Match Point
We rented it this weekend. I’m going to summarize it for you, to save you the trouble of having to watch it (don’t read if you plan on seeing it).
Some ex-Tennis pro Brit dude decides to get out of Tennis because it’s too much work with the travel and all. So he starts teaching lessons at a local private club. He’s scraping by. He happens to meet a nice gentleman from a well to do family and after some time he gets set up with this guy’s sister. She falls for him head over heels, as does he for her. The girl’s family likes this guy a LOT, even getting him into a corporate type job that pays much better than being a Tennis pro at the local club.
The problem is: the brother of this guy’s girlfriend has his own girlfriend (played by Scarlett Johannsen) whom the original guy falls madly in love with.
So the basis of the movie is: the dude is in a relationship with a woman he loves, is well taken care of by her and her family, but all of the time longs for the beautiful girl that his soon-to-be brother-in-law is seeing. To the point of obsession. Like he’s all over her and wants to be with her.
The rest of the movie is about him sneaking around with her and constantly covering it up, for years. Eventually she leaves London and this dude is devastated. He continues on with his wife, but is never happy, even though he has everything going for him.
Eventually he runs back into Johannsen and “sees” her again, getting her pregnant. Now he’s in a quandry, because Johannsen wants him to leave his wife and be with her to raise the baby, but now that he finally has her, he doesn’t want to give up all of the stuff he’s gotten. He’s dug himself into a very deep hole. How does he get out of it?
Only by “borrowing” a skeet shooting rifle from his father-in-law, going to Johannsen’s apartment and killing her and her neighbor (to make it look like a burglary). He thought he got away with it too, until the cops find Johannsen’s diary in which his name is mentioned a trillionty times. One cop on the case thinks he’s completely guilty, the other cop thinks it’s just a burglary gone bad. The basically ends at that point not showing what happens as a result.
I didn’t think the movie was that great, but it definitely got me a bit animated. This dude is a complete loser (and not a very good actor either, in my opinion). I understand the human psyche of longing for someone else, particularly if you’re in some kind of dead relationship. But this guy had everything going for him. His wife was pretty attractive, he was well liked, and had a great flat/apartment, with a driver, expense account, and more. Yet he kept longing for Johannsen. And even when she wasn’t around anymore and he could have taken time to just get over her, he didn’t. He kept wanting her more and more. Then, finally when he completely had her, he didn’t really want her anymore and killed her (presumably because he realized the good life was better than the life he would leave when he lost everything by telling his wife what had been going on).
He kept digging himself deeper and deeper into a hole. Yikes!
June 26th, 2006 at 11:17 am
i’ll summarize it even more briefly.
it’s a woody allen movie, so i won’t waste my time
June 26th, 2006 at 12:34 pm
Yeah, the big problem with that movie is that there was no connection made to the climax of the movie. We saw no character progression that would lead to the murders. No real motive. Not in the script, nor in the actor’s attempts at characterization; it was completely unbelievable.
Maybe the movie production team & actors should have read a bit more shakespeare, that way they could have seen some good examples of how a more-or-less normal guy can end up committing heinous crimes (any of the tragedies).
Bleh. Match Point earned no points!