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Review by Seth Rogovoy
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[FILM REVIEW] Bill Cunningham New York
Review by Seth Rogovoy
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FILM REVIEW: Match Point
2.5.06
FILM REVIEW
MATCH POINT
Written and directed by Woody Allen
Woody Allen tips his hand in the first few minutes of his best movie in years, Match Point, when he shows Jonathan Rhys-Meyers lying in bed reading Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. Certainly we’ve been down this road before, with Woody Allen (in Crimes and Misdemeanors) and elsewhere. But give credit to Allen that he’s able to take us through the paces once again of this familiar tale of love, crime, and guilt, and have us on the edge of our seats – and our moral compasses in overdrive – the entire way.
I’m not one for extensive plot synopsis, so cutting to the chase: Rhys-Meyers plays an upwardly mobile striver of dubious origins who finds himself swept into London high society, where he bumps into Scarlett Johansson, who as an American wannabe actress is viewed as his equally dubious doppelganger. Rhys-Meyers’s charms work their way in that society where hers don’t, hwoever, and the world is his oyster. He gets his cake, but he wants to eat it, too, and the greatest pleasures of this movie come to us by way of our siding with Rhys-Meyers in his pursuit of Johansson on the sly. After all, who are we to blame him for wanting to possess the most incredibly sexy woman in the world? And Allen and his cinematographer make Johansson – who plays seductively against her beauty all the while knowing its there -- even more beautiful than she’s ever been.
There are some hot and heavy scenes between the two, but the most erotically charged one comes early on when Rhys-Meyers and Johansson bump into each other and duck into a pub for a drink. The very subtly flirtatious conversation that ensues is as hot as any of the scenes wherein Rhys-Meyers and Johansson are tearing each other’s clothes off, a credit to Allen as writer and Johansson as actress, and a debit to the Academy, which unfathomably failed to nominate her for a Best Actress award as well as failing to nominate this film for anything other than a Best Original Screenplay award.
To quote New York Times critic A.O. Scott, “Ms. Johansson and Mr. Rhys-Meyers manage some of the best acting seen in a Woody Allen movie in a long time, escaping the archness and emotional disconnection that his writing often imposes. It is possible to identify with both of them -- and to feel an empathetic twinge as they are ensnared in the consequences of their own heedlessness -- without entirely liking either one.”
Allen also has his way with London in this film in the best ways he’s had New York; indeed, several shots consciously evoke some of his classic shots of the New York skyline.
If Match Point wasn’t one of the five best pictures of the past year, then I’m Roger Ebert.
--Seth Rogovoy
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