risingsun40 Reviews

Match Point (2005)

Solid enough; delivers where it counts...

[6/10 · 5 May 2009]

One of Woody Allen's most polarizing films, so far as I can tell, there seems to be very little neutral feeling on Match Point: viewers either hail it as a late-career gem, or deride it as an absolutely miscast, poorly-scripted farce. It's neither, really; what the film demonstrates best is that anything 'new' in Woody Allen films is essentially the Emperor's new clothes.

The novelty in Match Point is that the director has found a new playpen to cast his sophisticated characters and their discussions of high art and snobby social, um, concerns (in this case, London). Chris, an Irish semi-pro tennis player, earns the trust of a rich upper-class English family and marries into it. Then there's his jealous mistress, Scarlett Johansson, a struggling American actress, on the side. Their emotional dramas are played out through visits to the opera and art gallery, in which in one line a character is marveling at the intensity of an artist's brush-strokes and in the next are talking about having an affair or getting knocked up. It all sounds rather pretentious on paper, but here Allen's talent (as a writer and behind the lens) takes over and makes it all somehow believable, even compelling for a good hour of its runtime.

A common complaint with the film is that the attempts at British speak are risible and stilted. I'm not English, myself, so I'm not sure how accurate these criticisms are, but there are patches of dialog that are either clumsy or too obvious: Allen seems obsessed with tossing foreshadowing into his character's dialog, a trick that lends the production a feeling as artificial as the mechanics of his storyline. The whole tennis subplot is weakly written as well as executed, and could do with being excised. In terms of acting, Jonathan Rhys Meyers severely underplays his calculated lead character, appearing generally disinterested and sleepwalking through his part, and Scarlett Johansson is very good as his love interest, with a screen presence that makes the relationship between the two work - on that note, it's doubtful whether there's been a director as obsessed with his blonde star since Hitchcock. The supporting turns from Emily Mortimer, Matthew Goode and Brian Cox are all convincing, and the direction is generally good.

The problem with Match Point is that there's a nagging evidence of pretension and patchiness that prevents the film from being entirely absorbing even when it's at its best - not usually a recommendable combination. In addition, Allen takes a serious wrong turn in the last third or so of his drama. Depending how you see it, what unfolds is either a plot twist or an aspiration for the sort of high drama you get in operas (get it? because the characters all love the arts so much!), yet it casts a 'wtf' shadow over the whole film. And then proceedings get weirder still, via ghosts hallucinations, and more clunky dialog... I felt cheated.

Misgivings aside, Match Point winds up a competent film with all of Woody Allen's expected trademarks, and is worth seeing for Scarlett Johansson's performance. Despite being muddled, it provides - despite its high-art focus - fairly decent, trashy entertainment.

Marnie (1964)

Hitchcock's career begins to downturn; one of his weakest films.

[5/10 · 20 April 2009]

One of the most interesting ideas in a Hitchcock movie is unfortunately given short shrift in Marnie, the film that signalled the beginning of Hitchcock's downturn towards mediocre film-making during his latter years. Marnie's most visible flaw is that it doesn't seem to know what kind of movie it wants to be: at first it seems like a tale of petty crime, with Tippi Hedren's lead role committing the sort of minor embezzlements that also introduced Psycho a few years previously. Throughout its runtime, it then alternates between a story of lost mother-son connection - Hitchcock's obsession with mothers taken to the extreme, a romance, and an obsessive examination of a pretty blonde... another signature of the director. In short, it's a mess. As a character, Marnie has nightmares, sees red a lot, and goes catatonic when men try to touch her, but Hitch is woefully unable to tie all this together and make it work. What kind of film, for example, takes over an hour to provide the audience with any inkling of tension, any reason for Marnie's deep-seated psychological fears to alert to us that the plot was, you know, going somewhere?

The first half of the picture, all dreary set-up in which bland details are thrown around - Marnie likes horses, her mother is odd, she dislikes thunderstorms, blah, blah - is incredibly slow-starting and boring; Hitch doesn't quite seem to know how to handle an actor of Sean Connery's calibre, and so keeps him on the backburner until well over the halfway mark. Once Connery secures an actual role in the picture's plot, as Marnie's makeshift husband, he works his best charm, and certainly manages to lift the latter end of the film's overlong two hours up from pathetic to passable, but he's given such a nothing character that he fights an uphill battle. He is even dubiously made to commit a horrific sex act in the film, alluded to in typically sly Hitchockian fashion, with the intention that his ultimately good intentions - him being Sean Connery, of course - will allow us to forgive him. As for Hedren as Marnie, she certainly shows a greater acting range than she did in The Birds, but is still mostly hit-or-miss, occasionally intoning her lines wrong, putting emphasis in the wrong place, or just appearing generally apathetic when her challenging role calls for something more compelling - to be fair, this may also be because of the poor manner in which the script is handled. There is little chemistry between Hedren and Connery, although they do work up a single excellent scene, one worthy of Hitchock's oeuvre, in which the two have a fast-talking battle of wits, trying to probe each other's weaknesses.

The interesting thing is that Marnie almost rewards the viewer's patience at the end, with a twist ending that finally explains Marnie's behaviour. In this section of the film, the pace suddenly jerks forward into life, moving too fast in the last fifteen minutes as Hedren and Connery confront Marnie's definitely not-quite-right mother. The climax is well-filmed, however, making effective use of flashback, and the movie could have cut any number of meaningless scenes and focused more on this plot thread to make Marnie the intriguing psychological drama it was supposed to be. As it is, Hitchcock seems out of his depth, or at least unable to get a grasp on his source material and actors in this, one of his worst films. Bogged down with lumpy exposition, patchiness, and in need of editing, most of all Marnie needed some enthusiasm.