In addition, having translated the story to London (the script was originally set in the Hamptons), Allen doesn't manage to make the external details even superficially convincing. For instance, we don't have any idea what the family business consists of or how Chris, with no relevant education or experience, could learn it so fast. (It doesn't help that the passage of time is uncertain and Rhys-Meyers doesn't mature or even change.) For his first promotion Chris is told he'll have an expense account and a driver; later his father-in-law tells him that he's giving him an opportunity to get in on the ground floor of one of the corporation's ventures in Japan and make a bundle. Allen talks about business the way a child might; if he doesn't understand how corporate officers are compensated then why highlight it? Later Allen attempts to create suspense with a murder investigation conducted by the least determined detectives outside of low comedy in movie history. (The actors in Law and Order could do a better job, let alone real detectives.)
Allen has referred to the move from the Hamptons to London as "cosmetic," which gives you an idea of how committed he is to the necessary brick-on-brick work of realism. While the situation he proposes in Match Point seems possible, that isn't enough in itself; it has to be thoroughly worked out and the enactment has to feel more than plausible. Calling the story "universal" wouldn't help because realism can't just skip over the particulars to arrive at the universal any more than a rocket can just skip over the intervening space to arrive at the moon. Allen develops characters and situations here as if he had jotted the major points down on the back of an envelope and then used the envelope as his shooting script. The movie is so thin-textured it's ludicrous.
No element of Match Point can withstand comparison to the evocative precision of Julian Fellowes's Separate Lies (see my review), which also takes place among wealthy Londoners—a romantic triangle finding their footing on morally shaky ground in the wake of a man's accidental death. By contrast, the characters and setting in Match Point are so underdeveloped it's even less interesting to sit through than Melinda and Melinda (2004), which at least takes place in a setting Allen is familiar enough with to describe credibly. The problem with Melinda and Melinda is not that the idea is bad, but that the movie doesn't demonstrate it. Over a meal a comic playwright and a tragic playwright take a single incident—a young woman named Melinda (Radha Mitchell) arriving unexpectedly during a dinner party—and from it one of them spins a comic plot and the other a tragic plot, both of which are acted out. The two stories are intercut with each other, and with additional scenes of the playwrights explicating their stories and debating the differences between comedy and tragedy.
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!!"