Match Point (BBC Film, Thema Productions, Jada Productions, Kudu Films, Dreamworks, 2005)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Wednesday, February 19) I screened for my husband Charles the DVD of a movie we’d started to watch a few weeks ago on the Tubi free-streaming service: Woody Allen’s Match Point (2005). We had given up on it then partly because it lasts two hours and four minutes (usually Woody Allen is famous for keeping his films at a 90- to 95-minute running time) and also because it was being streamed with commercials. The latter we could have lived with except that the commercials were almost twice as loud as the movie, which judging from how loudly I had to play the DVD was an intrinsic fault in the film and particularly in Allen’s sound mix. Match Point was made in Britain and takes place there; the central characters are Chris Wilton (Jonathan Rhys Myers), Tom Hewett (Matthew Goode), his sister Chloe (Emily Mortimer), and Nola Rice (Scarlett Johannson), an American actress from Colorado who’s come to London to make it in the theatre community. Tom and Nola met at a party they were both crashing and instantly fell in love, or at least lust. They became engaged, disappointing Tom’s ferociously ambitious mother Eleanor (Penelope Wilton), though Tom’s dad Alec (Brian Cox) finds her refreshingly frank. Chris begins the film with a bit of voice-over narration saying that sometimes it’s more important to be lucky than good. He’s a former world-league tennis player who realized he wasn’t going to be as good as the top professionals, and hired himself out to the Hewett family as a tennis teacher. The opening scene between Chris and Tom is easily the best part of the film – though Allen quickly establishes that both characters are straight it still comes off as a Gay cruise, especially when they realize they’re both opera fans and Tom tells Chris the Hewetts have a box at Covent Garden and Chris is welcome to share it every time there’s an empty seat, which is often.

Chris also starts dating Chloe, and when he declares that he’s ambitious and doesn’t want to be a tennis bum all his life, Chloe sees her chance. She talks her father into giving Chris an office job with his company, and the two get married and move into a preposterously large apartment with giant picture windows that Chris’s father-in-law is obviously paying for. Only Chris has also got the hots for Nola, and even though Chris is married and Nola is engaged to Chris’s brother-in-law, they have sex for the first time outdoors in a pouring rainstorm. (As I joked to Charles, I’ve never had outdoor sex in the rain and I’ve never wondered what it would be like.) Ultimately Chris rises through the corporate ladder and gets a chance to set up a potentially profitable co-venture with a Japanese company, but he’s also ditching his responsibilities at the office and stopping by Nola’s flat every chance he gets. When Tom and Nola break up, Chris considers that a green light to pursue his affair with Nola big-time, taking calls from her even while he’s spending weekends at the Hewett estate. Chloe is also anxious to have sex with Chris, not because she’s all that interested in him physically but because she’s determined to have children. Needless to say, that just turns Chris off; he denounces the sex he gets from Chloe as “routine” and spends more time with Nola. Ultimately, to no one’s surprise (no one’s in the audience, at least), Nola gets pregnant with Chris’s child and insists that she’s going to have the baby and expects Chris to help raise it. Chloe also gets pregnant with Chris’s child (until then I was expecting this film to tread the path of the 1941 Warner Bros. melodrama The Great Lie, in which Bette Davis’s boyfriend, played by George Brent, briefly marries concert pianist Mary Astor, gets her pregnant, but then has the marriage annulled so he can marry Davis, and the titular “great lie” occurs when Davis and Astor pair up for a tense few months in the desert so that Astor can have Brent’s baby and Davis can pass it off as hers), and just when you’re wondering how in his finite wisdom Woody Allen can resolve this conflict, [spoiler alert!] he has Chris get a shotgun from his father-in-law’s gun collection, dismantle it, pack it in his tennis bag, break into Nola’s apartment building, and shoot and kill first Nola’s landlady, Mrs. Eastby (Margaret Tyzack), and then Nola herself.

This happens about 90 minutes into this 124-minute film and of course completely changes its tone. The cops assigned to investigate the case are Inspector Dowd (Ewen Bremmer), who aside from his rather grizzled five-o’clock-shadow resembles Donald Trump advisor Stephen Miller; and Detective Banner (James Nesbitt). Dowd and Banner both assume the killer was a drug addict who killed Mrs. Eastby to steal her jewelry and her meds, and Nola just happened to walk in to the wrong place at the wrong time. Later Inspector Dowd has a dream which reveals to him the actual sequence of events and gives Chris away as the killer, but Detective Banner talks him out of it, saying that Chris has an alibi – his wife and his in-laws all can vouch that he was at a party with them all weekend – and there’s no evidence against him. (One imdb.com “Goofs” contributor said Chris would be a prime suspect as soon as DNA tests on Nola’s fetus revealed that Chris was its father – unless we were supposed to believe that Nola wasn’t pregnant at all but was merely faking pregnancy to get Chris to divorce Chloe and marry her.) The film ends with Chris wracked with guilt but seemingly on his way to a long, prosperous and reasonably comfortable life as a Hewett in-law and father to a third generation of Hewetts. In a “Trivia” post on imdb.com, someone claimed that Match Point is Woody Allen’s favorite of his own films, which quite frankly is hard to believe – especially just days after Charles and I had re-seen Annie Hall after years and had enjoyed it a lot more than Match Point. Of course it helped that Woody Allen was actually in Annie Hall – in fact, he was one of the romantic leads – but the main difference was that in Annie Hall Alvy Singer (Woody Allen) and Annie Hall (Diane Keaton) are genuinely lovable characters. Even their flaws make them recognizably human, while as Match Point progresses (like a disease) I was starting to complain that it was like a modern movie in that there was no one truly likable even before Allen took his story down the rabbit hole of murder.

The film I thought it was most similar to was Jack Clayton’s Room at the Top (1958), another movie set in Britain about a young proletarian trying to crash the office world and torn between his boss’s daughter and another woman with whom he’s having an affair. Clayton and his writers (Neil Paterson and Mordecai Richter, adapting a novel by John Braine) resolved it by having the other woman (Simone Signoret) commit suicide after the protagonist (Laurence Harvey) rejects her, while he goes ahead and marries the boss’s daughter he’s impregnated. Charles mentioned another Woody Allen film, Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989), also involving a romantic triangle (two romantic triangles, in fact), which he liked better than Match Point. Allen lets Chris off the hook for the murder via a “plant” he inserted in his script in which Chris was musing in his voiceover about how sometimes a tennis ball hits the net and bounces forwards, in which case you win, and sometimes it bounces back, in which case you lose. The ending features Chris throwing the jewelry he stole in his fake “robbery” in the Thames, but Mrs. Eastby’s wedding ring falls short of the river and ends up on the sidewalk. At first we’re sure that the police are going to find it and use it to unravel Chris’s elaborate cover story and nail him for the crime, but later on it has just the opposite effect: a longtime drug addict who committed another robbery-murder to get the money to buy drugs is found with the ring, which he picked up off the sidewalk, and the cops assume he did both sets of killings. It’s interesting to see Woody Allen use such an outrageously set-up “plant” for his resolution, but the upshot is that just as we’ve decided we hate Chris, he gets away with murder, though at least one possible reading of the ending is that (like the protagonist of Room at the Top) he’s going to be punished in essence by having to live all his life with the knowledge and guilt over what he’s done.