The odd thing about this film is that everybody appeared to love it before I saw it, yet afterwards, everybody I talked to wondered how this euphoria came about in the first place. Match Point is, after all, just another Woody Allen movie, the difference to his last ones mainly being that now he got an international distribution again (something Melinda and Belinda or whatever it was called could have done without, by the way). The location is different – London -, the protagonists are slightly different (few ariters and painters this time, more tennis players, shop clerks and fully-employed very rich people), but they all share the same problems with the personnel of previous Allen features: boredom, lack of perspective, love, etc. One nice difference is that in England, people appear to be hating the kind of dinner table conversation that usually make half of an average Woody Allen film. In a scene where somebody wants to talk about fate, destiny, meaning of life or something similar, the hero’s hunsband merely barks "Oh can we change the subject, pleeease" and everybody moves on to discussing the benefits of oldtimer convertibles.
The symbolism is a bit too apparent for comdort (reading Crime and Punishment, listening to Othello…), but the good thing about the Dosktojewski and Shakespearean plot lines is that there no room for mercy and every – well – crime gets the – well – punishment it deserves. While this may not necessarily the result of a court trial does not matter. In the end, consequently everybody gets exactly what he/she deserves, with one exception, which is the average male audience: there are at least three scenes where Scarlett Johannson’s "Babies" (recently read that she calls them that way) are almost on full screen, but at the end of the day, all you get is some kind of Miss Wet T-Shirt in the Wet Cornfield competition. Which is the same as every Woody Allen movie of the last 20 years: quite nice, but no reason to have a closer look again next time around.
thomas4cinema 