'Match Point' review

Woody Allen teeters between delicious and drawn out

By Ceda Xiong
Published: January 8th, 2006 | 10:59pm

In Stardust Memories, a woman repeats "I like your earlier, funnier movies" to Woody Allen — he grimaces. Allen's Achilles' heel has always been his "unfunny" movies because his sense of human drama verges on the histrionic. When he is successful, his dramatic movies like Husbands and Wives are intimately devastating. It is disappointing that Match Point just doesn't quite deliver the emotional acumen needed. Match Point feels like a vacation for Allen, away from America and away from the chorus of "What new Woody Allen movie?" It is a fresh film devoid his usual Allenisms. What has emerged, instead, is classically structured film noir. It would fun to see Allen play with the genre, and it's unfortunate that the formal element makes the movie too much a case study in Freudian psychology. He relies on classic roles — cheating husband, the jilted wife, the pregnant girlfriend — and the movie practically writes itself. Midway through, I was left feeling like I was watching a telenovella playing in the Queen's English.

While I fidgeted in my chair during the first hour, the second hour begins the slow death of the early fluffy melodrama. There are wonderfully redeeming elements; the British exoticism (Asprey stores, grouse hunting, and G&T's) substituting for Manhattan, Scarlett Johannssen's ripe performance (in body and in action) and finally, the twist of an ending that makes the tortuous pacing worthwhile. Allen saves the movie with an elegant mediation on Crime and Punishment, the ultimate moral tale of redemption, and leaves the screen with a devastating conclusion. The ending alone makes Match Point a deliciously dark noir.