For the last decade or so, every Woody Allen movie has had at least some critics declaring it his best work in years. Allen's latest, Match Point, has more than its fair share of supporters ready to proclaim it the director's comeback. But placing the film in the hierarchy of Allen's ridiculously prolific career is an ultimately futile endeavor. Whether or not Match Point is better than, say, 1999's Sweet and Lowdown or 1994's Bullets Over Broadway is more about nitpicking than a genuine assessment of its quality. Allen fan or not, all you really need to know about Match Point is that it's a very good movie.
It's also not a typical Allen movie, which is both why it's so notable within his oeuvre and why it's potentially beside the point to compare it to what's come before. Unlike so many Allen films, Match Point doesn't feature the writer-director in a starring role, and unlike many of his more recent efforts, it doesn't feature a younger surrogate in an obviously Allen-style role. It's still set among the cultured upper class, but by moving locations from his beloved New York to London and its environs, Allen has somehow shaken himself out of the cluelessness of his last few endeavors, in which his portrayals of people's lives were woefully disconnected from reality. The characters in Match Point are just as elitist, oblivious and blithely wealthy as those in other recent Allen films, but at least this time they're meant to be oblivious, wealthy elitists.
The film's protagonist is a bit of an antihero, a former minor professional tennis player named Chris Wilton (Jonathan Rhys Meyers). As the film begins, Chris is getting hired as a tennis pro at a swank country club, but, opportunist that he is, he quickly befriends wealthy layabout Tom Hewett (Matthew Goode) and strikes up a romantic relationship with Tom's sister Chloe (Emily Mortimer). Soon, Chris is in good with the fabulously rich Hewett family, attending the opera and being offered a position in one of the Hewett patriarch's companies. He seems to find Chloe pleasant enough, too, but he's really got his eyes set on aspiring American actress Nola (Scarlett Johansson), Tom's fiancée.
Match Point opens with portentous narration from Meyers about the nature of luck, and Chris is seen not much later poring over Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment (as well as an explanatory companion). Allen is wearing his intentions on his sleeve here, and as Chris and Nola's affair escalates, there is mounting tension that something particularly nasty is about to happen. Although comparisons have been drawn to Allen's 1989 film Crimes and Misdemeanors, which features a similarly dark tale of romantic obsession, the difference is that this time Allen doesn't temper the darkness with a humorous subplot. Chris is the polar opposite of the bumbling Allen-esque heroes of the past, a cool and often cruelly calculating cad who becomes increasingly unhinged as his affair with Nola gets more serious.
Meyers gives a controlled and fascinating performance as the essentially amoral Chris, and Mortimer and Goode are both excellent in supporting roles that require more reacting than acting. This is certainly the sexiest film Allen's ever made, full of attractive young people giving in to carnal passions, embodied in Johansson's sensual Nola. The much-praised actress is actually the cast's weakest link, though, at times coming off as awkward in her seductress' role.
Allen builds slowly but inexorably to a conclusion that feels both foregone and unexpected, and his meditations on fate and responsibility take on a quietly powerful tone by the film's end. What makes Match Point so successful is not simply that it's a departure for Allen, but that it finds him so perfectly suited to the place he ends up.