceit or higher crimes. Also, not that this is by any means one of his comic efforts, Allen also draws on the British setting to infuse a dormant sort of social satire technically reminiscent of a comedy of manners, which also brings the convention of a class impostor. Allen outwits the anticipated finale by having the decisive clincher work opposite its conventional purpose as the straw in the wind.

It's this understatedly amusing and roguish attitude merged with such an acutely urbane and stately atmosphere that makes Match Point not actually a homecoming to form for Woody Allen but one of growth: an elegant piece of gliding camera movements, artfully composed shots and seamless edits. He gives conceptions of his characters and tensions with palpable sharpness. But honestly, Match Point is a story intended more to demonstrate a line of reasoning than to observe a societal situation or a certain cast of characters. It is one of the very few film experiences that is at once an object of scholarship---an exemplary merged perspective of the contemporary cultural and environmental situation as a psychological and anthropological school of thought---as well as a seamlessly inflected emotional experience---insatiably carnal abandon, crossed with the pervasive social pressure for gaining right of entry to privilege and money, and living with shameful secrets you can never, ever, share or confess to anyone, that you must carry with you to your grave, when you cease to exist.