Match Point
The advance buzz is that ''Match Point" is Woody Allen's best movie in years. Since those years have given us "The Curse of the Jade Scorpion," "Hollywood Ending," and "Melinda and Melinda," this is setting the bar rather low. The question that should be asked is whether Woody Allen has made a good movie this time out, and the honest answer is "almost."
What this cool, watchful, ultimately overcautious moral tale represents is a conscious attempt at a fresh start by the 70-year-old writer-director. The setting isn't his beloved Manhattan but the expensive lofts and estates of haute London (at times the film almost qualifies as real estate porn). The characters are glitteringly sure of themselves, and none of them talk like Woody Allen. In a startling break with tradition, the music over the opening credits is not old-timey jazz but old-timey opera -- Enrico Caruso, in point of fact. Operatic emotions are much on the director's mind, but this is England, so everyone behaves themselves. Until they don't.
Does this work? For the first hour or so of ''Match Point," it works so well you'd be hard pressed to identify this as a Woody Allen movie. I mean that as praise. We're introduced to tennis pro Chris Wilton (Jonathan Rhys Meyers), a polite bloke from a scrabbling Irish background, and to the posh British clan he finds himself embraced by: son and new best chum Tom Hewett (Matthew Goode), kindhearted businessman father Alec (Brian Cox), and demure sister Chloe (Emily Mortimer). The attention to the delicacies and ironies of class feels smart, freshly seen, especially from a director who usually divides the world into the Upper East Side and Everybody Else.
On the opposite side of the Hewett circle, an outsider like Chris, is Tom's girlfriend Nola (Scarlett Johansson): an actress, an American, just a little de trop. Tom's mother (Penelope Wilton) doesn't like her, and mother is the wolf in this flock of monied sheep. Chris likes Nola, though -- somewhat too much. Does he lust after her because she's attractive (in other words, because she's Scarlett Johansson at her most casually erotic)? Or because she's Tom's, and Chris simply wants what's Tom's?
We're left unsure, and that's an interesting place to be, especially with a control freak like Allen at the reins. ''Match Point" balances for the longest time between comedy and tragedy, with the potential to go either way -- much like the tennis ball teetering atop the net that's the film's governing metaphor. These characters are unusually well-observed, and Allen lets them breathe in a way he hasn't for a very long time; the first half, before the machinations kick in, stands as his most confident filmmaking since the glory days of ''Hannah and Her Sisters."
The movie's stated subject is luck, which can be good or bad and which entangles Chris and Nola -- and all of us, by implication -- in its unthinking strands. It can entangle a director as well, and eventually Allen's luck runs out. He holds his takes too long, lets the energy flag in the dialogue scenes, all the while tightening the moral screws on Chris in increasingly deterministic ways. When the film comes to a scene of startling sexiness -- perhaps the first genuinely erotic moment in a Woody Allen movie -- you sense it can't go unpunished and it doesn't. We don't need a shot of Chris reading Dostoevsky to know that.
''Match Point" ultimately turns very dark in ways that closely echo one of the director's most well-regarded films (I can say no more), and while it's true that great artists return continually to themes that obsess them, this feels more like Allen trying to teach an old plot new tricks. In the process, his characters fall to pieces. Johansson's Nola, a smart, vibrant jangle of messed-up young womanhood, becomes strident and foolish; Mortimer's Chloe, so sweetly awkward, becomes a one-dimensional harpy.
Rhys Meyers's Chris merely becomes a cipher, and that's the film's biggest loss. The actor plays it so close to the vest -- he's so much the anti-Woody -- that you never understand why he prospers in the Hewetts' cosseted world, either in business or love. ''Match Point" is a thesis movie for Allen, and it offers a nifty final twist that may fool audiences into overlooking what waxworks the characters have turned into (that includes Ewen Bremner and James Nesbitt as two of the least credible Scotland Yard detectives in film history).
What begins as a directorial fresh start becomes a statement of misanthropy that isn't artistically insightful so much as it's resolute. (See 2004's "Closer" for a London-set tale of sex and infidelity that bleeds real feeling.) By the end of ''Match Point," you realize that Woody Allen doesn't hate people. He just doesn't care much for them.
Ty Burr can be reached at tburr@globe.com.
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