Woody Allen's Match Point

Director: Woody Allen
Chris: Jonathan Rhys-Meyers
Nola: Scarlett Johansson
Tom Hewett: Matthew Goode
Chloe Hewett: Emily Mortimer

Woody Allen's recent hit Match Point sets up a game between the haves and have nots, or more apropos-those who have luck and those who don't. The triviality on which this plot hangs gives director Woody Allen the leeway needed to make this story more than one of merely class or marital boredom, and in turn allows its chief characters that natural human tendency imperative to dramatic climax-mistakes.

Match Point might be more accurately equated with the game of chess; the pieces navigated by fate, the gods, lady luck, or God (however you wish to interpret it); and the characters within the story-pawns, moved about the board by the hand of a pleased or frustrated greater force. Allen eliminates the plausibility of free will or choice because every outcome is dependant on the ever elusive lady luck. It does not matter who is good, bad, moral, immoral, hard-working or lazy; the outcome will be the same. Consequently, it also doesn't matter if our lead characters are smooth as butter or blithering idiots, because in Allen's Match Point the idiot can be the hero.

Allen underscores this with his main character Chris (Jonathan Rhys-Meyers), a semi-pro tennis player who decides at the outset of the film to call it quits and pursue other things. He is good looking, well-dressed and even appears suave in the first 30-40 minutes of the film, but we soon see when he meets his unlucky equal Nola (Scarlett Johansson), that this is all due to the careful tending of the hand of luck.