Woody's Back!

I watched Woody Allen's latest directorial effort Match Point and I must say that I enjoyed it. Nay, I love it. I love it probably as much as Woody loves nubile Korean teenagers. I can't remember the last time that Woody's done a movie which wasn't a comedy -- with the exception of Small Time Crooks. Well, that one was techincally a comedy but it was just rank and unfunny.

Match Point uses tennis (duh) as a metaphor to show how much luck, more than skill or money, actually charts the course of man. A tennis ball hits the net and it can either go forward (success) or backward (failure). No man-made force in the world can persuade that stupid green ball to go the direction that you want. Remember that old saying? How do you make fate laugh? Make a plan. And Match Point's main character who makes a plan is Chris Wilton (Jonathan Rhys Meyers). He's a tennis player who's quit the professional tour and decides to work inevitably as a pro in one of London's high-end tennis clubs. There he gets the chance to be the tennis pro of club member Tom Hewett (Matthew Goode) who happens to hail from one of London's wealthiest families. He starts out first to impress the son in the non-Brokeback Mountain sense and then afterwards turns on the charm machine on the whole Hewett family: father Alec (Brian Cox), mother Eleanor (Penelope Wilton) and the plain-jane daughter Chloe (Emily Mortimer). Chris also rather easily succeeds in making Chloe fall in love with him and when that's done, he's on the path to becoming a member of the Hewetts complete with all the perks that that carries with it.

And then on a fateful weekend at the family's country estate, Chris meets Nola Rice (Scarlett Johansson). She's a struggling American actress who happens to be engaged to Tom Hewett. This doesn't matter to Chris though as he falls madly in lust (and love, I think) at first sight with her. And like a street kid who get his first whiff of rugby, Chris tries everything he can to get a fix. This proves a little difficult and it's comical how he tries to arrange dinners or movie nights with Emily and Tom in the off chance that Nola's going to be present. You know, it's so SB. In the end, Chris' efforts pay-off and he manages to bang Nola at a vulnerable time for her. However, Chris' succeeding invitations for a repeat are thwarted by Nola. Sulking in the bitter taste of Nola's rejection, Chris marries Chloe, gets a cushy job at his father-in-law's company, and becomes a reluctant participant in his wife's project to have a baby. But underneath it all the embers of lust for another woman still burn in his loins and it'll take more than a wife and a career to douse this.

Then as luck would have it, Tom breaks off the engagement with Nola and then marries another woman. Chris takes this as the oppurtunity to try to bang Nola again -- despite the fact that he's married now -- and he succeeds eventually. They both fall passionately in love. I know this because, one time, they have sex and Nola wraps Chris' necktie around his eyes so he can't see. Oh, and another time, he tears Nola's white shirt off while they fall into her bed.

While the affair with Nola is at full steam, Chris maintains his duties as husband and son-in-law. The affair causes strains of course in his execution of both but Chris Wilton is one lucky SOB. For one thing he never gets caught red-handed and he succeeds in his job for another. Soon, his father-in-law offers him choice opportunities to earn more money and his wife stops nagging him about her desire to have a baby.

So it looks like Chris has got the best of both worlds. That is until Nola gets pregnant by him.

Nola then nags Chris to leave his wife for her but he doesn't want to of course because it's not just the wife he's going to have to leave but the comfortable life of a man of wealth. And so Chris reaches a match point in this grandslam called life -- which way will the ball go? Would it move to towards leaving his wife and with her, his Jag and driver, cushy job, an apartment in the city or would it move towards Nola's way with the hottest sex any man can get outside of Vegas.

Well, I don't wanna give spoilers but there's a scene in the beginning of the movie where we see Chris reading Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment. And there's also a scene where Alec talks about having discussed the same author with Chris. Woody wasn't shy at all in trying to establish a parallel between his movie and Crime and Punishment. I say this because we know what happens in the book right? Well, the same thing happens in the movie but only one of the book's titular aspects fulfill itself in the movie. So which one was it? Crime? Punishment? Hey, didn't Woody also come out with Crimes and Misdemeanors a few years back which also culled the rocky shores of infidelity and its disastrous consequences -- you know, a mistress threatening to ruin a married man's life if he doesn't leave his wife? There's that title-reference again to Dostoyevsky's most famous novel.

As it is, I've already revealed too much of the movie and so I'll shut up now. This entry's less of a review of Match Point but rather an invitation to watch it: Please po, don't forget to watch Match Point. Punong-puno po ng aksyon at may mga aral at moral lessons po kayong mapupulot.