Thoughts after seeing Match Point, the new Woody Allen movie.
Clunky dialogue, wooden acting, touristy London references. I wince at the Banksy graffiti, now as much a coffee table London cliche as Big Ben. Indeed, there’s ads on the tube for coffee table books in the January sales, and Banksy’s book is included. Very Basquiat, I suppose: the rebel beloved by the establishment. Jeffrey Archer having the UK’s biggest Warhol collection.
As seen in Enduring Love previously, the Tate Modern is the new double-decker bus. Puts me off going to that place ever again, really.
Scarlett J manages to be an asexual fat-lipped brat, a shame given her character is meant to be fantastically irresistible. Jonathan Rhys-M is too Malcom McDowell / Tom Ripley-esque and effete (at least here) to be a convincing heterosexual- he has more onscreen sexual chemistry in his scenes with Matthew Goode, the family’s son. I was watching a different movie in my head.
Various names from the Brit comedy and acting worlds are wheeled on and off. Mark Gatiss is a ping-pong player with no lines (!), while Steve Pemberton is a bland police officer with about three lines. Paul Kaye is a cliched cockney estate agent. When you’ve got versatile comedy actors at your disposal, what on EARTH is the point in wasting them? Ye gods. I’d kill for the chance to write scenes for them myself.
The movie picks up when murderous intentions are introduced, but this should have been foreshadowed from the off. It’s a thriller that only realises it’s a thriller in the last 30 minutes, as if out of desperation. ‘This drama really isn’t going anywhere… Oh, let’s make it a thriller instead.’
It staggers me how a whole movie can be allowed to be this bad, given the huge amounts of money, time and personnel involved. Someone should have gone up to Woody Allen and said, very gently and very nicely, ‘This isn’t working. You’re surrounded by fantastically talented people who know what a great script is. Ask them to re-write it with you. Ask anyone to re-write it with you.’
Mr Allen famously never re-watches his own films after completing them. He really, really should start doing so. How can the director of Match Point be the same man who made Manhattan and Annie Hall?
Okay, so what would I do with the script? Well, I’d enhance the Patricia Highsmith thriller elements, getting them in place from the start. Use the homoerotic chemistry between JRM and Mr Goode – think Hitchcock’s Rope. Put in some lines about how crowded and overrated the Tate bloody Modern is. Put some dark jokes in. Give Ms Johannsen a decent character – girlish, awkward and endearingly sulky rather than sophisticated-young-womanly. She still looks a teenager, for goodness’s sake.
There’s a great film here, but it’s not the one that’s been made.
Match Point is what happens when the entire UK film scene is too polite to tell Woody Allen that he’s wrong. Which says more about the English than anything in the script.
