Match Point (2005)

There’s an elegant irony at the heart of Woody Allen's Match Point. As hero Chris Wilton early avers: “The man who said ‘I'd rather be lucky than good’ saw deeply into life. People are afraid to face how great a part of life is dependent on luck. It's scary to think so much is out of one's control. There are moments in a match when the ball hits the top of the net, and for a split second, it can either go forward or fall back. With a little luck, it goes forward, and you win. Or maybe it doesn't, and you lose. “

The opening focuses on the net at the center of a tennis game. We don’t see the players, just the net and the traversing slo-mo ball. Illustrating the point, the ball hits the net, pops into the air and then falls — short. That player has lost — but the other one won. One player’s bad luck is the other’s good. 

  The net shot returns in the ping pong scene where Chris meets femme fatale Nola, the seductive fiancee of Chris’s new best friend and future brother-in-law. Aggressive Chris plays weak but slams back her tentative serve. That prefigures the end of their relationship.

This Chris does not wilt. The irrational doomed Nola also has a telling name: It’s ‘alone’ spelled backwards, as a tennis game volley invites. 

The climactic irony has Wilton throwing into the Thames the jewelry he stole in the cover-up murder of Nola’s neighbour. The last item, a ring, arcs toward the river but lands on the concrete wall. It hops into the air and then falls — short. When the police summon Wilton for an interview, alerted by her tell-all diary, we assume the ring will prove his undoing. Instead it saves him. The man who found it is caught committing a similar drug-theft so has Wilton’s crimes hung on him too. The lucky find proves doom. The unlucky toss proves fortunate.

As a serious observer of life and art Woody Allen knows better than to believe and promulgate sentimental conventions. The overriding irrationality of life hardly guarantees justice (other than poetic) or satisfaction. So his characters can get away with murder, here as in Crimes and Misdemeanours if not in the more exuberantly generic Manhattan Murder Mystery. 

Of course the title has a double point. It’s not just about a tennis match but about the social order concentrated in the romantic match or marriage (one chooses). Chris and Nola meet in a supercharged erotic connection. But they are also players in that marriage game, ostensibly bound by its conventions. 

Auteur Allen is not bound by genre conventions. His wealthy family is warm, cultured, generous. His tennis pro Wilton reads Dostoevsky (and a book about Dostoevsky) and is an opera enthusiast. Allen fills his tennis story with opera segments, dissolving the bounds of the genre.

  But even in that welcoming world our central heroes — well or ill-matched —  both are ambitious classless arriviste,  the Irish tennis coach and the American actress. Both are bent upon marrying into their respective fortunes. Nola’s engagement crumbles. But Chris’s marriage thrives until their resurrected romance blossoms into the fatal pregnancy.  Romantic matching is also a game, played by the rich and privileged, with the winner and the loser often distinguished only by the arc of accident.