IN 1979, WOODY ALLEN made a movie called Manhattan in which a 43-year-old man has an affair with a 17-year-old high-schooler–a relationship that is welcomed and accepted by his friends. In 1986, Woody Allen made a movie called Hannah and Her Sisters in which a man has an affair with his wife’s sister, suffers no remorse for his actions, and ends up back with his wife, contented and unexposed. In 1989, Allen made Crimes and Misdemeanors, in which a married man has his nagging mistress killed and goes through a period of guilty torment that simply fades over time, leaving him contented and unexposed.
“The heart wants what it wants,” Allen notoriously said after his girlfriend Mia Farrow found nude pictures of her 17-year-old daughter–the same girl who was a sister to the two children he had with Farrow–in his dresser drawer in 1992. Nobody, not even Farrow, had any right to be surprised by Allen’s shrugging dismissal of the moral opprobrium that greeted his conduct. He had already made it clear through his art that he did not believe that there were any consequences for engaging in immoral behavior.
But there were consequences for Allen–profound artistic consequences. The same year Farrow made her tragic discovery, Allen’s movies went rotten. From 1993 until 2005, he made a single watchable film, Bullets over Broadway. During that period he made ten other movies, all of them atrocious: the wan Manhattan Murder Mystery, the egregious Mighty Aphrodite, the appalling Everyone Says I Love You, the pointless Deconstructing Harry, the ridiculous Celebrity, the peculiar Sweet and Lowdown, the overdone Small Time Crooks, the undercooked Curse of the Jade Scorpion, the horrendous Hollywood Ending, the agonizing Anything Else, and the preposterous Melinda and Melinda. No other major filmmaker has ever made so many bad movies so consistently over so long a period of time. Maybe Allen is right and there is no God–but this record suggests he might have had a Muse who deserted him in disgust when Farrow found those pictures.
Now, perhaps as a 70th birthday present, Allen’s Muse has suddenly returned. His new movie, Match Point, is the best thing he’s done since Radio Days 19 years ago. Even more remarkably, Match Point has virtues no Allen picture before it has displayed. For one thing, Allen’s direction is startlingly fluid. Gone are the dull static shots that have characterized most of his movies, in which characters walk in and out of frame in front of an unmoving camera that seems almost as bored as the audience. Match Point moves as insinuatingly as its protagonist, a has-been professional tennis player from Ireland named Chris Wilton (Jonathan Rhys-Meyers), who takes up residence in London and seamlessly knits himself inside an aristocratic British family. Chris becomes friendly with son Tom, begins dating Tom’s sister Chloe, and is soon given a fast-track job by their kindhearted and generous father. He may have given up competitive sports, but Chris proves himself a brilliant strategist when it comes to making his own dreams come true.
Match Point‘s other unexpected virtue is its superb pacing and plotting, as Chris starts taking dangerous risks while playing his ambiguous double game of marrying rich and achieving power. At the same time that Chris is succeeding in winning over the love of the entire Hewett clan, Tom’s American fiancée Nola (Scarlett Johansson) is having a rougher go of it. A would-be actress, Nola finds herself under constant assault from her future mother-in-law, with no defenders in sight.
While Chris finds Chloe charming and sweet, he is floored by the intensely sexual Nola, and he begins an affair with her when she is at the lowest point in her life. Over time, Nola starts turning into a shrewish secret girlfriend reminiscent of Anjelica Huston’s nagging mistress in Crimes and Misdemeanors–and Chris finds his comfortable new life threatened by Nola’s demands and needs. The last half-hour of Match Point becomes almost unbearably tense, as Chris tries to figure out how to keep hold of what he has and then sets in motion a plan that demonstrates just how ambitious he really is.
There is, I think, a reason that Match Point is so powerful. Like Hannah and Her Sisters and Crimes and Misdemeanors, Match Point is about someone who behaves immorally. But unlike Allen’s other explorations of transgression, Match Point is not a paean to immorality. Chris is a lucky man and has luck on his side throughout this powerful movie. But even as his lucky streak continues to hold, he is shriveling up inside. You spend half the movie rooting for his success; but by the end, he is the last person on earth you would wish to be.
John Podhoretz, a columnist for the New York Post, is The Weekly Standard’s movie critic.
