In the shot at the climactic party in which Cliff first sees Halley "with" Lester, Cliff looks numb beyond pain; it's as if Allen had created Lester as a caricature of Allen's own jealousy of conventionally handsome and successful artists and then forgot it was an exaggeration. (Alda certainly plays Lester as a maddening joke—How can he not be on to himself?—and is one of the few comedians who has been able to develop his own comic persona and maintain his own vocal rhythms in a Woody Allen movie.) Allen's self-pity runs so deep he thinks it is deep; with the "misdemeanors" section of the movie Allen has written a comic sketch and then handed it in for credit in philosophy class.
Allen's latest movie, Match Point has obvious similarities to Crimes and Misdemeanors, taking off not from Dostoevsky, however, but from Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy. Allen adjusts the story so that the class-climbing young protagonist who murders his pregnant girlfriend in order to protect his marriage into a wealthy business family gets away with it. Here the "idea" is that it's more important to be lucky than good (a notion spoken offhandedly by the blind rabbi played by Sam Waterston in Crimes and Misdemeanors), but the plot point that demonstrates this—a wedding ring that bounces back off a railing rather than going over it—is excruciatingly inadequate for the philosophical weight Allen thinks it's bearing. This moment, in which worldly ruin and salvation lie in the balance, is no more momentous than an ironic development in a film noir, the accidental strangulation with a telephone cord in Detour (1945), for instance.
Allen is a comic-idea man, the most spirited period fantasist in American movies, but not a thinker or a great narrative artist. What he can't do at all is what a novelist does—map out in believable, minute detail the intersection of characters' inner and outer worlds. (From the synopses of novels attributed to the writer-protagonist of Deconstructing Harry (1997), Allen doesn't even know what a novelist does.) Match Point focuses on the outer world more than Crimes and Misdemeanors and its failure is that much more disappointing.
In Match Point the Irish working-class protagonist Chris (Jonathan Rhys-Meyers) comes to London to capitalize on his limited success as a tennis player by getting a job as a pro at an exclusive club. He becomes friendly with one of his pupils and ends up dating the guy's sister. The siblings' father is a tycoon who finds a place in his corporation for Chris and helps him up the ladder. The first problem is that as Rhys-Meyers plays him Chris doesn't seem working-class, or even Irish although he is, and doesn't evince the ambition or hunger or expedience it would take to become attached to a rich girl just to get ahead. Rhys-Meyers's narcissism is never terribly expressive, but it's particularly inopportune when playing a character who would have to be especially watchful of the family he's conning. He doesn't seem as tactical as a tennis player and there's nothing like the compulsively absorbing process of Patricia Highsmith's Tom Ripley taking on another man's life. (Rhys-Meyers doesn't seem that different from his dupes to begin with.)
Article comments
1 - Ruvy in Jerusalem
ENOUGH ALREADY!! Who would have thought that a poor putz who wrote comedy sketches for Sid Caesar a half century ago and did stand-up comedy in the Village FOUR decades ago would get reviews SOOO long? Did Allen die? Were you writing a eulogy, maybe?
Honey! Get me the Tylenol! PLEASE!
2 - Alan Dale
Presumably if Allen had died he'd have stopped making and releasing movies, though you can never be sure.
3 - Andy Marsh
the planet would be a better place if this child molestor had died!
4 - Penny Woods
What's wrong with the long review? I thought it did justice to how bad Match Point was.
5 - Alan Dale
Thanks, Penny, for the back-up. In fact, the review covers four WA movies, so its length is that much more justifiable. (The fact that WA has been working for half a century, as Ruvy points out, is only more reason a review of his work would be longer--there's more work to talk about.)
The question of length comes up for me on Blogcritics periodically, so let me lay out my defenses of the in-depth reviews I post here:
1) some people actually like the fuller discussion possible only by writing more;
2) while the average reader may want no more than short-form consumer advice about what to see this weekend (i.e., thumbs-up/thumbs-down), I'm not writing for the average reader;
3) there's no particular reason any individual reader's attention span should set a limit on the length of movie criticism--i.e., you can stop reading at will, it's a review not homework;
4) this isn't a market so readers can't bring economic pressure to bear on me and thus don't have the complaining rights that a paying readership would; and
5) there's not limited space on Blogcritics as opposed to a print or online magazine, so I'm not squeezing anyone else by writing longer pieces.
6 - Rodney Welch
On the other hand, the enormous length of a review may indicate that the writer is simply long-winded, has no particular talent for persuasion, cogency or boiling an argument or point of view down to its essence, or has simply never heeded the advice "If you can say it in fewer words, you probably should."
7 - Alan Dale
This comment addresses personality rather than principles--it's inherently subjective. "Long-winded" doesn't decide anything; it's just another way of saying you personally think the review sucks. As for heeding advice, what's the difference between "talent for persuasion" and "cogency" (Chambers dictionary defines the latter as "convincing power")?
8 - Ruvy in Jerusalem
Alan, this is going to sound terribly selfish and self-centered.
Allen Koenigsberg is the most famous graduate of Midwood High School (so far, anyway), and a fellow alumnus. I can't admire how this man has lived his life. I'd LIKE to admire his art. But you have tken a long time to say it isn't worth admiring.
Your article may be cogent and display immense talent for persuasion, even if it is a TAD long. But I'm disappointed. Not davka, with you, but with yet another possible hero with feet of clay...
9 - Alan Dale
Hey Ruvy,
I'm not judging WA the man--with the possible exception of his making a second movie about killing an ex-girlfriend, in which the man inevitably crosses the boundary from life into art. And I am not at all saying that his art is worthless. Apparently the review was long enough that the first paragraph hasn't lingered in your mind! In the '70s WA was a hero of mine, my family's, and friends', entirely for aesthetic reasons--we loved his early comedies, we read his books out loud on car trips, and, as I hoped to make clear, I think that The Purple Rose of Cairo, Bullets Over Broadway, and Sweet and Lowdown are classics. By his own admisson he's not an intellectual or a great director. Unfortunately his ambitions lie in areas that require more talent of a certain sort than he's blessed with. That still leaves him with an impressive legacy. (If you rewatched his movies in reverse order you'd probably feel better about his career.) So take heart--one foot of clay, at most. Maybe only four toes.
Thanks for writing.
10 - V
I can't help but be reminded Woody's commentary on that idiot's pretentious rambling in Annie Hall...
"You know nothing of my work...how you got to teach a class in anything is beyond me!!"