Comprehensive information and links about Match Point

Match Point is a 2005 film written and directed by Woody Allen and starring Jonathan Rhys-Meyers, Scarlett Johansson, Emily Mortimer, and Matthew Goode. Rhys-Meyers plays Chris Wilton, a tennis pro seeking a new direction for his life, who seems to find it all (friendship, a new career, love) when he meets the members of a wealthy British family. Mortimer and Goode play siblings in the family, and Johansson plays a struggling actress dating Goode's character.

The film is the first of Allen's films to be shot in England, and his first film since to be entirely shot outside of the United States.

The movie had its premiere on May 12, 2005 during the Cannes Film Festival, where it was shown outside the competition. It has made its $15 million dollar budget nearly four times over, with a worldwide gross of $57 million dollars as of February 2006.

Allen has been nominated for an Oscar for best original screenplay. The film was also nominated for four Golden Globe nominations, for the film, Allen's writing and directing, and Johansson's performance. The nominations marked the first for Allen since his 1987 film .

The story is about the role that luck plays in determining everyone's destiny, as protagonist Chris Wilton notes in an opening voice-over:

lockquoteThe man who said "I'd rather be lucky than good" saw deeply into life. People are afraid to face how great a part of life is dependent on luck. It's scary to think so much is out of one's control. There are moments in a match when the ball hits the top of the net and for a split second it can either go forward or fall back. With a little luck it goes forward and you win. Or maybe it doesn't and you lose.

After realizing that he does not have what it takes to become a successful professional tennis player, Wilton takes a job as a tennis coach at an exclusive English country club. He befriends Tom (Matthew Goode), a rich young playboy, and he begins a somewhat passionless relationship with Tom's sister, Chloe (Emily Mortimer), whom he describes as "sweet." They are both members of the wealthy Hewett family, headed by father Alec (played by Brian Cox) and mother Eleanor (Penelope Wilton).

He is immediately drawn to Tom's fiancée, actress Nola Rice (Scarlett Johansson), as she is to him. The two act on this mutual attraction, though Nola later tells him nothing can come of it.

Some time later, Chris has married Chloe, with a promising career as a businessman in her father's firm. After discovering that Tom and Nola have broken up, he attempts to locate her and finally bumps into her at the Tate Modern. He begins a clandestine affair with her, one that soon leads to Nola's news that she is pregnant. While his passion for Nola remains strong, his whole life is so dependent upon the wealthy family that has taken him under their wing that for a while he tries to have it all, a situation that Nola is increasingly unable to tolerate. Nola demands that he talks to Chloe about the situation, and tells Chris that if doesn't talk to Chloe, she will.

Cornered into a desperate situation, including a close call where Nola almost reveals their affair, the audience soon realizes that Chris sees only one way out. At this point, a film that was mostly a drama about Chris and his relationships with and dependencies on the Hewett family becomes a thriller, as a crime unfolds.

Chris decides to kill Nola. His plan is to make it look like a drug-related crime leads him to also target Nola's landlady (played by Margaret Tyzack). Surreptitiously, he takes a shotgun from his father-in-law's household. He leaves work, pretending to be going out to play tennis, but actually taking the disassembled shotgun in a large sports bag. After gaining entry to the elderly landlady's apartment, he assembles the shotgun while she is in another room, kills her in cold blood, and takes her drugs and jewelry, among other possessions, putting it all in his bag. Then he waits for Nola to get home from work and kills her on the landing outside her apartment, making it appear that she has disturbed the murderer's getaway.

The now-disassembled shotgun and stolen goods remain in his bag for a while. After a couple of close calls, he is able to systematically eliminate the evidence, throwing (almost) all of the stolen goods in the river, though one item, an engraved gold ring, falls onto the embankment rather than into the river as intended.

As Wilton had hoped, the police (played by Steve Pemberton, Ewen Bremner, and James Nesbitt) initially conclude that the crime was as Chris set it up to be. The existence of Nola's diary, which repeatedly references his affair with her, makes him an obvious suspect, so they bring him in for questioning. Unaware of the diary, he first lies about how well he knew Nola, but he is able to talk his way out of any initial suspicions by quickly admitting to the affair and begging them to keep his wife (and her family) out of it. His story is plausible enough for them to give him the benefit of the doubt.

The film ends with Chris having gotten away with his crime because the gold ring he left on the embankment, with an engraving tying it to his crime, is fortuitously discovered by a drug addict who has it in his position when he commits another crime in the same neighborhood.

The movie is surprisingly dark and shocking for an Allen movie, concentrating on the tension between Wilton and Nola, and his wife Chloe. Dostoevsky's novel . Like that book, the film explores the development of a young introspective figure towards murder. The structure of the murders is similar, but inverted. In Raskolnikoff sets out to murder an older woman, and kills a younger one when she arrives unexpectedly. In the film the older woman is killed in order to make the death of the younger one seem accidental. There are several smaller references. For instance, in the book, Raskolnikoff is so poor that he sleeps on a sofa in his small apartment. In the film Chris is forced to sleep on a sofa bed.

Wilton tries to juggle both women in his life at the same time, trying to hide the truth from both of them. Mortimer plays the innocent, rather naive but jovial Chloe, who never had to worry about anything in her life because it was always provided for by her father and loving family. She assumes the good in one person, including her husband, who she does suspect of infidelity at one point, but accepts his denials at face-value. Nola on the other hand is by far more suspicious about Wilton's intentions, telling him already in the beginning to "stop playing games" with her. Her approach is by far more aggressive and self-confident; this self-confidence seems to be a facade, although it is later revealed as such. After the initial tryst in the wheat-field on the Hewett's estate, she tells Wilton that it was just a short affair. However, he cannot accept that. After hearing of her break-up with Chloe's brother Tom, he tries to win her back so many times that she finally succumbs, even begging for her phone number in the Tate Modern while his wife was standing in the back. The character of Wilton seems to be drawn and torn to both women in his life, his fiancée and later wife Chloe, and his hot affair with Nola. He genuinely seems to care and love his wife, however she can never give him the sexual satisfaction and thrills that Nola provides. Both women offer him aspects in life that the other is not providing.

It is an open question whether Nola was actually pregnant, or if she was trying to keep Wilton that way. Either way, the situation ultimately leads to her murder. Sensing his downfall if he does not take action, Wilton sees the balance he has reached with each woman severely endangered by Nola's threats and pregnancy, potentially wrecking all that he has achieved.

Soundtrack

The film has an unusual soundtrack consisting almost entirely of old pre-war recordings of opera arias (many sung by Enrico Caruso) at critical dramatic moments in the film. These are intertwined with the extracts from performances at the Royal Opera House and elsewhere, which the characters attend over the course of the film. Pieces include work by Verdi, Donizetti, Bizet, Carlos Gomes, Andrew Lloyd Webber ("The Woman in White") and Gioacchino Rossini.

. Roger Ebert gave it four stars, saying it was one of Allen's four best films. Stephanie Zacharek of Salon.com, described it as a phony movie "made by a poor little rich boy who's perpetually on the outside looking in, gazing forlornly at this privileged world to which he's always wanted to belong..."sup The film's backdrop includes well-known London locations such as the Tate Modern, Norman Foster's "Gherkin", Richard Rogers' Lloyds building, the Royal Opera House, the Palace of Westminster, Blackfriars Bridge and Cambridge Circus.Woody Allen considers this the best film he has ever made, meaning that it was the closest to his original vision of the film.