Allen presents the side-by-side stories as if to compare the comic and tragic views of experience, and it might work but for the fact that the two men come up with dissimilar plots featuring different characters played mostly by different actors. Did anyone ever deny that some people write comedies while other people write completely different stories that are tragedies? In structure Romeo and Juliet comes awfully close to romantic comedy and Othello to bedroom farce, but to demonstrate this you wouldn't need to make the plots and characters as different from Shakespeare's as the two stories in Melinda and Melinda are from each other.
And yet Allen places so much emphasis on the idea that he neglects the more fundamental task of making the comic and tragic stories interesting in themselves. I can't imagine separating the two out from each other and watching them in sequence independently. One is a broad romantic comedy, but though Allen hired that warped crack-moose Will Ferrell as his lead, he reins him in, having him imitate Allen's signature delivery and act "nice." And the other story isn't tragic at all, it's merely sordid, and overrelies on Radha Mitchell, who is in way over her head as the disturbed protagonist. (The "tragic" dialogue is also some of Allen's awkwardest.)
The actors can't save Match Point, either, because Allen lacks a feel for the younger generation of performers he's now working with. The only character of any interest besides Rhys-Meyers's blank Chris is Nola (Scarlett Johansson), his brother-in-law's fiancée (until mother comes between) with whom Chris has his "torrid," "ill-fated" affair. (All the other characters, including, once again, the killer's wife, are in background-chatter mode, with the occasional exception of Penelope Wilton as the determined mother-in-law.) Johansson is very alluring early on, yet interestingly self-protecting. (Rhys-Meyers's eyes come to life only when he's chasing her.) Experience seems to have taught Nola to be both yielding and unyielding and yet she can't quite close the deals this enables her to promote. Nola is young but you can already see how the prospect of failure is souring her. Regrettably, Johansson's performance evaporates in the later sections. Unlike Anjelica Huston who brought her considerable, even threatening, physicality—the broad shoulders and weight-lifter's neck—to the role of Dolores, Johansson is a softie, and has to push too hard to transform Nola into a demanding hysteric with none of the resources we glimpsed in her before. You might want her dead just to end the repetitive gear-grinding of her later scenes. They have no traction because there's no character development leading to Nola's unassuageable fury: Why does she want a man who doesn't want her? What does she think she'll get by forcing the issue into the open that she couldn't get by playing it smart on the side? Is she trying to strike back at his in-laws? (Nola's situation has less grip and generates less pathos than Judy Henske's enthralling rendition of "Little Romy", a ballad about a man who murders his pregnant girlfriend, which lasts all of two minutes in Hootenanny Hoot! (1963).)
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!!"