This isn’t very timely, but so be it.
I watched Match Point last night. It was pretty good, but I liked it better when it was called The Talented Mr. Ripley. Okay, it wasn’t exactly the same, but it had some definite similarities (which I won’t go into because they’re essential to the two plots). Anyway, this movie had a little buzz when it came out last year, mostly because it turned out that Woody Allen managed to actually make a movie that wasn’t a Woody Allen movie. Meaning it wasn’t (completely) filled with cloying neuroses and whiny dialogue, and the usual Allen players were MIA*. Also, the camera moved around and there were some artful moments.
A couple of departures from Allen’s standard made a huge difference: the setting is London, not Manhattan; and the superb soundtrack is opera, not jazz. It’s like Woody suddenly realized that he didn’t have to go through the motions and conventions that anchored just about all of his artistic endeavors up to this point. There were hints of this in Melinda and Melinda, which had a lot of Allen’s typical ideosyncrasies but exhibited bursts of actual creativity. Though ultimately it wasn’t a great movie, it was at least a novel disappointment.
The acting was very good, and the writing was solid, and the movie looked terrific. Although I certainly haven’t seen all of Allen’s movies, this was by a wide margin the most filmic–meaning polished, plotted, and professional–of those I have. Add an engaging (if somewhat slow-moving) plot and enough twists to keep the viewer guessing to the end, and Match Point is by a wide margin Allen’s best effort in years.
* Although it’s clear that Scarlett Johansson, who’s also in Allen’s upcoming Scoop (also set in London, interestingly–can we expect the next two decades of Allen films to be about Brits and ex-pats?), is the director’s new muse–even though, if you ask me, she was the weakest actor in Match Point. But yeah, definitely the most attractive.
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