Love Set

Naw, we're not scheming: Chris Wilton (Jonathan Rhys-Meyers) and Nola Rice (Scarlett Johansson) in Woody Allen's Match Point. Courtesy Dreamworks.

What makes Match Point, a coolly deliberate murder mystery from Woody Allen, so startling is that it feels as if the director himself has been done away with. The nervous wisecracking and stuttered dialogue that mark Allen’s work are missing. Gone too is the familiar urban clutter of his Upper West Side stories. Instead, we find ourselves in the country club suburbs of London, in the company of an amoral tennis pro looking to spin and lob his way into a family of filthy-rich aristocrats. He’ll make it, too, provided Mumsy doesn’t catch him slipping into the wrong bed at the family estate.

In fact, the protagonist may get away with everything — brazen social climbing, adultery and more — without so much as a reproach from the storyteller. How can the huffy moralist from Annie Hall tolerate such behaviour? Has the Woodman pulled a Zelig and become Patricia Highsmith? Indeed, Match Point’s pretty-boy tennis player seems a character on loan from Hitchcock’s 1951 film adaptation of Highsmith’s Strangers on a Train.

Whatever the reason, filmgoers can be thankful Allen has managed to escape Manhattan and himself. The 70-year-old director has spent the last decade making films out of habit rather than inspiration, labouring on cornball farces like Curse of the Jade Scorpion. Writing in a foreign idiom for younger players has reawakened his interest in storytelling, and the expertly plotted Match Point is a glad reminder that, once upon a time, between Woody-and-Diane crowd pleasers, Allen was capable of producing sturdy offbeat diversions like The Purple Rose of Cairo.

Allen is so sure of himself here that he risks the most dangerous of all dramatic gambits, setting us up with a deliberately bland first act. Chris Wilton (Jonathan Rhys-Meyers) is a poor, struggling tennis pro who lands a job in a posh London athletic club. Batting his eyelashes like an orphaned fawn, Chris works his way into the good graces of the sporty, gullible Hewitt family. First, he’s an obliging sidekick to gregarious oldest son Tom (Matthew Goode), then a charity project (and eventual husband) to maternal sister Chloe (Emily Mortimer). Before long, we find him in the Hewitt mansion, breathing in the leather-bound volumes in the family library, thrilling to the perfume of old money.

Oh dear, this isn’t going anywhere, we figure. Then, at a cocktail party, Chris wanders into a room to find a plush blonde from a noir thriller: Nola Rice (Scarlett Johansson), a scheming, out-of-work American actress. Chris and Nola tumble into an easy intimacy. And why not? She’s Tom Hewitt’s girlfriend, and, like Chris, hoping to marry into a jackpot. The two interlopers are like burglars who meet by chance at a half-open safe, flush with excitement and daring.

But if Chris and Nola give in to their mutual attraction, they risk blowing their cons. Chris cannot help himself. Like every film noir confidence man from Fred MacMurray in Double Indemnity to William Hurt in Body Heat, Chris’s eyes are bigger than his wallet. In trying to get away with both the money and the girl, Chris ends up with a gun in his hand and the coppers on his trail.

The last hour of Match Point is a creepy, tingling pleasure. There is even a nicely chilled, plainly erotic sex scene, the first in an Allen movie, in which Chris and Nola consummate their affair on a distant acre of the Hewitt estate, tearing at each other in a dead field of hay during a punishing storm.

Point man: Director Woody Allen on the set with Rhys-Meyers. Courtesy DreamWorks Pictures.

Ironically, all that prevents Match Point from being a classic noir is that it lacks a sense of humour, the dark wit that mocks the folly of overreaching fortune hunters. Occasionally, the sanctimonious angst that marred Allen’s previous “serious” films intrudes; in one early scene, Chris lies on a sofa, frowning at a paperback of Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment. Make no mistake: Match Point is in every way superior to Allen’s purposely grim Interiors and Shadows and Fog. Still, the career humorist makes a mistake in not spicing his drama with more lurid horseplay. The film comes most alive when Chris and Nola first pick up each other’s scent.

“Men think I may be something special,” Nola informs Chris during an early meeting.

“Are you?” he asks.

“No one’s ever asked for their money back,” Nola responds, exhaling a plume of cigarette smoke.

Sadly, the intoxicating patter ends shortly thereafter, as the lovers succumb to an unattractive panic worrying about their reckless deception. And we are robbed of the pleasure of watching Johansson play the ready moll, trembling on the end of a vine like an overripe fruit. Meyers is just as intriguing as a lethal angel who has found a soft perch at a millionaire’s dining table. Good as it is, Match Point would have been even more absorbing if Allen had allowed Johannson and Meyers to scheme and score off each other to the end. Alas, Nola lacks the stamina and ingenuity of a proper femme fatale. Chris, too, loses his nerve prematurely.

We watch them anyway, in nerve-wracked appreciation of Allen’s skill in pulling off a racing melodrama. The last scenes, involving an inevitable visit by snooping detectives, are unbearably tense. And a trick ending — which plays on Chris’s contention that fate, like a match point tennis shot, is often dependant upon the luck of a ball bouncing one way or another off the top of a taut, unforgiving net — is splendidly achieved.

Match Point represents an astonishing comeback for its director. Allen has reinvented himself here, creating a film unlike anything he has attempted before. His 1989 work, Crimes and Misdemeanors, also dealt with adultery and murder, but it was nowhere as rousing and hungry for life as Allen’s latest. He’s currently shooting another London film with Scarlett Johansson, due next summer. It’s been years — decades really — but it appears it’s safe again for fans to say they can hardly wait for the next Woody Allen movie.

Match Point opens Jan. 20 in Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver.

Stephen Cole writes about the arts for CBC.ca.

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