Match Point
“Match Point,” directed by Woody Allen, is the story of an ex-tennis player named Chris Wilton (Jonathan Rhys Meyers,) who gets a job as a tennis instructor at a English club. He becomes good friends with one of his students Tom Hewett (Matthew Goode,) and Chris falls in love with Tom’s sister, Chloe (Emily Mortimer,) but not before hitting on Tom’s American fiancé Nola Rice (Scarlett Johansson.) Once he discovers this, he tries to put her out of his mind, but even when he ends up marrying Chloe, he still has feelings for Nola. They end up in the middle of an affair and Chris is unwilling to sacrifice everything he has gotten since marrying Chloe to be with Nola.
The film starts slow. I was worried that I may have chosen a bad movie and that all I heard was wrong. It took a while, but it picked up about twenty to thirty minutes into the film. The film grows as the relationship between Nola and Chris does and reaches its climax as their relationship does. We see his obsession pick up and as he tries to balance his marriage and his affair. As Nola becomes more obsessed and needy, he finds it harder and harder to keep his affair hidden from not only his wife, but the family as well.
I became a fan of Scarlett Johansson when I saw her in “Lost In Translation.” It was her break out movie and made her a star. She is just as good, if not better in this one. She gives the best performance of any one in the film. As the affair continues, she wants more and more of his time before she wants him to leave he wife and be only with her. Johansson shows why she is one of the best young actresses in these scenes. She made Nola an almost pathetic person and you don’t know whether to hate her for what she is doing to Chris or to pity her because of her background.
There is a theme of luck all through the film that is established in the opening scene. It is a shot of a net while two people play tennis. In a voice over Chris says, “The man who said "I'd rather be lucky than good" saw deeply into life. People are often afraid to realize how much of an impact luck plays. There are moments in a tennis match where the ball hits the top of the net, and for a split second, remains in mid-air. With a litte luck, the ball goes over, and you win. Or maybe it doesn't, and you lose”. That is that the film is about. Those little moments where you will either succeed or fail, make it or not, get away or get caught.
Rated R for some sexuality.
Runtime: 124 min
